[Kzyxtalk] LETTER TO THE HIRING COMMITTEE FOR GENERAL MANAGER OF KZYX&Z.

[Marco McClean]

LETTER TO THE HIRING COMMITTEE FOR GENERAL MANAGER OF KZYX&Z.

Hi. Marco McClean, here. You should hire me to manage KZYX&Z.

I can save you over $100,000 in the first year, and at the same time 
improve the station by welcoming people who will take creative risks, 
and not shutting them out in favor of timid sycophants. I will put a 
remote studio in every community in the county, where everyone you've 
had up to now has quailed at just putting one in Ukiah. The main studio 
can be any of them, or all of them in turns. I'll move the office to a 
population center, in a storefront on a street, where people can walk in 
and don't have to skip work and drive for hours just to read the public 
inspection file. I'll put an open unmoderated public forum on the main 
page of the station's website so listeners and members and airpeople and 
boardmembers can communicate in one place and hash out solutions to 
problems, and quibble and swear at each other if that's what they need 
to do to be heard and to organize for what they want done. I'll bring in 
children to read aloud from the Anderson Valley Advertiser for newstime, 
and engage a network of correspondents on different subjects, in 
different areas. I'll pay the airpeople for their time. And I'll leave 
the door open to others to apply their talent, and give ideas a fair 
chance, for a change.

I taught radio and music production in the early 1980s to adults and 
children at the Mendocino Community School. I had a music show on KMFB, 
where I played the results of my radio show project. We made and sold 
tapes of the radio drama shows I wrote and produced at the Community 
School. I produced live-on-stage radio drama in local halls.

I cooked in restaurants, ran an electronic repair service, wrote for 
local newspapers.

I built recording studios. I built small, functional radio stations 
--built the mixing boards, transmitters, everything. I put an automatic 
radio station on the air in Mendocino, connected to a telephone line, so 
people could call and recite poetry or play music or report on their 
lives, and they were on the air until they hung up, and then someone 
else would call.

I taught physical sciences and electricity and radio drama at the Albion 
Whale School. We did a live weekly radio show on KKUP in Cupertino, via 
phone hookup.

I've been doing sound design and setting up sound effects systems for 
local theater companies since the early 1980s. I did sound design for 
literally hundreds of plays.

For two-plus years in the mid-late 1980s I did a public access variety 
teevee show on MCCET channel 6 in Fort Bragg, where every Wednesday 
people would show up at my house and eat dinner and take turns doing 
their own segment of the show. It was always different, but it always 
started with a little boy and a little girl going into the studio (the 
back room), winding up the theme music box and introducing the Radio 
Free Earth Teevee Show. Sometimes dozens of people showed up and 
sometimes only three or four. We used to play board games on teevee. A 
neighbor was a painter; he'd paint pictures on teevee. A woman brought 
her children's choir. A diver brought things he found in the ocean, to 
show and talk about. One woman came nearly every show to read from her 
bible and talk about it.

I had a music show for four months in the very beginning of KZYX.

I edited and typeset the Mendocino Commentary newspaper from 1989 
through 1991, then published (edited, typeset, designed, did the press 
and delivery runs and managed the subscription list, all with the help 
of the many writers) until Christmas of 1996. I printed everything sent 
to the paper, including the transcribed telephone messages. Anyone who 
wanted a regular column got one, simply by being regular about sending 
in work. I never refused to print a story. A couple of years ago the 
people of Kelly House helped archive all those newspapers.

In 1989 I went to work for a software engineer who has a few rental 
units. Carpentry, roofing, plumbing, and repairing and calibrating 
biofeedback equipment, building and installing remote measuring systems 
for pumphouses, in the early days going on field calls to companies in 
San Francisco to service their computers and printers. I'm still working 
there. That's my day job.

In February of 1997 I went to KMFB and started Memo of the Air, reading 
aloud on the air all night, every Friday night, everything sent to me 
and the interesting bits of whatever I was reading all week. I sold ads 
for my own show and it paid for itself and also KMFB paid me to do 
maintenance and repairs --plumbing, carpentry, electronics-- and also to 
design and build electronic devices. I built phone boxes and a mixing 
board. I built microphones and integrated swing-arm stands. I configured 
satellite dish receivers. I can't think of everything I did there to 
write down for you-- I was there for like 15 years. The station was 
sold, the new owners fired everyone, changed the call letters, 
affiliated with Fox News and went to near-24-hour automated pop schlock 
and sports, but for decades KMFB, a commercial station, was a place of 
far more freedom for the airpeople than noncommercial KZYX could ever 
hope to be under the sort of people who've been running it so far.

Speaking of which, in early 2012 I tried to get my show on KZYX but Mary 
Aigner refused to take even a single step in the direction of scheduling 
it. When I went to talk to her, she dismissed my show proposal, saying, 
and I quote: "Nobody's gonna read that." I waited eight months, then 
called Bob Young of KNYO in Fort Bragg and was on the air there within 
the week, and I've been there since November of 2012, every Friday 
night, 9pm to 3am and sometimes to 5am. Just the underwriters of my 
late-night show are paying for, currently, about a sixth of the 
station's entire budget. I've bought and built equipment for KNYO. We 
have a system where anyone can do his show live by remote from anywhere 
there's reliable web access, using a portable studio that costs in the 
200-to-300-dollar range to assemble. (A microphone, a USB mixer, a 
refurb laptop and, if you want to spluge, a cheap tablet for a music 
player.)

I've done more than 900 weekly 6-hour-plus Memo of the Air shows, each 
one absorbing about 20 hours in prep time, and in all those live shows, 
with the phone lines live and no tape-delay unit and no restrictions on 
what (or who) I broadcast, there hasn't been a single lawsuit by an 
aggrieved listener nor any legal problems with the FCC.

A couple of months ago talking with Ed Nieves of KMEC in Ukiah resulted 
in KMEC picking up the stream of my show in progress at midnight to 
broadcast it live also in Ukiah and Redwood Valley until 3am. That's 
ongoing. So my show is on two stations with a combined three-fourths the 
potential audience of KZYX for a combined budget of a twentieth of what 
KZYX has been throwing away.

And all the above and more, everything I've done in media, has been a 
workaround to get past the sort of people who run organizations like 
MCPB and who say no, no and no by default, and I've always been about 
just doing the art, doing the project and showing how easy and fun (and 
cheap) it can be, and inviting others to participate, and demonstrating 
how not to be afraid.

In short, I have more experience in publishing, teevee, theater (media 
in general) and radio in particular in this county than anyone else 
you're likely to look at for the job of managing your little radio 
station. It is said that if you want to find out who a person is, give 
him a little power and see what he does with it. Unlike the people 
you've hired in the past, whenever I've had a little power, I used it to 
bring everybody up to the same level of power. The idea is: give the 
talent the tools and access to the medium, whether you like the person 
or agree with him or not, and let him work, and then if the project 
results in money left over, pay everyone for hours actually worked, and 
don't lie that it's way harder than it actually is.

No more secrets; no more secret cabals and back-room decisions. Every 
aspect of the station's government, every decision and the composition 
and disposition of every committee can and should be posted and put on 
the air. Meetings should all be on the air, live. The resumes of people 
applying for management positions should be displayed on the station's 
website. The station's members and the public can and should be part of 
the process.

You have been fooling yourself since the beginning of KZYX that radio is 
difficult and very expensive and depends on secrecy and trickery and 
suckers. It isn't and it doesn't. It's simple. It's a bandstand and a 
library and a public place. Once you have a microphone and a transmitter 
and the license to switch it on, it's practically free thereafter.

If you hire another antisocial, talent-fearing, Nixonian schmuck like 
John Coate was (or Stuart Campbell is) or --worse-- if you make someone 
like Mary Aigner the general manager --which I dread is what you're 
about to do-- you'll have only yourselves to blame for the continued 
failure of KZYX to climb out of its tepid bath of lazy mediocrity and 
become greater than it is.

Thanks for reading, committee people.

p.s. I have a lot of good references I can give you from, among others, 
Charles Bush, who runs the Senior Center in Fort Bragg and ran the 
Mendocino Community School in the 1980s, and Eduardo Smissen, who's dead 
but whose opinion of my work is documented. And Jamie Roberts comes to 
mind; ask him about my influence on radio in the county. And the last 
nine managing directors of the Mendocino Theater Company, going back 
nearly thirty-five years, can tell you about my audio work. Chief among 
references, though, will come from Bob Woelfel, who ran KMFB (and paid 
the talent) on a third the budget of KZYX and with no government grant 
to bail him out, and who I hope is applying to be manager of KZYX. If 
so, he would be a great choice. Pick him over me.

Marco McClean
memo at mcn.org
http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com