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

[Erif]

You've got my vote!  Good luck!
Erif.

On 11/29/2015 1:55 AM, Marco McClean wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
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