[Kzyxtalk] Fwd: Marco McClean

[sako4 at comcast.net]

----- Forwarded Message -----

From: sako4 at comcast.net 
To: "kzyxboard" <kzyxboard at lists.mcn.org> 
Sent: Monday, November 30, 2015 3:21:18 PM 
Subject: Marco McClean 


Dear Mr. Campbell: 

Why wasn't I copied on Mr. McClean's cover letter and application? Please see below. Why did I have to read about his application in the Anderson Valley Advertiser ? 

Mr. McClean is the perfect candidate for station General Manager (GM). He can heal the wounds here at KZYX that our exclusionary, closed clubhouse mentality has caused. He can launch the station forward with a new business model that is both more cost-effective and representative of the people of Mendocino County than our past business practices. 

Back at the MCPB Board meeting in June, I asked to be named to the Search Committee. You, Stuart Campbell, were President of the Board, at that time, and you publicly stated that you refused to name me to any committee because of what you called my "rhetoric" and "desire to destroy that station." 

Those reasons given by you grossly misrepresent me. They are slanderous. I work diligently for much needed change here at KZYX on behalf of a one third of the station's Corporate Membership that voted for change in the last Board elections. 

The decision by you to deny a duly-elected, sitting Board Director a committee seat was a clear violation of the law -- the California Corporations Code. 

If a lawsuit is ever filed, one could reasonably expect that my exclusion from committees be added to other violations among the causes of action in the pleading. 

Other causes of action would include the station's refusing me to inspect station's records except under your tightly controlled restrictions. Also, former GM and Executive Director John Coate's public and on-the-record refusal to answer my questions about our "audit" at the annual membership Board meeting at Space Theater was an egregious violation. And in a recent Board meeting you have refused to disclose who is our station's legal adviser on issues other than regulatory issues -- our local attorney. 

Therefore, let this email serve as my demand as a Board Director that Mr. McClean's application be brought before the entire Board. As acting GM and Executive Director who will probably be applying for the permanent position of GM and Executive Director, you have an obvious conflict of interest vis-a-vis other, more viable, candidates for the job. 

Mr. McClean is qualified. He a veteran of both print and electronic media. His history with our station goes back to its founding, 25-years ago. He currently hosts and produces popular programs at both KNYO and KMEC. He attracts listeners, members, and underwriters. His management style is consultative, persuasive, and democratic, and it differs greatly from the autocratic management style of both yourself and John Coate -- a management style that has resulted in chaos and conflict, an erosion in membership and underwriters, loss of CPB support, and FCC regulatory delays in licensing renewal, among other problems including possibly a future lawsuit. 

Thank you. 

John Sakowicz 
MCPB Board of Directors, 2013-2016; Board Treasurer, 2014. 


----- Forwarded Message -----





MARCO'S THE MAN FOR THE JOB 




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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