[Kzyxtalk] In which I reply to Katharine Cole.

[Marco McClean]

  On 3/2/2016 7:46 PM, Katharine Cole wrote:
 >
 > I'd like you to Go through the books of kzyx and figure out how to 
pay the utilities and staff and rents and operations expenses and then 
also pay 100 programmers. We volunteer for kzyx which is a non- profit 
community supported radio station. We volunteer because we believe kzyx 
serves the community and that, more than our personal gain, is why we 
are doing this. There is great joy to be found in volunteering.  This is 
not a job. Kzyx is our community. If you need money, go get a job.


Katharine, you might recall that until very recently paying members have 
been prevented from even seeing where the financial books are, much less 
been allowed to go through them. And when a very small group announced 
that they were going to show up to look anyway, Stuart Campbell called 
the police (!) to be there to keep them out. There's a history of that 
sort of thing at KZYX going back to the beginning. Sean Donovan ordered 
his flunky Johnny Bazzano to call the police to come and throw me out of 
a programmers' meeting in very early 1990, because he'd just yanked my 
show for bringing Mitch Clogg to the air to talk about how Sean had 
kicked Mitch off the Environment Show the week before, and he'd done 
that because he just didn't like Mitch any more than he liked me. Sean 
took all the local support for a free and open radio station and instead 
made it his own personal fiefdom, and he set the tone for every 
management regime for every year to follow, to the present day. Pull out 
the agreement you signed when you were given your airtime and read it 
critically. Really, grasp what you've agreed to.


I've parsed out the expenses. I've written extensively about this over 
the years. I've helped start little radio stations --KZYX included-- and 
I've worked in enough of them, in all aspects of their operation. I've 
produced years of community teevee shows. I've published newspapers, and 
I can tell you that it's way busier and more expensive to juggle 
hundreds of performers and writers and sell and design ads and print and 
deliver thousands of papers than to oversee a radio station where the 
airpeople just show up and do their shows and normalize the mixing board 
and leave.


Like you I volunteer at a radio station. I've been a volunteer in radio 
and in theater and I've been paid; paid is better. Regardless, paid or 
not, I work at it; I don't just show up and play a few CDs and identify 
the station. I put about twenty hours of concentrated prep into my 
six-to-eight-hour weekly show and have done since 1997. My show would 
have been on KZYX instead of KNYO since early 2012 if it weren't for 
Mary Aigner. I understand you adore her because she took you under her 
wing, but the many competent, valuable people she has treated like dog 
fudge on her shoe don't adore her all that much and are frankly 
ebullient that her authority is over --if, in fact, it is; one of the 
last though not least sleazy actions Stuart Campbell took as board 
chairman was to appoint her to the programming committee.


The people in the office at KZYX who have been slurping a quarter of a 
million dollars out of the station every year could be wonderful 
volunteers like you, but they prefer not to, and you think that's fine, 
so they don't have to. And the people who do the many shows carried on 
KZYX from out of the area are all paid. Some of them get hundreds of 
thousands of dollars a year, and that's okay with you. Why aren't locals 
worth even ten an hour? Why don't you think you are?


So you don't want money. Fine. Give the money away. Again, I have to 
say, when a handful of bosses are paid to exercise authority and 
everyone doing the real work is /volunteering/, it's not right. When 
health and child-rescuing and goods-and-services and disaster-relief 
charities do it that way, and they do, and it's brought to light how 
well off the bosses are, and how most of the money donated to the 
organization goes directly into the bosses' pockets, as it does at KZYX, 
it's a shame and a scandal. And even so, many unpaid or poorly paid 
underlings will defend their situation like junkyard dogs. That's just 
the way people are, and that's what I'm up against, I guess.


It might be that a slacking airperson who has good reason not to be 
confident that what he's doing is worthwhile might think of being paid 
as behooving him to actually work to excel and experiment and grow and 
change and make the most of the miracle of radio, and that would be too 
hard. I think that might be the true foundation of many objections.


I didn't respond to the airperson who simply angrily wrote, "You suck!" 
But here, in case you didn't see it, is what I wrote in response to Jim 
Heid's comment on my basic suggestion that airpeople should expect to be 
paid:


----------


Jim Heid <jim at heidsite.com> wrote:

 > *Dismissive chortle*... Actually, lets do a little math...


Okay, let's, Jim. The fiscal year before this one, MCPB (corp. that 
manages KZYX) pissed away $575,000, much of it mysteriously, hence the 
reasonable request for detailed information, and $170,000 of that came 
from a grant of federal tax money. I guess those are usual figures, 
though not long ago MCPB had a fiscal year where it pissed away 
/three-quarters-of-a-million-dollars/.


When I listed all the real expenses of running and maintaining KZYX, 
including everything --and I mean everything: paperwork and rent and 
paint and music publishers' fees and tower rental and equipment 
maintenance, as well as water and electricity and phone lines-- it was 
easily covered, and then some!, by just the yearly CPB grant. A truly 
bare-bones operation like KNYO has essentially everything KZYX has, 
except the right to use a high-power transmitter, and KNYO spent just 
$12,000 over the same period. Compare. And KZYX broke down about the 
same number of times as KNYO, and in many of the same ways.


A big part of the difference ($575,000 vs $12,000) is: the handful of 
office people at KZYX are paid a quarter of a million dollars a year to 
show up and sit in the office. That's many times what it would take to 
pay all the airpeople to do their shows. Bob Young of KNYO performs all 
the essential tasks of /everyone/ in the KZYX office, and he does it 
while helping with his partner's serious health adventure, and he has 
time left over to have a life, and he is paid nothing. So, Jim, your 
attitude of awe and respect for the work/value ratio of the pack of KZYX 
office drones is puzzling. Surely Lorraine Dechter alone can easily 
cover it all in return for her salary. Why would you think she can't?


Also, when you characterize $700 or even $1,000 a year per airperson as 
piffle, you can't be thinking of people I know. People who work for a 
living don't think of $20 here and $30 there for this job or that in 
terms of how little each gig adds up to at the end of the year and then 
spit on it. We think of it in terms of: when I leave paying work to do a 
two-hour show (that I prepared for days to do) I have $20 to pay for gas 
to get to the radio station and food to eat when I get home and save up 
for a new microphone or computer part to make the show better.


And Tim Gregory blathers that /MCPB is a corporation and so it needs to 
make a lot of money or else lose market share to video games/. What can 
be said to that? The educational band of the FM spectrum was set aside 
to do things commercial radio and its money-centric attitude makes 
impossible, because if it hadn't been set aside, there would be nothing 
but KUNKs and Fox Newses up and down the dial. The noncommercial 
left-hand end of FM isn't there to play Monopoly with; it's there for 
ordinary local people to further art and science and music and education 
and public affairs and even whimsy and annoying self-conscious nonsense.


Radio is cheap. Little churches own whole broadcasting networks of radio 
stations. Once a station has a broadcast license, and the transmission 
equipment has been paid for --which was all accomplished for KZYX 
twenty-six years ago-- it costs pennies an hour to operate. If KZYX has 
so much money to throw away, and apparently it does, why not pay the 
local people who do the work? Why constantly lie that that's impossible, 
when so many shows from out of the area are paid for without your 
batting an eye?


Again, if you don't want or need the money for your work, fine. See that 
someone who does actually gets it, for a change.


Further, Jim, you write: "/So who do you propose handles the logistics 
of adjusting pay depending on whether a programmer was able to do his or 
her usual shifts? Or does the station install a time clock? What fun 
THAT would be. Or does the station institute some kind of bureacratic 
process of figuring out how much content a programmer produced, then 
paying him or her accordingly? Who's going to tackle that adventure? One 
of the employees you?re proposing to do away with? Do weekends and 
holidays warrant overtime? And what about taxes: are each of those 90 
programmers going to want to complicate their tax returns by including 
1099 income? Do each of those 90 programmers even FILE a return now? 
What about worker's comp and the other legal liabilities that the 
station would incur if it were to hire 90 part-time employees? ...Chortle."/


Jim, you're being deliberately obtuse. There's a schedule on the 
station's web page that says when each airperson is sitting at the 
microphone. It's plain as day; it's already in a spreadsheet; I'm 
looking at it right now. It's simpler than the pay schedule of even the 
smallest theater company, and at Mendocino Theater Company, one of the 
places where I work, a single bookkeeper manages the task in a short 
afternoon per month using a ten-year-old computer. Workers and 
performers and designers and techies are paid what's called a stipend. 
The company has insurance. And theater people do their taxes just like 
everyone else does. The company is a nonprofit, just like KZYX; unlike 
KZYX it doesn't get $160,000 a year from taxpayers, but it manages 
nonetheless. I think your bookkeeper can handle it.


Speaking of which: Mendocino Theater Company's first play of the 2016 
season, /Quills/, about the Marquis de Sade in the booby hatch, opens 
this week. For info call the box office: 707-937-4477, or go to 
http://MendocinoTheatre.org


-- 

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