[Kzyxtalk] To each MCPB (KZYX) boardmember: answer your damn email, so writers can trust it's even getting to you, and that you're at least reading it.

[Marco McClean]

To each MCPB (KZYX) boardmember: answer your damn email, so writers can 
trust it's even getting to you, and that you're at least reading it.


On 5/11/2016 6:29 PM, Meg Courtney wrote:

Dear Marco,
The board has received your email.  It is up to individual Board members 
whether they reply to it or not.  Unfortunately, your email seems to be 
more your opinions than facts. You are welcome, however, to express them 
on the BOD list serve or at our meetings during the public comment period.


Meg, after waiting over a week, how do /I/ know the board members have 
received the email? Watch this, here's how to do it: I just got home and 
sat down to deal with email and I'm taking a moment to reply to people 
who expect it, or might expect it. I expect this same courtesy of each 
of the board members. Last Tuesday I wrote, "Reply requested." If none 
of you have even a minute a day to deal with the public, why are you on 
the board of a public radio station?


Dues-paying members talking for three minutes at a board meeting once 
per year while the lot of you sit there stonefaced and pursed-lipped and 
then you say, /Next,/ is not enough. It's like talking to a wall. That's 
the way you're used to, because that's the way you've been allowed to 
get away with it. Nothing has changed with the advent of your so-called 
new regime; you've just painted over the problems with a 
friendlier-seeming color. That's a fact. And then you get all huffy when 
someone gets justifiably frustrated with you. You didn't need to call 
the cops on Jeff Wright. That was just mean. Likewise your surly 
cheerleader throwing his drink on Derek.


Your superfluous program directors both previous and present-day don't 
reply to email any better than the boardmembers do. I've been waiting 
for more than four years for my show to be scheduled on KZYX. Memo of 
the Air: Good Night Radio has been a gem among radio shows in Mendocino 
County for two decades-- another fact. Oh: also you're paying people a 
thousand miles away very well to do their shows but you refuse to even 
consider paying locals at all, and that's not right.


There's plenty of money to do it, too. KMFB paid all of us by the hour 
to do our shows, and paid us a percentage of the underwriting money we 
brought in. KMFB covered the county with two transmitters, and didn't 
get any six-figure government grant, and paid $3,000 a month for 
fricking ever on a long-term loan, and paid the manager and /paid the 
owners/, and did everything for what I'm now told was about $200,000 a 
year. And that was a commercial operation. Think about that for a minute.


KNYO just had its tenth birthday party last Saturday. It was more 
pleasant and better attended than the KZYX annual membership party on 
May 2nd. Mountains of free pizza. Several permutations of a live band. 
Fire dancers... The main difference between KZYX and KNYO is transmitter 
power, meaning you have to pay about $20 a day to run your transmitters 
and KNYO has to pay more like forty cents a day. That's a difference of 
about $7,000 a year. Both stations maintain internet service and phones 
and various types of STLs. (KNYO has several more remote studios than 
KZYX does, and our various internet-based STL links break down less 
often than your /insanely expensive and byzantine system/.) Both 
stations have music publishers' fees to pay and all the FCC paperwork to 
do. KNYO has an office and storefront performance space in town; you 
don't have that, but our basic arrangement is very similar to yours. Yet 
KNYO operates on between $10,000 and $12,000 a year, everything 
included. /You/ have to pay about $30,000 a year for NPR pablum-- even 
so, keeping all the NPR shows, even though if you ask Lorraine you'll 
find out that the biggest complaint is /too much NPR/, really you could 
run KZYX for about $50-$60K a year. Pay the airpeople, and pay the 
manager by the hour for hours actually worked for the station, pay a 
competent engineer to pare things down and keep them simple, buy 
economical replaceables, and you could easily do the whole job for less 
than the CPB grant gives you and never have to do another egregiously 
unlistenable pledge drive again, and you could make every citizen in the 
service range an honorary, voting member. KZYX has been mysteriously 
pissing away more than half a million dollars a year each and every year 
since the beginning-- that's just a plain fact. The only thing that's 
kept MCPB afloat all these years, since the very beginning, because of 
overpaid incompetent management chosen and employed and defended by 
people like you, is the CPB grant. Without that, you would have failed 
utterly every year. FOUR MILLION DOLLARS-- that's how much tax-derived 
money KZYX has absorbed and frittered away so far. These are all facts, Meg.


Lorraine is darling. She even charmed Bruce Anderson. Keep Lorraine. But 
she can and should do the job of radio station manager without needing 
Raoul or David Steffen or anyone else to sit in the office and pretend 
to be useful, and --getting back to KNYO-- Bob Young does all necessary 
management by himself, for free, in a lazy afternoon per month. Bob 
Woelfel managed KMFB and also answered the phones and did the paperwork. 
Radio is /easy/. If Lorraine is being run ragged babysitting the 
equipment and manually connecting and disconnecting remote shows, and if 
that's the reason you feel the need to pay her $5,000 a month (five 
times the entire monthly budget of KNYO!), replace the offending 
equipment with something made in this century, from off the shelf at 
Best Buy, and solve that problem, so she can do what she's there to do 
and relax.


Last year I applied to manage KZYX, and the hiring committee that Stuart 
Campbell appointed, as his last act in a series of sleazy acts as board 
chairman (so he could be manager), tossed my application as soon as it 
arrived. John Sakowicz had to shame Clay into acknowledging that I'd 
applied at all. If I hadn't copied my application to the AVA and the MCN 
Announce list you wouldn't even have known. More facts.


All right... point me to the BOD subscription page, then, so I can 
subscribe. I'll try that for awhile, then I'll share it with my 
listeners on KNYO and KMEC, and start a letter-writing campaign if it 
occurs to me to be necessary. If anyone's show belongs on KZYX, mine 
does. And if you're going to keep paying the bosses and the 
chair-fillers in the office, the airpeople deserve to be paid first. If 
after all this time you can't grow up and figure out how to straighten 
that out, you don't deserve to be in proximity to the levers of power 
there. The three frequencies you use don't belong to you to be secretive 
incommunicado Nixonian control freaks with them; they're natural 
resources that belong to all of us. Act like it every day.


And, to each boardmember: answer your damn email, so writers can trust 
it's even getting to you, and that you're reading it. I don't believe 
for a minute that you're overwhelmed with missives from the public.


-- 

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