[Kzyxtalk] KZYX pledge drive. Another view.

[Marco McClean]

Re: Anderson Valley Advertiser story NEST FEATHERING AT MENDO COLLEGE

"Wouldn’t it be a nice world if those at the top considered those who 
actually execute the mission?"

Yes, and this applies aptly also to KZYX, where a tiny handful of people 
in the office suck about $300,000 a year out of the station for 
themselves and pay the airpeople nothing to beg for all that money for 
them, not to mention all the local airpeople showing up on time and 
doing all their shows all year long all put together. If they're happy 
to do it and it's a labor of love, then what kind of labor is it for the 
bosses who take all the money? I've said it before and it still fits: 
even /pimps/ give a little of the money back to the workers who are out 
there busting their butts to produce it in the first place.

Just the so-called manager of KZYX, who has no history in radio and 
knows nothing about radio and does /nothing essential/, removes the 
equivalent of 1,200 fifty-dollar yearly memberships from the station for 
his own personal cushy life. He pays out /other people's/ money, good 
tax-derived money, for canned shows from thousands of miles away, so I 
know he believes radio work is worth paying for; he just must not think 
local airpeople are worth anything at all. Because a real manager will 
pay the workers before he pays himself. That's the manager's job.

Meanwhile, I've been waiting for almost seven years now for my 
excellent, proven, innovative local show to be scheduled on KZYX. I had 
built a recording studio and two whole radio stations, where one of them 
would automatically answer the phone and put callers on the air, and I 
taught radio production, and staged live radio drama before studio 
audiences, and I ran well over a hundred two-hour public access variety 
shows on teevee, and completed several other relevant projects , before 
the current so-called program director at KZYX was even born. I've been 
doing Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio since 1997, on KMFB and now on 
KNYO and KMEC, with zero problems generated for any of those stations, 
and my show always pays off for the station. I have never missed an 
airdate for either television or radio, and never missed a deadline 
either writing for or publishing newspapers. I have always got along 
swimmingly with managers and the other airpeople at every radio station 
I've ever had anything to do with /but/ KZYX. KZYX's management model 
was rotten from the beginning, and it has stayed rotten.

I just bring it up now because yet again the bosses at KZYX are running 
their seasonal unlistenable two-week pledge drive to try desperately to 
somehow drag in $600,000 by the end of the fiscal year. That's fifty 
times the entire yearly budget of KNYO and all of KNYO's remote studios. 
And that can only be because the management of KZYX, both on the surface 
and underneath in the shadows, is corrupt /and/ incompetent. All MCPB 
Corp's transmitters and studios and computers and microphones and mixing 
boards switched on and all pumping at once, no matter how many people 
shuffle in and out the door, cost less than a dollar an hour to operate. 
$600,000 is an obscenely inflated amount of money to run a little radio 
station. The least they can do is give $1000 a year to each of the 60 to 
80 regular local airpeople. Make it a Christmas bonus. Clear out the 
corruption at KZYX and free up some money to pay the right people for a 
change.

Keep all this in mind over the next two weeks as you hear voices on KZYX 
lying to you that the station needs your donations and pledges and 
membership dollars to "keep the great shows on the air." In the real 
world, if the current pledge drive brings in $60,000, which is the usual 
amount, none of that goes to fund the station in any way; every penny of 
that $60,000 goes into the manager's personal bank account. He has a 
program director to direct the programs, an operations manager to manage 
the operations, a bookkeeper to keep the books, a business underwriting 
coordinator to coordinate the business underwriting, and if anything 
breaks there's a real engineer a phone call away. What is left for a 
manager to do? What is the point of him? What is he doing for the 
station that's worth $60,000 more than all the local airpeople actually 
putting all the great shows on the air?

If you want to give money to radio stations that really need it and 
aren't fully funded nor funded at all by tax money, and that run my 
eight-hour live show every Friday night week after week after week, 
consider KMEC-LP in Ukiah and KNYO-LP in Fort Bragg. All of the money 
they take in goes to pay for rent and electricity and water and phones 
and internet and equipment and maintenance and music publishers' fees 
and streaming fees. None of it goes to pay cynical bosses to pretend to 
be in charge.

https://kmecradio.org

https://knyo.org

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