[Kzyxtalk] KZYX pledge drive. Another view.

[John Sakowicz]

Hi Marco,

And let's not forget to support KMUD...true community radio, not corporate so-called public radio. KMUD is neighbors making radio for neighbors.

Amen.

My show now airs at KMUD the first Thursday of every month at 9 am. It's a long drive from Ukiah to Redway, but I'm committed to community radio. I'm thinking I may do two shows a month.

Last night, as a guest host, I interviewed former California State Senate President Kevin De Leon, who is running for U.S. Senate.

This morning, as a regularly scheduled host, I did a show on Yemen, the worst man-made humanitarian crisis in the world today. I interviewed a Yemeni woman, Professor Shireen Al-Adeimi, of Michigan State University.

Keep up the good work on your fine show on KNYO and KMEC, brother.

John Sakowicz




> On November 1, 2018 at 4:27 AM Marco McClean <memo at mcn.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 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
> 
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