[Kzyxtalk] TGiving Across the TuneIverse

[Marco McClean]

On 11/22/2018 10:46 AM, liz at mcn.org wrote:
 > This afternoon 1-3 on KZYX, Bessie Mae Mucho serves up musical & 
poetic selections to accompany you through whatever mood/anywhere you 
find yourself this day. The usual unusual, on your radio, livestreamed 
at KZYX.org, & archived for 2 weeks on jukebox.KZYX. Thankfully!


Marco here. Speaking of thankfulness, I saw the notice and ecstatic 
photos of how thankful the Mendocino County Public Broadcasting Corp. 
cheerleaders are for amassing $90,000 in pledges from the latest 
unlistenable seasonal begging drive to make a /dent/ toward paying the 
handful of people in the office at KZYX $300,000 for whatever yez all 
imagine they're doing in there, while all the real radio people like 
you, Liz, show up week after week, month after month, year after year 
and do all the real work for nothing but the pure love of radio, while 
all the real expenses of the radio station are actually completely 
covered by tax-derived grants that alone have kept the organization from 
failing utterly every year of its existence, it's run that badly, so 
badly it would've died a long time ago without Uncle Sugar's generous 
yearly shovelsful of money. When a high-power broadcast license, the 
permission to switch on the main transmitter, that was granted to MCPB 
Corp. thirty years ago, is a license to coin money.

Years ago when I first pointed out the Dickensian quality of this 
arrangement I was deluged with messages like, "Why should the managers 
work for nothing?" And my answer still stands: The managers are /not/ 
working. They are pretending to be busy. Local airpeople show up and do 
all the local shows. Automation automatically plays the canned shows 
from far away. It's more complicated to learn to manage your smartphone 
than it is to run a radio station. The transmitters and cheap computers 
are as reliable as a refrigerator and all keep pumping for less than a 
dollar an hour whether a manager's loving drunken reverie ever touches 
upon them or not, and no matter how many deejays play musical chairs at 
the microphone.

"Why should the managers work for nothing?" Answer: Why should the 
/airpeople/ work for nothing? And if it's a labor of love for the 
airpeople, what's it a labor of for the managers? Specifically, what are 
just the general manager and so-called program director doing for the 
radio station that's worth $100,000 a year (!) more than all the 
airpeople preparing and bicycling in and doing all their shows all year 
long all put together? GM Jeffrey has a program director (Alice) to 
(ahem) direct the programs, a bookkeeper to keep the books, a business 
underwriting coordinator to coordinate the business underwriting (and 
pay his personal self, in a good year, exactly as much as his 
coordinatorial chairwarming brings in), an operations manager to manage 
the operations, and when the toilet or the transmitter or the recycle 
bin gets clogged, a real plumber or a real radio engineer or a real 
waste management specialist is a phone call away.

KZYX is constantly begging for money because of the literally crazy 
management model that's been in effect from the beginning, making the 
station cost $600,000 a year, many many times what it should cost, 
enough to have bought and paid for four city blocks of houses in 
downtown Fort Bragg since 1989, and yet never pays the real workers. And 
the worst radio station in the world has a crowd of people who love it 
to pieces, ready to jump up to defend it. KZYX isn't the worst, but how 
would your show and your creativity and joy be negatively impacted, Liz, 
if the sixty or eighty regular airpeople were getting, say, a stipend of 
$1,000 a year each? How long have you been doing it there? 15 years? 
Imagine getting that check for $15,000 now. Would you tear it up and 
throw it away? Or would you spend it on six months' rent and food and 
electricity and heat and car insurance and gas and a set of tires and a 
brake job and a movie and a sit-down restaurant dinner every once in awhile?

Just the so-called manager slurps that $15,000 out of KZYX for himself 
every twelve weeks. And you get nothing but the opportunity to work. 
There are several terms for this sort of arrangement, none of them nice. 
And you're gonna live another fifteen years; you can be getting that 
$1,000 a year starting now if you demand it. If you don't, you won't. 
The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is 
right now.

The purpose of a radio station is to provide a platform for people to do 
radio. That's done, covered, taken care of. If you really feel you need 
a manager to manage you, the job of a real manager of a real radio 
station is to pay the airpeople before he pays himself. And Jeffrey 
knows that and chooses not to pay you.

Also, if you don't mind, please pass this along to the other deejays via 
the appropriate secret KZYX programmers' listserv.


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