[Kzyxtalk] KZYX's $100,000 windfall. A modest proposal.

[Marco McClean]

Re: Jerry Karp's press release about how KZYX has received a $100K gift 
from the Dean Witter Foundation, where he says, “We thought folks would 
be interested to know about the major contribution, and to learn what 
we're considering to be the best ways to make use of those funds. Please 
check in with station manager Marty Durlin if you have questions.”

I don't have questions. Just Marty and her program director, two people 
in the office at KZYX, will be sucking that $100,000 out of the station 
for themselves over the course of the fiscal year. They won't be paying 
the local airpeople for their shows. They won't be making better radio, 
nor making the transmitter available to people who can. They will be 
changing nothing. I'd love to be wrong about that, but it's been going 
on for thirty years, and every time they get a new manager they're all, 
"Things are gonna be different!" and it never is. I dunno; maybe it's 
something in the water supply there, or the office was built on an 
ancient Indian burial ground, or there's some kinda conspiracy-theory 
thing going on that I'm not paranoid enough to really peer deeply enough 
into to grasp.

In fact, Mendocino County Public Broadcasting Corporation will be 
pissing /six/ hundred thousand dollars into the void regarding KZYX this 
year, next year and the year after, just as they have every one of the 
last 30 years (in 2020-corrected dollars), even though the crux of the 
biscuit, all the phone systems and computers and lights and the main 
transmitter and Fort Bragg and Willits transmitters all pumping at once 
cost less than a dollar an hour in electricity. Radio is practically 
free. $600,000 is an insane amount of money. It's enough money to fully 
fund /forty or fifty radio stations like KNYO or KMEC./ The only real 
difference is the amount of power KZYX is allowed to turn its main 
transmitter up to, by federal decree.

KNYO has all the responsibilities and needs and FCC accountability that 
KZYX has. It has more remote studios than KZYX does. It has a downtown 
performance space and studio in a storefront in the middle of the 
community it serves, and must pay rent and communications costs and 
maintain FCC paperwork and keep the transmitter up, just like KZYX, and 
even so it only costs between 10,000 and 12,000 dollars a year. Because 
unlike NPR-colonized stations KNYO is operated by people who are in it 
for the right reason: to give radio people a chance to do radio, not to 
run a money pump. I don't mind not being paid for my long hours 
preparing and doing my show on KNYO and KMEC, because everyone else 
involved in KNYO, including the manager, is also volunteering. And when 
I'm on the air, when I'm doing the show from Fort Bragg and not via 
remote, anyone can walk in off the street and be on the air. /That's/ 
community radio. At KMFB, a commercial station, that was possible, but 
not at KZYX.

KZYX is not community radio. Mendocino County Public Broadcasting calls 
KZYX and Z /listener supported community radio/ I don't know how many 
times a day, and that is such a lie. Without the rich hill-muffins' big 
donations and the annual CPB grant of like 150,000 tax-derived dollars, 
KZYX would have failed utterly every year of its existence, going back 
to 1989. That's how /not/ listener supported they are, and that's how 
bad MCPB is at managing a radio station unless it's, as I have pointed 
out many times before, the point: the constant flow of controlling 
money. There's an old saying: Whose bread he eats, his song he sings. 
Hesiod, it might be.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that no-one who points this out in public 
/or private/ will ever be allowed to do a show there, much less be paid 
fairly for it, and by fairly, I mean the same money per hour as the 
handful of people in the office are paid. If that's not possible, cut 
back on the largesse to the people in the office until it is.

Again, KZYX has a program director to watch the automation lights blink 
and say hi and bye to the airpeople, a business underwriting coordinator 
to coordinate the business underwriting, an operations manager to manage 
the operations, and a bookkeeper with a computerized bookkeeping program 
to keep the computerized books. And when the rock-reliable transmitter 
fails, as they do ever fifteen or twenty years, there's a real engineer 
a phone call away. So what does the station need Manager Marty for at 
$60,000 more than all the airpeople preparing for and showing up all on 
their own and putting on all their shows all year long all put together? 
When a radio station basically runs itself. The airpeople do their 
shows. The automation computer plays the canned crap all by itself. 
What's left? It's a simple, honest question.

I know KZYX management has always known that radio work deserves to be 
paid for. How do I know this? They pay [other people's money] into the 
system that, with a thousand other NPR satellite stations, pays 
tremendous amounts for canned national shows made by people whose source 
of information and culture is the same internet available to any local 
radio person with a computer or a phone. A few years ago I read that 
just Ira Glass and the two producers of his one-hour-a-week show get 
paid $500,000 a year. And yet somehow, to the management of KZYX, local 
airpeople have never been worth anything at all.

This latest windfall of $100,000 could be distributed to all 80 regular 
KZYX airpeople. That would mean $1250 each for just the last year of 
their work. That's $12 an hour for 52 two-hour weekly shows. Of course, 
if you think of it as paying for an airperson's last twelve-and-a-half 
years, it's only a dollar an hour, but imagine, Marty: You tell the 
bookeeper to mail all the airpeople a check for $1250, how many of them 
do you think will get all incensed and tear it up and spit at you and 
curse your name, and how many will pay a month of rent with it, or fix 
the brakes on their car, or buy food for a whole family for a whole year 
instead, and just keep coming in and doing their shows as though nothing 
had happened except they got at least a fraction of what they deserve 
for a change. Who knows? maybe they'd even do better prep and better 
work, and the general chirpy genially-stoned cheerfulness would sound a 
little less forced.

Keep in mind, regardless of what Manager Marty does, or whether there's 
a windfall or not, she takes home for herself $1250 /every week/-- that 
is how much she is paid by the week. I'm sure you can think of a few 
historical words for the kind of /community/ where the people who do all 
the real work the organization is there for in the first place get 
nothing but the opportunity to work, as long as they keep their head 
down and their mouth shut, and the bosses get every penny the workers' 
work brings in. It's not piracy, because pirate ships divided the loot 
fairly among the workers. It's not a whorehouse, because a pimp or a 
madame (madam?), as I understand it, does aggressively take all the 
money but gives a little back to the workers so a girl or boy can buy a 
new brassiere every once in awhile, or drugs, or a hotdog, whatever they 
need. Ice cream. So KZYX is not even as honorable as sea piracy or a 
whorehouse. A feudal fiefdom, maybe. An antebellum cotton plantation.

The noncommercial band at the low end of the FM dial was set aside for 
education and innovative projects and creative experimentation and 
weirdness that the creative constraints on commercial radio make 
difficult or impossible. Radio is dirt cheap to do when the owners 
aren't running things to maximize the return on the owners' investment, 
and when the management is not incompetent or venal.

But Mendocino County Public Broadcasting is hogging three frequencies, 
one of them licensed for county-spanning high power, and they're 
monopolizing public radio and public radio money here. And when they do 
the /rock-bottom bare minimum/ required of them to keep their high-power 
license --cooperate with fire and rescue services, say-- they crow for 
years after about how valuable to the community they are and beg for 
/more and ever more money/ and keep an even tighter rein on talent, such 
as it is, than I experienced for 14 years at commercial KMFB. It's 
galling. The sense of fairness is offended.

I know the world isn't fair, but when it could be turned just a little 
bit toward fairness by the stroke of a pen, and the person with that pen 
instead cackles and spins around gleefully in her fancy leather chair, 
it's funny, yeah, but it's also seriously fucked up.

Chuck out a few slackers. Make public the complete financial records of 
MCPB; let the light in. Let some new people in who want to and have 
demonstrated they can do things differently. (Me, for example. You've 
had my ongoing application and resume since late February of 2012, and 
every week since then I've been emailing the manager and program 
director and board of directors of KZYX a link to my excellent fresh 
eight-hour weekly written-word show, and yez never acknowledge it. I 
have been waiting for more than seven years. If you know anyone who puts 
in longer hours to do better radio than I do, and has the experience and 
list of accomplishments in radio and teevee and publishing that I have, 
I wish you'd say who that is so I can learn from them.) Oh, and pay the 
real workers, the local airpeople. Whenever I've said it, the manager or 
somebody on the board or one of MCPB's elderly cheerleaders in the back 
of the room always growls, "There's no money for that." That's the 
biggest baldest-faced lie of all. KZYX is and has always been /swimming/ 
in money. And now look: $100,000 more, out of the blue. And Jerry Karp 
says you'll be "spending it judiciously", when we all know that means 
you'll be putting it in your own bank account. Make me wrong about that, 
Marty. Pick up the pen, or call the bookkeeper in, and make me wrong. 
But I know how it is: another month goes by, and that's another $5000 
for you, and the universe whispers, "Do you want the money or don't 
you?" And of course you want it, so. And then another month. And 
another. And that's how it starts, and that's how it goes.

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