[Kzyxtalk] KZYX begging for money again, and for what? Further: A Nancy Drew Mystery.

[Marco McClean]

Subject: KZYX begging for money again, and for what?

(Addressed to BOD at kzyx.org)

To John Azzaro, who wrote to me this week to tell me to take him off my 
email list, which he's not and has never been on:

Okay, John, I see what's happening. I've been emailing the program 
director (pd at kzyx.org), the general manager (gm at kzyx.org), and the board 
of directors of KZYX (bod at kzyx.org), a single email to all three 
addresses, once a week, sometimes twice to correct a mistake, for years, 
since almost as far back as when KMFB was bought up and destroyed and I 
applied to move my long-running, time proven, excellent show to KZYX in 
February of 2012 and have been waiting ever since for a substantial 
response. I applied again a few times, and /nothing/. I applied to 
manage the station at one point, and was not even considered. Lately 
I've been sending to KZYX notices of my weekly show (on air since 1997 
all night every Friday night (almost 15 years on KMFB, now on KNYO-LP 
Fort Bragg and KMEC-LP Ukiah) as samples, so yez can see what you're 
missing. Apparently you are getting email sent to the board of directors 
of KZYX because you are on the board of directors of KZYX. That explains it.

In that case, it's weird you didn't know: your corporation's budget is 
insanely bloated, mostly with paying nearly $300,000 a year to a handful 
of people in management and tech support while somehow not paying the 
local airpeople anything at all for showing up and doing all their shows 
all year long, all put together. You're paying just the general manager 
at KZYX $60,000 a year. A similar amount entirely supports a real 
community radio station like KNYO for /six years/, including rent on the 
downtown storefront performance space in the community it serves, where 
in normal times people can often just walk in off the street and up to a 
microphone --it happens on my show at all hours of the night-- and there 
are community events right in the radio station --bands, live radio 
drama, etc. In normal times, that is, whatever that means anymore.

Just in terms of money: the six-figure Corporation for Public 
Broadcasting grant MCPB (Mendocino County Public Broadcasting) corp. 
gets could easily support KZYX by itself without the need for several 
pledge drives every year. Most of your broadcasting clock that isn't 
devoted to automation playing recorded crap from a thousand miles away 
is given to a pack of genially-stoned-sounding slackers who I.D. the 
station at the top of the hour and chuckle or drone through a slight 
reshuffle of their record collection-- that part's nearly free to you, 
as are all the NPR shows, thanks to the CPB grant.*

Even so, airpeople show up, they do the radio work that brings in the 
money the people in the office use to pay themselves with, and airpeople 
deserve to be paid. As long as you're paying management, you should pay 
the airpeople who do a two or three hour show per week a stipend of, 
say, $1,000 a year each. That's less than minimum wage and leaves out 
paying for prep work. It would be as simple as a phone call and a few 
emails back and forth with your bookkeeper, who would distribute a 
one-page tax form to fill out, like the way it's done at plenty of other 
nonprofit organizations, theater companies, for example, who have no 
trouble paying workers for their work. Sixty deejays at $1,000 a year 
each would be $60,000. How is it that you consider one manager to be 
worth that much money, and all the real workers put together to be worth 
/nothing at all/? John, how can you not see what's wrong with that? The 
first job of the manager of any business, for-profit or nonprofit, is to 
pay the workers before he pays himself. And the manager of KZYX has a 
program director to direct the programs (such as they need to be 
directed), an operations manager to manage the operations, a business 
underwriting coordinator to coordinate the business underwriting, a 
bookkeeper to keep the books (see above) and if anything complicated 
breaks, a real radio engineer is a phone call away. What's left for the 
manager to do besides scribble up a glowing financial report for the 
board once or twice a year and attend the occasional broadcasting 
conference once or twice a year to hobnob with similar managers of 
similar radio fiefdoms?

KZYX' high-power license for 92.7Mhz is a free government grant of 
control of a natural resource. And you've been using it for more than 
thirty years mainly as a bullhorn to beg for money to pay a tiny group 
of people in the office. And the sort of people in the office who you 
hire keep people who will lick your hand licking your hand and keep 
dedicated radio people like me and shows like mine out, and have done 
since the beginning. That's my personal concern in this.

$600,000 a year to MCPB corp., much of it tax-derived, far outweighs 
what the public gets from you in return. For that much money 
--approaching $20,000,000 (!) now, in 2020-corrected dollars, KZYX 
should be the Cadillac of community radio stations, a shining 
gold-plated beacon of wonder and delight, and not a mediocre, 
run-of-the-mill NPR outlet.

*It costs MCPB corp. less than a dollar an hour for electricity to keep 
all KZYX&Z's transmitters and electronics and computers and lights in 
all your studios on and pumping at the same time, whether someone's at 
the microphone or not, whether airpeople put in some effort to prepare a 
real show or not. That amounts to less than $10,000 a year. And all the 
music fees and streaming fees and tower fees and repairs and rent and 
every other expense of KZYX should bring the crux of your biscuit to 
$80,000 a year, $100,000 tops. Everything after that, that isn't paid to 
the real workers, which it mostly isn't, is vanishing to no effect 
either because of incompetence or crooks, or both, and likely also up 
someone's nose.

KZYX under MCPB corp. has never been open to freedom and creativity and 
change. Three minutes of some chemtrails or antivax-conspiracy lunatic 
calling in once a week for comic relief, or three minutes allotted time 
for someone to bravely but shakily speak a discouraging word to a cold 
boardroom once a year does not satisfy the requirement for power to 
engage with the public who are the real owners of the frequencies you 
squat on. Learn something, at last, and do something right for a change, 
John. And if you personally don't want critical communication from the 
public about the so-called public radio station you have so much control 
over, that's on you. I guess I'll continue to write the occasional email 
to the board, despite continuing to be ignored except to be told, as 
you've just told me, that the board doesn't want to hear what the board 
doesn't want to hear.

--Marco McClean, memo at mcn.org

(Further, I later had to write again to the the board of directors:)

To board of directors of KZYX:

John Azzaro just sent the following reply to me, meaning he immediately 
got what I sent only to the KZYX board of directors at the board of 
directors' email address, bod at kzyx.org

John wrote, and I quote: "I am not on the KZYX BOD, or connected to the 
station in any way, nor are station sent e-mails directed to me from 
anyone but you. Again I respectfully request you remove my name from 
your list(s)."

Now, I just triple-checked: bod at kzyx.org is the only place I'm sending 
this (except maybe later to the AVA) and John Azzaro is listed as a 
boardmember and committee member of KZYX on these pages of KZYX.org:

https://www.kzyx.org/board-meetings
"Current Board Members: ...John Azzaro)"

and https://www.kzyx.org/mcpb-board-committees
"Personnel Committee: ...John Azzaro)"

If those pages are in error and John is not a boardmember, then maybe 
you should remove him from being listed in your system to have email 
addressed to the board (like this one and my previous ones, for example) 
passed along automatically to him, whether it goes for everyone or just 
applies to what I write to you.

In short, I'm sending email to bod at kzyx.org, and he's getting it, marked 
as from me, and he's claiming neither to be on the board nor to have 
anything at all to do with the station! It's possible that someone with 
the keys to your system and web page, or who is also on the board's 
email forwarding list, is playing a prank. It's not my doing. Look into 
it, because he'll probably get this too, and whatever else I send to you.

I'm complying fully with John's repeated requests not to email him. To 
my knowledge, and given his denial of any connection to KZYX, I never 
have. (Except for replying once privately to his email to me, of course, 
to tell him so.)

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