[Kzyxtalk] [MCN-Announce]- KZYX&Z HAS AN OPENING FOR MEMBERSHIP DIRECTOR

[Marco McClean]

On 12/30/2022 4:07 PM, Chris Skyhawk wrote:
 > https://www.kzyx.org/employment-opportunities

Marco here. Several problems with this. 1. Nowhere on the page does it 
say what the pay is, and it's the law now that you have to do that with 
a job notice.

2. KZYX has 2,000 members. Membership is either $25 or $50 a year. 
That's $100,000 total as a high estimate, which is coincidentally close 
to what just the Manager and Program Director suck out of the station 
for themselves in pay. So all the membership  money goes to just two 
people in the office. Add to that the pay of the person cranking the 
begging wheel (whatever that amounts to; see 1, above), and the pay of 
the Business Underwriting Coordinator, who presides over schmoozing with 
wineries and so on, and the only thing paying the real expenses is the 
six-figure tax derived CPB grant and /huge/ grants from rich people, to 
make sure never is heard on the air a discouraging word about them or 
their interests or class. Which is a lot. KZYX is /swimming/ in money,* 
easily enough money, if the management model weren't tangled into 
pretzel, to pay each of the regular airpeople a stipend of more than 
$1,000 a year; that's a mere $20 a show, and they won't even do that.

3. You heard right: the local airpeople, the ones at least going through 
the motions of doing all the real work the radio station is there for in 
the first place, are paid nothing. And if any of them ever speak up 
about the internal workings of the station or voice disaproval of the 
status quo or air a surprise without getting managerial approval, 
they're out like a shot. So the only people left on the air there over 
the course of thirty years of this are ones who are happy with the way 
things are because they don't need money, they have their show to play 
their harmless record collection on, or chat on the phone with their 
friends, and that's enough for them, or they're kids and they don't know 
any better, and it's fun for them. Of course it's fun; even crappy radio 
is /radio/.

*And they're building a million-dollar office situation in Ukiah with 
even more money from rich families and corporations, relying on 
innocuous canned crap from a thousand miles away for so much of the 
broadcast day and night. With no plans to ever open up the schedule to 
anyone doing anything out of the cookie-cutter NPR-colonized station 
sphere, and I'll say it again: nor to ever pay local radio people for 
doing real local radio.

Look: they say it over and over: "Listener-supported community radio." 
It's the same lie every time they run that tape. It's not 
listener-supported, it's government and rich people-supported, and much 
of the community is permanently vibed out if not shut out of doing radio 
there. People /died of old age/ waiting through half a dozen managers' 
tenures to get back on the air there after they were kicked out for not 
kowtowing properly to the well-paid comfortable autocratic management.

But, sure, a job notice.

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