[Kzyxtalk] The NPR's new clothes.

[Marco McClean]

Robert Spies wrote:

...If you told me you saw a grey coloured whale but was unsure of the 
species then we could agree to call it a grey whale or even a gray whale..

I wrote:

Fair enough. Capitalization and even spelling conventions clearly are 
not a huge deal to either of us. I sometimes capitalize things 
idiosyncratically myself, and use foreign and historical dialect terms 
poetically or out of context, as well as pronounce words for comic 
effect. To say vej-un for vegan, for example, and guh-LAH for gala. I 
don't know why I opened with spelling; it just came out of my fingers. 
Here's something I love: Stephen Fry on grammar nazis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ovi7uQbtKas

Robert Spies wrote:

As to the KZYX rant; I have read your opinions on the list serve for 
years.  And you entitled to them.  My experience with non-profits tells 
me you need  talented leaders for success and they do not work for free.

I wrote:

Talent is the people on the air, the ones doing all the work the radio 
station is there for in the first place, not the manager. In the real 
world the first job of the manager of any business, profit or nonprofit 
--radio station, crime family, school, gas station, shoe store, 
whatever-- is to pay the workers before she pays herself. Just KZYX' 
manager and program director think their own royal personages are worth 
all the membership money the corporation takes in --that's 2000 
fifty-dollar annual memberships-- and they think all the airpeople 
showing up and doing all your shows all year long all put together are 
worth nothing but a pat on the head. A better word for the KZYX system 
is a cult, pronounced kuhlt. That's what it's called when the people 
with all the power over the place also keep all the money for themselves 
and everyone who brings in the money for them does it for the spiritual 
rewards and supports the power unconditionally, and often obtusely, in 
/my/ experience.

If there were no money to pay anyone, not the manager class and not the 
airpeople, it would be a different story, but KZYX has always been 
swimming in tax-derived and donor-class cash flow. Evidence for that? 
Here: by hook or by crook, each /talented/ manager, going all the way 
back to the beginning, managed every year to somehow burn several times 
the real cost of maintaining the station. The fortune that magically 
disappears into the cult of KZYX every year could support /sixty/ 
stations like KNYO, whose truly talented manager, by the way, is as much 
a volunteer as the airpeople. The very well-paid manager of KZYX has a 
program director to direct the programs, and a bookkeeper to keep the 
books, and a business underwriting coordinator to coordinate the 
business underwriting, and an operations manager to manage the 
operations. What's left for her to manage? She's a figurehead, nothing 
more. Actually, the program director also is a figurehead. If what she's 
really being paid for is her real work on the air, the occasional 
interview, and for engineering the shows of people who don't care to 
learn to do it for themselves then so should /you/ be paid for your work 
and engineering on your show, Robert. But she's being paid very well for 
simply being called the program director. Name a program that Alicia 
directed today, or yesterday, or all last month. KZYX has to have a 
certain small number of full-time employees as a condition of getting 
its yearly six-figure Corporation for Public Broadcasting grant. That's 
why she's there.

If the airpeople don't show up and do the shows, there's no living radio 
station, there's nothing but a Linux computer the size of a pack of 
cigarets running automation. When airpeople show up, which they all 
always do without prompting, the ship sails on unperturbed whether the 
manager is sitting in the office or sleeping one off or touring the 
Southwest incommunicado in a Winnebago. The machinery of radio is more 
reliable than any household appliance, and the cost of keeping on the 
air, and the difficulty of maintaining a radio station, is way lower 
than the cost and difficulty of running a newspaper, or a restaurant, or 
a theater company, or a toy store, or landscaping service, or a thrift 
shop. All these other managers manage to pay the workers before they pay 
themselves. I'm non-stop baffled as to why it's okay with you or anyone 
that KZYX management skates, on this issue.

I mean, you have no problem with the airpeople being paid who do all the 
smarmy canned shows from thousands of miles away. You consider them to 
be talent worthy of being paid. But locals not at all? Not worth a 
penny? Even ones who prepare all week to do worthy shows week after 
week, year after year, and don't just read the station ID, play a few 
records and/or talk on the phone with their friends, though they also 
serve, and should be paid. It doesn't have to be a lot. A stipend of 
tangible respect. It would take one phone call from the manager to the 
bookkeeper to get it started. One phone call that no manager at KZYX has 
ever nor probably will ever make.

And if I repeat myself on this matter for five minutes every six months, 
how is it ranting? The facts are all facts and sadly don't change; they 
go stonewalled against and unacknowledged. It's been 33 years and all 
coasting downhill in the comfort zone for KZYX, no expansion of freedom, 
no danger, no un-swiftly/un-ruthlessly-punished/un-swept-under-the-rug 
surprises. And the corporation's new cult compound in town, when it's 
painted and moved into? The NPR's new clothes.

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