[Kzyxtalk] Kzyxtalk Digest, Vol 119, Issue 5

Mon Dec 11 12:34:40 PST 2023

According to their latest Form 990, total payroll expenses for 2022 were $426,290.

Legal fees were reported at $27,848. Nothing was reported for accounting expenses, even though KZYX's Form 990 was prepared by a Certified Public Accountant.
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Subject: Kzyxtalk Digest, Vol 119, Issue 5

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Today's Topics:

   1. Shoestring. (Marco McClean)

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Message: 1
Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2023 01:17:58 -0800
From: Marco McClean <memo at mcn.org>
Subject: [Kzyxtalk] Shoestring.
To: kzyxtalk at lists.mcn.org
Message-ID: <fcd2e452-fad5-49e0-b1a5-a498f9738a0c at mcn.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed

SHOESTRING.

Marco here. Re: Marty Durlin's letter titled Inside KZYX: "On a
shoestring budget, KZYX operates..."

That shoestring budget includes paying Marty Durlin $60,000 a year plus
full medical, dental, and vision. Just the money she sucks out of KZYX
for herself in three months would fully fund every aspect of KNYO for a
year, you know, speaking of shoelaces. Just two people in the management
suite of KZYX, Marty and the next one in line, personally swallow every
penny of all KZYX membership dues. 2000 members at $50 each is $100,000.
Last time I checked, the station was burning through $600,000 a year,
provided by a six-figure government grant and large, controlling
donations from rich people whose class and stripe and financial
interests you will consequently never hear a discouraging word about.
And then there are underwriters.

About the underwriting. On the KZYX underwriting info page, three points
are stressed to potential underwriters:

/1. Eighty percent of public radio listeners say they have a positive
impression of a company that supports public radio. 2. Seventy percent
of listeners say that underwriting messages have a positive impact on
purchase decisions. 3. Eighty-six percent of listeners considered NPR
personally important to them./

Underwriters are encouraged to buy time for their message on the air
expecting a return in brand attraction and sales. How is that not
advertising? And when programming decisions, like the decision to soak
the broadcast day with NPR shows, are made with potential underwriting
money in mind, how is that different from commercial radio, that
similarly plays what pays.

The reason the low end of the FM dial was set aside for noncommercial
radio was so radio could be done by people not concerned with whether it
made money or not. Radio is only expensive to do when the folks who run
the station like money. And who doesn't like money? So the expense of
acquiring the plant and the license naturally ratchets to absurd
heights, pricing everyone not mainly concerned with money entirely out
of having a reasonably high-power radio station. So real noncommercial
radio needs those specially allocated slots, and can do fine there,
because doing radio is cheap. Transmitters last decades without
maintenance; they're as reliable as a refrigerator. Once you've got the
transmitter and you've got permission to plug it in and switch it on,
your main expense of broadcasting is electricity. If the transmitter
uses 4,000 watts, and electricity is 40c per kWh, which it is now,
that's $1.60 an hour. That's two medium-size bites off the end of a
burrito. A decent mixing board can be had used for just a few hundred
dollars. Computers and microphones are practically free anymore.
Internet access for phones and web is $100 a month, say $200 a month
with all the bells and whistles. You get better equipment for more
money, but you can't hear the difference.

The people who make KZYX's shows from distant places (for NPR and etc.)
are often paid bogglingly well. Ira Glass, for example, just pre-Covid
got divorced and sold his million-dollar apartment in New York. It's the
local Mendocino County airpeople on KZYX who are not paid for their
shows, though they're the ones who do all the actual work the radio
station is there for in the first place, and also they have to
periodically beg for money, "to keep the great shows on the air," as
they used to put it, money that instead, see above, goes to a handful of
people in the office. All of KZYX's transmitters and
studio-to-transmitter links and all the studio lights and computers and
microwave popcorn ovens comes to well less than $20,000 per year in
electricity. So if the folks in the management suite, including the CEO,
the bookkeeper, the microphone-cable mender guy, the underwriting
salesperson, the program director and the newslady, are getting a total
among them of, say, $200,000, and rent on the various places, and the
tower fees, and replacement lightbulbs, and Henry's roof patch and a
shingle every once in awhile, and so on, come to another $50,000 a year,
that all adds up to less than $300,000. But it's $600,000, isn't it?
Where's the extra $300,000 going? That's three million dollars every ten
years. That's a mystery. Unless my math is way off, KZYX is /swimming/
in mystery money. And if it isn't, where did it vanish to?

The main item on the job desciption for a CEO for KZYX has always been:
the candidate must be able and committed to raise money. Hence the
periodic pep talk and poor-mouthing from the CEO. And yet the first job
of the manager of any business, for-profit or nonprofit, bar or gas
station or pet grooming salon or grammar school, is to see that the
workers are paid before she pays herself. No manager at KZYX has ever
done that, despite all the copious available money. I'd start with a
$1000-a-year stipend for regular weekly airpeople, which is only $20 per
show, but it would be a step. If the airperson is independently wealthy
and $1000 for him is a bottle of fancy alcohol and a Japanese beefburger
with gold flakes in the pickles, and he doesn't need it, he can tear up
the check. People who need it can get a fresh set of tires and a year's
worth of car insurance, or pay rent for January, or have a few teeth
fixed right instead of having to keep gluing the caps back on in the
bathroom mirror.

I was at KMFB for almost 15 years. That was a commercial station, that
didn't get government grants to keep going, and had plenty of expenses a
noncommercial station doesn't have, and was in a depressed radio market,
and the string of owners always took their profit, and manager Bob
Woelfel every once in awhile could not pay himself. Yet he paid us every
time, both for our airtime and a cut of the advertising money our shows
brought in. And he didn't dick around with our shows. Everyone at KMFB
had more leeway and freedom than anyone at any NPR station I have ever
heard of has ever had. That's my model for managerial integrity. Bob
Young at KNYO, same thing. I don't mind not being paid at KNYO, because
nobody is being paid. Bob manages the station so there'll be a station
to do his show on. To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, Marty Durlin could
volunteer to manage KZYX, like the airpeople volunteer, but she doesn't
have to if she doesn't want to, and I guess she doesn't want to, so.

With some of poor shoestring KZYX' mystery riches lately MCPB has bought
prime real estate in downtown Ukiah with existing suitable buildings
intact and ready to paint. When they move the office in, meaning some
final paperwork, a dish antenna on a mast on the roof, a new
studio-to-transmitter box, and a lazy afternoon plugging in the mixing
board, phone and internet connections, a couple of microphones and a
wingback chair, that'll be nice, but what will change on the air, where
it counts? Will shows finally be allowed on KZYX that push the envelope
out a little farther than chortling about sports or playing genre music
and reading the liner notes in a genially stoned drawl or Terry Gross
interviewing the granddaughter of the inventor of the windshield wiper,
besides Ralph Nader at 5am Saturday morning?? Will anything change at
all? I'm aware I'm harping on the pay issue, but if the local shows are
valuable (I say even the most banal of them is) and radio work is worth
being paid for, then pay the airpeople. If you value them, Marty, pay
them. Not paying them is not valuing them; it's slapping them in the
face. Of /course/ it's nice to be on the air and it feels good to have a
show, and it's a rare opportunity in the world, and that softens the
blow somewhat. That's no excuse. You can pay them, so pay them. If I
were in your shoes, and if there was any hint of the station being
embarrassed for funds, I'd take a substantial pay cut and pay them some
more. I'd pay the token LGBT talk-show people a lot more. They clearly
take the responsibility seriously. It's the best show you've got. That
is a driveway show, called that because you get where you're going and
sit in the car to hear the rest of it. Their work, and all the other
local airpeople's work, brings in all that money that you pay yourself
with. So pay them.

To compare, KNYO will be moving into another building soon, too, as its
main studio and performance space of ten happy years of very fair rent,
downtown in the city it serves, is being sold, which was expected, and
no hard feelings. KNYO had some trouble this year; the tower-tree blew
down in a storm, money was raised and that was dealt with, and there's
money left over, saved, toward moving the tower and transmitter to a
much better place early this coming year. All the problems, obligations,
technical considerations, paperwork, and real expenses of KNYO are
remarkably similar to KZYX's. And KNYO is constantly changing and
adapting and continues to provide a platform for people to do radio from
wherever they are, with cheap personal studios all over the county,
including welcoming problematical people like me, and that's saying
something. The difference comes from, I think, the level of money
corruption. KZYX, $600,000 (one year it was $750,000!). KNYO, $15,000.
/KNYO, at least forty times less corrupt./ That's a good slogan. I'll
have to write that down.

Oh, also the difference is, KNYO's broadcast radius is limited by law to
just a few miles. KZYX's signal can blanket the entire country 24 hours
a day with a sometimes hourly pitch for ever more money, beyond the CPB
grant that they get /because/ they can blanket the county. Does that
seem fair to you?

Shoestring, tch.

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End of Kzyxtalk Digest, Vol 119, Issue 5
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