<html><body><div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; color: #000000"><br><div>Brilliant.</div><div><br></div><hr id="zwchr"><div style="color:#000;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;text-decoration:none;font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:12pt;"><b>From: </b>"Marco McClean" <memo@mcn.org><br><b>To: </b>"kzyxtalk" <kzyxtalk@lists.mcn.org><br><b>Cc: </b>discussion@lists.mcn.org<br><b>Sent: </b>Thursday, May 21, 2015 3:48:47 PM<br><b>Subject: </b>[Kzyxtalk] Through consistently bad management KZYX hemorrhages half a million dollars every year. And all the while that same bad management lies to you that they need more and more money to stay on the air at all. Happy Pledge Drive.<br><div><br></div>[Editor: Please include my email address and weblog URL at the end if <br>you can.]<br><div><br></div>Through consistently bad management KZYX hemorrhages half a million <br>dollars every year. And all the while that same bad management lies to <br>you that they need more and more money to stay on the air at all. Happy <br>Pledge Drive.<br>--by Marco McClean<br><div><br></div>The board of Mendocino County Public Broadcasting --more simply said: <br>KZYX-- pays Mary Aigner and David Steffen some amount that they won't <br>disclose even to the paying members. It's probably $40,000 per year <br>each. And their "operations" person is probably paid $40,000 a year, and <br>John Coate is paid $60,000 per year, during which he fakes up a couple <br>of financial reports and apparently once per decade calls the neighbors <br>to have them cut down a tree that's grown in the way. Just those four <br>people's pay totals to $180,000 every year-- the equivalent of three <br>thousand six hundred (!) yearly fifty-dollar memberships, which is way <br>more active members than KZYX has or had or will ever have. So none of <br>the membership money nor donated money supports the station in any way; <br>it can't buy replacement equipment, nor solve engineering problems, nor <br>establish a downtown studio in the county seat, nor pay the airpeople, <br>but it all goes to enrich a handful of entrenched bureaucrats who are <br>not making the station better by their presence but are simply <br>entrenched there. Every time John Coate tells the board that he can't <br>improve the scratchy signal or the STL path nor do crucial maintenance <br>or set up that important studio in Ukiah --much less move the main <br>studio to Ukiah-- nor [fill in blank] until a miracle occurs to produce <br>more money-- I wonder: what prevents the board from seeing that they <br>have that money already and that they've always had it? It's just <br>constantly vanishing to pay John Coate to lie to them that they don't <br>have enough money. And they are paying him with the money he's lying to <br>them that they don't have, and the most positive thing you can say about <br>what he does for the radio station is: he sucks money out of the system <br>so it won't feel all bloated.<br><div><br></div>I just read John Coate's latest state of the station report, where he <br>crows proudly about the KZYX news department and how it's come "roaring <br>back", as though he's responsible for something monumental and laudable. <br>Look: there was a news department at KZYX up to 2008, when John's first <br>act in office was to destroy it and fire everyone so there would be <br>money for him to be paid to do things like dispense with the news <br>department. Because, eh, who needs hard-hitting local news? Ya gotcher <br>classical show and your jazz show and your hippie wind-music shows and <br>Prairie Home Companion and that should be enough for ya. Oh, wait, <br>that's right, he also dumped A Prairie Home Companion, the most popular <br>show they ever had. Finally, in 2015 --that's seven years later, but <br>who's counting?-- after a threat over the technical illegality of his <br>--I'm going to say this again-- eliminating the entire news department <br>in favor of paying himself, he assembles a thin short shadow of that <br>news department, and contact information for the individual newspeople <br>isn't even made available on the website (just as the boardmembers can't <br>be contacted except by going through Stuart Campbell) ("We like it that <br>way," Stuart wrote to me), and that's just one example of how much KZYX <br>has improved under J.C.'s occupation. The news department hasn't "roared <br>back" but rather mewed piteously after having crawled part-way back up <br>the side of the hole he and his weirdly compliant board kicked it into. <br>Watch them kick it back down when it gets up on its hind legs again.<br><div><br></div>John Coate is a fraud. KZYX isn't improving; it's merely continuing to <br>exist in a fugue state. And here is how little it has really cost for <br>KZYX all along to keep microphones plugged in, and do a touch-up here <br>and there on the official paperwork, and pay for a couple of IDSN-linked <br>studios, and internet service and web hosting and telephone lines and <br>STLs, and pay to energize the really very small main transmitter and the <br>two teensy translator stations (translators use about as much <br>electricity as a single back-porch light bulb), and tower space rental, <br>and music publishers' fees and so on, and even computerized bookkeeping <br>--the whole operation and overhead; everything, all of it really costs <br>less than $50 a day, meaning way less than $20,000 a year, which is a <br>very small fraction of just the annual grant from Uncle Sugar. Add <br>$30,000 to pay for NPR shows, if they must, and the total comes to less <br>than $50,000 a year. Which is /half a million dollars per year less/ <br>than they're constantly flushing away under John Coate's "financial <br>genius" guidance. Also I've met him. In person, as the face of the <br>station, he is a testy, insecure/angry man who literally ground his <br>teeth when he spoke to me. And it's not just when he speaks to me or <br>speaks in private; if you've ever been to an MCPB board meeting or <br>watched one on television you've seen this. It's who he is all the time.<br><div><br></div>Even so, if he had wanted to be published in my paper or to be on my <br>television show or to have his own radio show on any of the radio <br>stations I've ever had anything to do with, he could walk in and do it. <br>I'd have no objection; I'd encourage it. It would mean the man was <br>growing and, you know, making an effort. But he doesn't want to do <br>anything like that-- he has no use for radio; he's afraid of it and he <br>obviously hates radiopeople and hates the public. What was the reasoning <br>behind putting him in his position of control over a radio station and <br>everyone in it? And why does the MCPB board continue to unconditionally <br>support him? It's baffling. It's crazy. Is it just because he looks like <br>the dad in a family of J.C. Penney plaid-pyjama mannequins, except also <br>scowling and seething? Because that's funny but it's not a good enough <br>reason.<br><div><br></div>And they certainly don't need David Steffen. Take a look at their own <br>various financial reports of the past few years, as incomplete and <br>internally conflicting and confusing as everyone knows they are <br>deliberately made to be. David Steffen's efforts --whatever he and they <br>imagine he's doing-- barely return the station enough to pay him. Other <br>stations get along fine without a David Steffen. And Mary Aigner-- other <br>stations that have programs equal to and better than shows on KZYX (I'm <br>speaking here in terms of my show and KNYO, just for instance) get along <br>fine without a tyrannical program director or any program director at <br>all. And back to John Coate-- what radio-station-improving and signal <br>clarifying ability does the board see in him that might develop in some <br>nebulous future? The only skill he has exhibited so far is to influence <br>them somehow to keep shoveling cash at him and wherever he points while <br>the physical plant continues to deteriorate.<br><div><br></div>If the airpeople are expected to volunteer their time and energy and <br>talent, why is it beneath John Coate and Mary Aigner and David Steffen <br>to similarly volunteer? If it's ridiculous to consider even mildly <br>throttling back on the money diversion that John's and Mary's and <br>David's salaries represent --which amounts to endlessly hemorrhaging <br>many times the actual cost of running the station (see above)-- how can <br>the board continue to declare it ridiculous to pay the actual airpeople <br>a meaningful stipend for the airpeople's essential work? If the board's <br>reasoning is that John and Mary and David do better work for being paid, <br>why should that not apply to the airpeople? They call the airpeople <br>their "wonderful volunteers" --well, get John and Mary and David to <br>wonderfully volunteer and they can be wonderful volunteers too, and the <br>station will have hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to spend and <br>never have to do another smarmy pledge drive ever again. Think of it: <br>they could dispense with all their soul-shriveling lying about how much <br>the station needs pledges and donations "to keep the great shows on the <br>air." The board could just live and enjoy it and be people and do their <br>own unique shows, if they're the sort of people who want to do radio and <br>lift people up to do radio, and if they're not, why are they on the <br>board of a radio station?<br><div><br></div>The purpose of a community radio station is to provide a place for <br>people to do shows that just can't be done on commercial radio. That's <br>what the whole lower end of the FM band was set aside for in the first <br>place. It's dead easy to pay to keep a radio station on the air and do <br>better, more interesting radio than commercial stations do. My show <br>belongs on KZYX. From my point of view, when my show wasn't on the <br>schedule there within six months of my offering it (in February of <br>2012), that was a measure of Mary Aigner's malice and incompetence, and <br>by extension the malice and incompetence of the organization. I waited <br>years before I started bitching about it, and before I started looking <br>into how poorly the station is managed in general, and telling you <br>people what I found out. By all means, pledge money during this latest <br>in the endless series of unlistenable KZYX pledge drives if you can't <br>help yourself, but keep in mind that when they tell you they need your <br>money, that's a pants-on-fire lie. You've already paid and you continue <br>to pay with your taxes whether you like it or not, and there's plenty of <br>money to "keep the great shows on the air". The shows are not in any <br>peril that the managers don't create themselves. When you give money to <br>the current regime at KZYX, what you're really paying for is to keep me <br>and people like me off the air there, and to keep people in power who <br>don't deserve it, who aren't in it for radio and never were, but just <br>for the money and the power trip. KZYX is like one of those cancer <br>charities where the people managing the charity company keep all the net <br>for themselves. Or even more like Scientology, because it's not even a <br>charity, and it relies on very simple 100-year-old technology. In the <br>case of Scientology, it's tin cans and a galvanometer and official <br>secrecy and compressed gaseous horsepucky. So you see it's very similar.<br><div><br></div>I recommend that if you have some radio money burning a hole in your <br>pocket you give it instead to 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg, where every <br>underwriting penny goes to improve the station. KNYO is not funded by a <br>government grant, and though it isn't luxurious and its broadcast reach <br>isn't far there are facets of its operation that are ingenious and <br>fascinating, such as a new system that lets airpeople do their scheduled <br>shows by live remote from anywhere there's reliable internet access, and <br>there are retro facets --we have a brilliant old piano now, right there <br>in the station's downtown storefront performance space-- and KNYO does <br>it all on 1/50th of KZYX's absurdly inflated budget. Contact Bob Young: <br>bobb@poetworld.net to support KNYO or even to get airtime for your own <br>radio show. There are good slots open in the schedule. It's easy and <br>fun, and you can do it.<br><div><br></div>Marco McClean<br>memo@mcn.org<br>http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com<br><div><br></div><br>-end-<br><div><br></div>_______________________________________________<br>Kzyxtalk mailing list<br>Kzyxtalk@lists.mcn.org<br>http://lists.mcn.org/mailman/listinfo/kzyxtalk<br></div><br></div></body></html>