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<font face="Courier New, Courier, monospace">To each MCPB (KZYX)
boardmember: answer your damn email, so writers can trust it's
even getting to you, and that you're at least reading it.<br>
<br>
<br>
On 5/11/2016 6:29 PM, Meg Courtney wrote:<br>
<br>
Dear Marco,<br>
The board has received your email. It is up to individual Board
members whether they reply to it or not. Unfortunately, your
email seems to be more your opinions than facts. You are welcome,
however, to express them on the BOD list serve or at our meetings
during the public comment period.<br>
<br>
<br>
Meg, after waiting over a week, how do /I/ know the board members
have received the email? Watch this, here's how to do it: I just
got home and sat down to deal with email and I'm taking a moment
to reply to people who expect it, or might expect it. I expect
this same courtesy of each of the board members. Last Tuesday I
wrote, "Reply requested." If none of you have even a minute a day
to deal with the public, why are you on the board of a public
radio station?<br>
<br>
<br>
Dues-paying members talking for three minutes at a board meeting
once per year while the lot of you sit there stonefaced and
pursed-lipped and then you say, /Next,/ is not enough. It's like
talking to a wall. That's the way you're used to, because that's
the way you've been allowed to get away with it. Nothing has
changed with the advent of your so-called new regime; you've just
painted over the problems with a friendlier-seeming color. That's
a fact. And then you get all huffy when someone gets justifiably
frustrated with you. You didn't need to call the cops on Jeff
Wright. That was just mean. Likewise your surly cheerleader
throwing his drink on Derek.<br>
<br>
<br>
Your superfluous program directors both previous and present-day
don't reply to email any better than the boardmembers do. I've
been waiting for more than four years for my show to be scheduled
on KZYX. Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio has been a gem among
radio shows in Mendocino County for two decades-- another fact.
Oh: also you're paying people a thousand miles away very well to
do their shows but you refuse to even consider paying locals at
all, and that's not right.<br>
<br>
<br>
There's plenty of money to do it, too. KMFB paid all of us by the
hour to do our shows, and paid us a percentage of the underwriting
money we brought in. KMFB covered the county with two
transmitters, and didn't get any six-figure government grant, and
paid $3,000 a month for fricking ever on a long-term loan, and
paid the manager and /paid the owners/, and did everything for
what I'm now told was about $200,000 a year. And that was a
commercial operation. Think about that for a minute.<br>
<br>
<br>
KNYO just had its tenth birthday party last Saturday. It was more
pleasant and better attended than the KZYX annual membership party
on May 2nd. Mountains of free pizza. Several permutations of a
live band. Fire dancers... The main difference between KZYX and
KNYO is transmitter power, meaning you have to pay about $20 a day
to run your transmitters and KNYO has to pay more like forty cents
a day. That's a difference of about $7,000 a year. Both stations
maintain internet service and phones and various types of STLs.
(KNYO has several more remote studios than KZYX does, and our
various internet-based STL links break down less often than your
/insanely expensive and byzantine system/.) Both stations have
music publishers' fees to pay and all the FCC paperwork to do.
KNYO has an office and storefront performance space in town; you
don't have that, but our basic arrangement is very similar to
yours. Yet KNYO operates on between $10,000 and $12,000 a year,
everything included. /You/ have to pay about $30,000 a year for
NPR pablum-- even so, keeping all the NPR shows, even though if
you ask Lorraine you'll find out that the biggest complaint is
/too much NPR/, really you could run KZYX for about $50-$60K a
year. Pay the airpeople, and pay the manager by the hour for hours
actually worked for the station, pay a competent engineer to pare
things down and keep them simple, buy economical replaceables, and
you could easily do the whole job for less than the CPB grant
gives you and never have to do another egregiously unlistenable
pledge drive again, and you could make every citizen in the
service range an honorary, voting member. KZYX has been
mysteriously pissing away more than half a million dollars a year
each and every year since the beginning-- that's just a plain
fact. The only thing that's kept MCPB afloat all these years,
since the very beginning, because of overpaid incompetent
management chosen and employed and defended by people like you, is
the CPB grant. Without that, you would have failed utterly every
year. FOUR MILLION DOLLARS-- that's how much tax-derived money
KZYX has absorbed and frittered away so far. These are all facts,
Meg.<br>
<br>
<br>
Lorraine is darling. She even charmed Bruce Anderson. Keep
Lorraine. But she can and should do the job of radio station
manager without needing Raoul or David Steffen or anyone else to
sit in the office and pretend to be useful, and --getting back to
KNYO-- Bob Young does all necessary management by himself, for
free, in a lazy afternoon per month. Bob Woelfel managed KMFB and
also answered the phones and did the paperwork. Radio is /easy/.
If Lorraine is being run ragged babysitting the equipment and
manually connecting and disconnecting remote shows, and if that's
the reason you feel the need to pay her $5,000 a month (five times
the entire monthly budget of KNYO!), replace the offending
equipment with something made in this century, from off the shelf
at Best Buy, and solve that problem, so she can do what she's
there to do and relax.<br>
<br>
<br>
Last year I applied to manage KZYX, and the hiring committee that
Stuart Campbell appointed, as his last act in a series of sleazy
acts as board chairman (so he could be manager), tossed my
application as soon as it arrived. John Sakowicz had to shame Clay
into acknowledging that I'd applied at all. If I hadn't copied my
application to the AVA and the MCN Announce list you wouldn't even
have known. More facts.<br>
<br>
<br>
All right... point me to the BOD subscription page, then, so I can
subscribe. I'll try that for awhile, then I'll share it with my
listeners on KNYO and KMEC, and start a letter-writing campaign if
it occurs to me to be necessary. If anyone's show belongs on KZYX,
mine does. And if you're going to keep paying the bosses and the
chair-fillers in the office, the airpeople deserve to be paid
first. If after all this time you can't grow up and figure out how
to straighten that out, you don't deserve to be in proximity to
the levers of power there. The three frequencies you use don't
belong to you to be secretive incommunicado Nixonian control
freaks with them; they're natural resources that belong to all of
us. Act like it every day.<br>
<br>
<br>
And, to each boardmember: answer your damn email, so writers can
trust it's even getting to you, and that you're reading it. I
don't believe for a minute that you're overwhelmed with missives
from the public.<br>
<br>
<br>
-- <br>
<br>
Marco McClean<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:memo@mcn.org">memo@mcn.org</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com">http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com</a></font>
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