Programming

KPFA on the brink: pledge drive falls $125,000 short

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Recall endoser Larry Bensky with KPFA's Antonio Ortiz & John Hamilton
Recall endoser Larry Bensky with KPFA's Antonio Ortiz & John Hamilton

The station ended its Winter Fund Drive one week ago, $125,000 short of its pledge goal. This is sad news for everyone who cares about KPFA, and it underscores the importance of change at Pacifica.

Pacifica’s re-programming of 6-10 AM is behind the shortfall. Those time slots used to raise 40% of KPFA’s total pledges. Since the destruction of the Morning Show, that’s dropped by more than half. For a time, station management was able to offset the plunge by lengthening fund drives, but they’ve run into diminishing returns from that strategy. (This year’s Winter Fund Drive ran 24 days, a whopping 50% increase from the length of the last Winter Fund Drive before the Morning Show was axed).

By any measure, the morning lineup that Pacifica imposed on KPFA has been a catastrophic failure. But instead of fixing it, Rosenberg, and the Pacifica managers she backs, are still defending it. They rejected over $63,000 that SaveKPFA raised to pay for the reinstatement of the Morning Show. They spent more money on lawyers to fight Morning Show co-host Aimee Allison‘s reinstatement than it would have cost to keep her on payroll for a year. And they’ll keep doing it until KPFA’s voting members call them to account.

The high cost of bad management: longer fund drives

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In his last newsletter, KPFA interim general manager Andrew Leslie Phillips released first-quarter financial figures for KPFA with little comment. One year ago, the station’s first-quarter results showed it better than budget by $237,000. This year’s figures show the station has fallen $60,000 short of budget in just three months. Yikes!

The plunge is mostly due to a drop in fundraising during the morning hours. But the situation is actually much worse than it looks. SaveKPFA‘s analysis of KPFA’s fundraising calendar shows that the station made up from the fundraising plunge during morning hours by massively lengthening KPFA’s fund drives. In the 12 months after the Morning Show was cancelled, on-air time spent fundraising jumped by 19 days, a 30% increase. And time spent fundraising is budgeted to increase still further this year. By contrast, less than two days of normal fundraising would raise enough money to pay the salary and benefits of Aimee Allison, the only Morning Show staffer whose reinstatement Pacifica has managed to block.

This is a serious problem. Long fund drives are more than just annoying: they drive away listeners, which means, eventually, there are fewer people left to ask for money. Other stations — most notably Pacifica’s WBAI in New York City — have followed this path into a downward spiral. WBAI now spends one out of three calendar days in fund drives. Yet, in a signal area with three times the population of KPFA’s, it has fewer listeners, raises less money, and runs the largest deficits in Pacifica.

Uprising spared, LA Theatreworks on the block

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Despite promises that they would not make any program changes without constituting a Program Council and consulting KPFA’s staff, Pacifica-appointed managers Andrew Phillips and Carrie Core are pressing ahead with plans to replace popular KPFA arts programs with shows hosted by their political allies.

The plans include a program about KPFA’s internal issues, to be hosted by a pro-management partisan who has produced online videos attacking SaveKPFA as well as KPFA’s union, CWA. (Ironically, management has disciplined union members Mitch Jeserich, Mark Mericle and John Hamilton, and unpaid staffer/board member David Gans, for simply mentioning such “internal” issues on the air.) And LA Theatreworks appears to be on the chopping block, to be replaced by a program hosted by allies of management called “Twit-wit,” in which actors read a Twitter stream.

SaveKPFA-affiliated local board members wrote this letter to Phillips, calling management’s actions “incomprehensible,” and noting that they are “certain to drive away even more of KPFA’s listeners.”

YOU MAKE A DIFFERENCE: TAKE ACTION FOR KPFA!
An avalance of objections from KPFA listeners and staff appears to have saved Sonali Kolhatkar‘s Uprising (details here). Let’s turn up the heat again: CLICK HERE TO SEND AN EMAIL to KPFA’s managers telling them that you DO NOT support their destructive moves, and that you demand their resignations immediately. Use our sample letter or create your own, as you prefer.

Outraged listener letters pour in
Hundreds of you have also called for the resignations of the managers responsible for the destruction of KPFA’s programming. Here are just a few: “As decades-long listeners and financial contributors to KPFA,” wrote Blair and Charlie Moser, “we honestly believe that ‘managers’ Engelhardt, Phillips and Core are deliberately attempting to destroy KPFA, in order that its license and broadcast frequency can be sold to commercial interests. These three so-called ‘managers’ are paid a total of $210,000 in salaries….Those funds should support the programming KPFA listeners pay to hear, not an incompetent bureaucracy that is canceling the best programs.”

“Without the anchor program of the Morning Show, to wake me up in the morning, I only sporadically listen to KPFA throughout the day, avoiding ever more programming” installed by the interim managers, wrote listener Norie Clarke. “We must remove the bloated salaries, and dictatorial powers of Phillips, Core, and Engelhardt which are being used to bleed dry the resources, community spirit and open voice of KPFA.”

We’ll be posting more letters from listeners who have given permission at SaveKPFA‘s listener mail page.

Your KPFA board reps at work
After a disastrous fund drive with year-over-year declines in every morning time slot reprogrammed by Pacifica, SaveKPFA reps passed a motion at the August 20 Local Station Board meeting recommending that managers reinstate the Morning Show during the major fund drive scheduled for October.

Pacifica-appointed manager Andrew Phillips gave no indication he’d actually implement the motion. The debate, however, was instructive: members of Independents for Community Radio (ICR), the pro-management slate on KPFA’s board, had to explain how they justified keeping KPFA’s biggest fundraiser off the air. Pacifica has maintained it was forced to axe the Morning Show due to financial necessity and union rules regarding layoffs — even though Brian Edwards-Tiekert won reinstatement through a union grievance and SaveKPFA raised enough money to pay for Aimee Allison to return.

But at the board meeting, ICR rep Henry Norr (audio clip) argued against even temporarily putting the old Morning Show staff on the air because, he said, it would increase pressure for a permanent reinstatement. ICR rep Cynthia Johnson said, “There is nothing sacred about a couple of jobs.” Former ICR member Sasha Futran (audio clip) who declared herself fully independent earlier this year, said, “The Morning Mix [the program Pacifica imposed to replace the Morning Show] is, frankly, dreadful. . . there were two times I turned to the station at 8 AM and didn’t know I was listening to KPFA.” She turned to her former ICR colleagues and said they know the program is awful, and say as much to each other privately. | ENTIRE BOARD MEETING: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5

solidarity fist kpfaSolidarity from San Francisco Labor Council
Delegates to the San Francisco Labor Council unanimously passed a second resolution last week supporting KPFA’s workers. In addition, unpaid programmer David Bacon, who has been out in solidarity since the Morning Show‘s cancellation, made a surprise appearance on KPFA after Philip Maldari asked him to guest host the pre-Labor Day Sunday Show. Listeners, such as Barrie Ann Mason, were delighted, calling the show “informed, intelligent, thoughtful, grounded in experience [and] very compassionate,” and adding a thank-you for Bacon’s “principled” stand to help KPFA’s community regain control of the station.

LAST CHANCE: send in your recall petition now
We will shortly be turning in petition signatures to recall Pacifica National Board treasurer Tracy Rosenberg. As with any petition campaign, some signatures will not be valid, and we expect Rosenberg to try to slow the process by bringing multiple challenges. That’s why it’s extremely important to exceed the required number by an overwhelming margin — so the petition’s validity is beyond question.

If you haven’t already, please:
1) make sure you’re a paid-up KPFA member by giving at least $25 at kpfa.org/support
2) PRINT, SIGN, & MAIL the petition here: http://www.SaveKPFA.org/recall/petition.pdf

A CORRECTION: Tracy Rosenberg wrote to us recently objecting to our description of her as “a key person who put Engelhardt, Phillips and Core in power,” saying she wasn’t a member of Pacifica’s board when executive director Arlene Engelhardt was hired. Rosenberg has been a strong ally of Engelhardt’s her entire tenure, presented Engelhardt a list of KPFA staff members to purge that included the Morning Show‘s staff, personally recruited volunteers to replace those staff when other union members refused to, misappropriated KPFA’s list of member emails to publicize the replacement program, lobbied heavily for Engelhardt to hire Andrew Phillips to work as KPFA’s interim general manager, engineered an illegal move by the Pacifica National Board to unseat two duly-elected SaveKPFA representatives, and launched vicious and misleading attacks on KPFA programmer David Gans for criticizing Pacifica’s hand-picked management. But Rosenberg did not, as far as we can tell, play a role in the decision to hire Engelhardt in the first place. We regret the error.

Yet another legal victory for SaveKPFA
Pacifica management ally Carol Spooner, fresh from her failed attempt to get the Court of Appeals to knock two SaveKPFA representatives off the Pacifica National Board, has racked up two more losses.

First, she tried to intervene at the trial court level, with the judge who issued an injunction in favor of SaveKPFA reps Dan Siegel and Laura Prives. After judge Frank Roesch expressed extreme skepticism, she withdrew her request, and tried to do an end-run around him by filing a new lawsuit with another judge. On August 15, Alameda County Superior Court judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers threw out that suit as well. Strike three!