Posted on 11/05/2010 1:11:52 PM PDT by SmithL
About 100 people marched, held signs and sang union songs Thursday to protest layoffs at Berkeley-based radio station KPFA, the liberal bastion on the FM dial.
Facing a drop of about $500,000 a year in listener donations and other funding for each of the past three years, KPFA's parent organization, Pacifica Foundation, plans to cut the equivalent of seven full-time jobs from a paid staff whose full- and part-time hours add up to about 30 full-time positions, said Tracy Rosenberg, a KPFA and Pacifica board member.
Rosenberg said the station's budget this year is about $3.6 million, but the station only has brought in $2.5 million through fundraising. The payroll is about $2 million, she said, and that will drop to $1.7 million with the layoffs.
In addition to KPFA, Pacifica owns licenses for four other radios stations around the nation.
The Berkeley radio station also has about 150 volunteers, and many of them were at Thursday's picket of the station's parent organization on Martin Luther King Jr. Way.
Sasha Lilley, a paid employee and host of a program called "Against the Grain," said that Pacifica could avoid layoffs at KPFA by cutting the budget of the national staff that runs Pacifica Foundation.
"When listeners donate to KPFA, they expect the money to go to programming, not to governance and national bureaucracy," she said. "The Pacifica national board has dismissed our recommendations to cut back on the bureaucracy. Advertisement Twenty-one percent of our income goes to the national bureaucracy."
Rosenberg said there is no way around the cuts because listeners do not have the money to send the station.
"We've had a 20 percent decline in donations every year since 2006," Rosenberg said. "A lot of our listeners these days don't even have jobs."
News reporter Christopher Martinez, a part-time employee who covers the state capitol, has worked at the station about seven years. He says he is on the list to lose his job. He disputes the idea that the layoffs have to be made because KPFA listeners do not donate enough.
"KPFA raises enough money to run the station, just not enough money to support the national staff and national board who don't even do any fundraising," he said.
About 100 workers, volunteers and radio listeners picketed KPFA in Berkeley, Calif. on Thursday Nov. 4 2010 over plans to cut about seven full time positions. Listener donations have been down about $500,000 each year over the last three years, radio station board members said
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
You’ll note none of them are reaching in to THEIR pockets to keeps these jobs?
Another business located on a Martin Luther King Way struggles to make a go of it. The kiss of death, invariably.
BWAHAHAHA! Of course they don't. They're libs. Either they're too lazy or too stupid to work, or they're too stingy to contribute. This is why lib radio fails, and why NPR/PBS survive only because of fed money. Cut them all loose and let them fail.
“Pacifica could avoid layoffs at KPFA by cutting the budget of the national staff that runs Pacifica Foundation.”
ROTFLMFAO!
They expect the elitist libs at this dysfunctional organization to cut THIER OWN jobs pushing Democrat Rhetoric, and attending lush Hollywood Parties with big stars to save a couple of down-the-line peons??
I love ignorant liberals....
Those fired can now hook up with Air America.
KPFA is a “public broadcasting station”. In ‘09 they got $451,009 in tax dollars.
Glad to see these moonbats are finally discovering a few things we conservatives have known all along, such as local control is much better than centralized, and the effect the 0bama-Reid-Pelosi regime has had on the economy.
First the election, then Olbermann, and now this - I’m starting to suffer from Schadenfreude Overload.....
Amazing, this free market thing isn’t it? What the heck do these people expect?
I seriously belive that these people and those who think like them have had some sort of brain malfunction where a certain part of their ability to rationalize was stopped at adolesence.
I do a long running blues show at a state univ. in Mass. and one song we have is a jug band version of “Which Side Are
You On?”, an old union song done orig. during the coal
miner strike days. I get a kick out of the line about “the
scoundrels in the White House”. Ha! (Of course you can tell it was recorded during the Bush Adm.; revised lyrics “Don’t follow New World Orders don’t listen to their lies...”) But yes the song does denounce the “scroundrels in the White House”
Maybe they should sell weed. LOL
In Boston WGBH radio, an NPR station, built a “Taj Mahal”
studio complete with big messageboard but later cut staffers and their long-running blues and folk shows (lack of money—also lack of airtime). They wanted to focus on news
and talk programming.
And of course you can guess how that programming tilts.
“You can see why Air America failed. We already have a liberal network in this country, and it’s taxpayer funded.
It’s called NPR.”—Howie Carr
(I know this is Pacifica but it’s public radio regardless)
I know KPFA does have an interesting “collage” show called
Over the Edge done by Don Joyce from the group
Negativland (and he is a big lefty and atheist but the
show can be...interesting). He probably volunteers his
time anyway.
>>OTE’s themed mixes are made live and spontaneously on the air from a variety of formats and equipment. There is a plan and there is no plan. The mix consists of found sound of many kinds and from many sources put together on the run as the continuous audio collage progresses.
OTE sometimes employs Receptacle Programming which means you. Phone callers are punched into our mix with no warning. Call 510-848-4425 to deposit your programming. When your phone stops ringing, you’re on the air. Don’t say “hello” – just begin.
WHat they need to do is replace the workers with volunteers and then spend the money hiring more bureaucrats
tax dollars... wasn’t mentioned in the article.
But the money gors to support a radical leftwing organization, Pacifica Foundation, which has radio stations staffed by volunteers??
Whats wrong with this picture??
I’m not seeing the problem - can’t the remaining employees just take pay cuts? Surely that’s the proper collecitve solution.
Yes and when I was growing up we learned that song but only the first verse. Guthrie a commie, so is Seeger.
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