The Save KBCS Blog!

Why do people think increasing revenues at the expense of the loyal listener base is a good thing? Similar to gaining the whole world but losing your own soul.

As a regular listener and supporter over 18 years, I do not want to lose the local expertise and talents of the DJs at KBCS, especially the diverse group who host Lunch with Folks. I tune in because KBCS is different from everything else in the region on the airwaves, and it is always fresh and expands my world. It is a community station, which means it plays an important public function to educate and provide exposure to cultural treasures that simply cannot be purchased via commercial outlets. Many institutions that have such a mission subsidize some of their activities in order to support others that are key to their mission. If KBCS loses its character as a community station, I will most likely stop listening and providing my dollars at the pledge drives. Non-profits and other charities have all seen plummeting revenues and donations in the past years. That’s not a reason to trash the station’s mission and some beloved programming – it’s a wake-up call to figure out a different business model to support it. I also must wonder how hiring paid DJs and pre-recorded, mass-produced programs is cheaper than coordinating volunteers. I also have no doubt that the rest of the proposed changes in the works won’t be my cup of tea either….The lack of public information sharing and dialogue with the station’s GENEROUS supporters isn’t how a community radio station should handle such major shifts, either. I vote NO on the proposed changes, and my dollars will follow my vote.

To respond in part to Pete Bentley:

“Please reconsider your future programming choices. If your desire is to force people to satelite and iternet music, you are headed in the correct direction. But if would like to continue to provide musical diversity to the people who appriciate what you offer, please consider your plans.”

My worry is that it’s not a desire to force people to satelite and internet music, but an effort to prevent that from happening. And that effort is likely to be futile – this has been going on for the past few years at an accelerating rate. How often do you see people with radios as opposed to music players of various kinds? And the incorporation of music players with direct WiFi access into the new generation of smartphones will only speed the process. Does anyone make a phone with an FM radio? There ARE a few MP3 players that do… I come across very few students at Evergreen who rely on radio any more (fortunately, those who do often volunteer at KAOS

And internet radio is heavily accessed on campus. What is the listenership of the internet stream at KBCS? Does it bring in significant financial support? Or is it a few folks scattered around the country? I know that I have a few web listeners to my show – they call occasionally, including the artists who send us music – but the usage rate of the stream is low, typically in the range of 5-10 simultaneous clients, and the last time I checked the stream had peaked at about 25.

This makes me wonder if the web listenership doesn’t parallel broadcast listenership more than we want to think about.

I would think that the incredible consolidation of the industry would push more people to community radio, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

Does anyone know if there is a grassroots radio conference this year? Their web site doesn’ show one.

A further comment on Bruce Wirth’s last post #24 –

“It certainly seems to me there might be alternatives to putting the kind of music each volunteer likes on the air, at the day and time that happens to be convenient for the volunteer. To me, that programming strategy puts the needs of the volunteer ahead of the listener – hardly a desirable way to deliver a service to the community. I cannot imagine any other community organization making the decision to offer only the services the volunteers felt like offering, only at their convenience.”

Well…..

It certainly seems to me the proposed changes would be largely for the convenience of KBCS staff. Granted it’s a tough job to co-ordinate over a hundred volunteers with differing opinions and tastes. I take my hat off to all who’ve tried their hand at running a community radio station, but will KBCS really be a community radio station anymore if the opinions and tastes it provides are those of the few instead of the many? Many many many listeners think not. Take a look at the listener comments page.

http://www.savekbcs.org/comments.html

Dear Admin, I’d like to suggest you include this link at the top of this page, it doesn’t seem to be there.

Dear KCBS owners and program managers,

I live on the right coast and have seen the Mid-Atlantic radio scene completely homoginized. Besides the hard to acquire college stations and a couple other low wattage private stations, the Washington, DC area is a radio waste land of talk and constantly repeated play lists.

Please reconsider your future programming choices. If your desire is to force people to satelite and iternet music, you are headed in the correct direction. But if would like to continue to provide musical diversity to the people who appriciate what you offer, please consider your plans.

Pete Bentley

I’ve been listening KBCS for at least 20 years. I have always tuned in for two reasons: to hear great music and to listen to the DJ’s who volunteer their time. I have never tuned in to listen to the news but haveoften done so as an alternative to the listening to “the news”

Anyone can play music-paid staff or volunteer. But what has always disinguished KBCS is its diversity of programming and its volunteers – their knowledge, and their passion about music. KBCS has something very special and it is its people. People who often volunteer their time for five, ten, and even twenty or morw years.

Personally, I think the station should stick to what it best

I’m responding directly to part of Bruce’s post in #24. I found many of his comments insightful and challenging, and had points of disagreement with others. I focus on some of the latter below, then move to a potentially controversial point of my own. I know it’s an awful lot of words, and I apologize for being long-winded, but I’m saying what I think is important to say.

(First, though, a little fair disclosure: Bruce was one of the people who helped bring me on as a programmer, in 1999-2000. I always considered our interactions to be good, and never had occasion to question his professional judgments. I’ve been away from the station for a little over two years (I had just started trying to get involved again when all this business exploded), but based on our past interactions I feel confident that he is speaking with good faith and intention here. Thus, the following points are intended as creative engagement, not attack, with someone with whom I used to discuss these kinds of issues before, albeit at a lower level of heat and in a much calmer context.)

Bruce says: “While community participation in the radio station is important, I think its possible that the connection can be maintained without relying entirely on volunteer-produced programming. It certainly seems to me there might be alternatives to putting the kind of music each volunteer likes on the air, at the day and time that happens to be convenient for the volunteer. To me, that programming strategy puts the needs of the volunteer ahead of the listener – hardly a desirable way to deliver a service to the community. I cannot imagine any other community organization making the decision to offer only the services the volunteers felt like offering, only at their convenience.”

The first point, minor but important, is that this invocation of “convenience” puts a rhetorical thumb on the scales. Leaving aside deeper consideration of whether programmers uniformly enjoy the fruits of such convenience–I certainly didn’t, having gotten marooned on overnights and never able to leave–it suggests a picture of on-air volunteers bogarting some resource that could be put to better use, like someone refusing to leave the last rent-controlled apartment in a building otherwise aching to go condo. I’m sure this wasn’t intentional. But this image precipitates from “convenience” in any event, and bolsters a problematic framing of what volunteer programmers are broadcasting, while bypassing what seems to me to be a key issue lurking at the heart of all this.

I’ll get to that later, but first, turning to the matter of those choices: the depiction of them as “the kind of music each volunteer likes,” and further that these “put[] the needs of the volunteer ahead of the listener,” seems to paint the situation with much too broad a brush. This is for two main reasons:

(1) When someone shows up wanting to do a show featuring X kind of music, someone on staff at the station has to approve that. In my case, not only did that involve making a demo and creating a bunch of playlists that indicated I had sufficient familiarity with my genre to do a show that represented it well, but it also involved someone who wasn’t me making a decision that a show of that type was–at that time–a worthy addition to the lineup. So if “kind of music each volunteer likes” means liking a given genre *as a whole*, that’s irrelevant because the PD and MD were the gatekeepers who allowed the show on the air, and of course programmers will be attached to “their” own genre.

(2) However, maybe “kind of music each volunteer likes” means something like “the volunteer in question plays only that portion of the genre that s/he likes, ignoring other, perhaps more representative portions, and thereby produces broadcasts that are out of synch with what the listening audience would expect from a show ostensibly dedicated to genre X”. But there are checks and balances there, too. People call you on the air and tell you what they think, even at 2 in the morning. They call the PD. They leave comments on the comment line. They talk to you when you run into them at other people’s gigs, or wherever. In other words, you are responsible to what might be called your musical constituency, and the best programmers go out of their way to involve themselves in that constituency (and be affected by it) at a deep level. It’s nowhere near as simple as deciding “to offer only the services… volunteers [feel] like offering, only at their convenience,” as if these volunteers were disconnected from their musical constituencies in some lone wolf manner.

It is definitely true that being the person on the mic does impose a certain top-down dynamic on the relationship with listeners. That’s the nature of the medium. However, it’s hardly an imprimatur to work in a vacuum. The station saw fit to let you on the air in the first place, and the feedback you get about your show will help make clear how well or poorly you are synching up with your program’s musical constituency. So this depiction of “community participation… [and] volunteer-produced programming… [as a] programming strategy [that] puts the needs of the volunteer ahead of the listener” is overly dichotomizing with regard to the volunteer/listener dynamic. It also downplays the role of the on-air volunteer as a transducer of that constituency’s listening desires (knowing them well enough to know what they might want to hear), a culture broker (with respect to understanding and passing along what kind of new or unfamiliar material would appeal to their musical constituency), and as an advocate for micro-aesthetics with respect to that constituency (e.g. being a champion of composer X) in ways that push the boundaries of that constituency creatively, but not so far as to rupture them. Sure, some programmers will not embrace those roles properly… but as a general rule, they will not be around very long if they don’t. And while there may indeed be ways to connect with various listener constituencies that go beyond simply making sure to include volunteer-produced programming, I think setting up the issue of “whether volunteer-programmed radio is the GOAL of community radio, or simply one of many TACTICS to achieve the goal of authentic connection to the community” is overly counterpositioned.

Nevertheless, even by invoking that (in my opinion) problematic take-home point, Bruce has opened the door to what I think is *the* single most important issue lurking behind all of this: the business of “authentic connection to the community”. I would suggest that we (and by “we”, I mean all of us who concern ourselves with the institution of “community” radio) do not function with a collectively coherent conception of what “community” is, and therefore consistently talk past each other about just what it is we are supposed to be doing in the name of “community”, let alone how we might authentically connect with “it”. This is to be expected. Anthropologists can’t agree on what “culture” is, theologians can’t agree on what “God” is… in my experience, every social formation set up to administer or otherwise be concerned with goods that are limited or difficult to access (e.g.: tough to get on the air, only so much real estate to go around) can be shown to revolve around some central concept that is frequently invoked, but either poorly defined or subject to a variety of different (and usually incommensurable) opinions.

So what is “community” in the community radio context, and how does it affect what we’re talking about here? Does it (as it so frequently seems to) mean “me and people like me, who want our concerns/preferences/interests represented”? Does it mean “incorporative of diversity,” along whatever demographic lines we can advocate for? Does it mean “constituency” in the sense I used it above, to mean something like “the group of people who would, by virtue of their involvements, tastes, or other aesthetic commitments, gravitate toward listening to genre X type of programming”? Does it mean the collection of all such constituencies? Does it have something to do with advocacy of particular points of view, for the ostensible benefit of all, or for some portion of society? Does it mean maximum participation, irrespective of the result? Which of these is most important? Why? How would things be different if one of these was privileged over the others? And how do we know when we are *authentically* in touch with “it”? How can we know?

I don’t think there are easy answers to these questions (especially considering that some of them involve, in my perspective, truly existential issues at their core), and I don’t pretend to have any kind of perfect answer, although of course I have a take on the questions I’ve raised. Except as discussed above and below, I’m not sure my take on the questions is nearly as important as raising them, because ever since I have been around KBCS I have heard people–all well-meaning–talk past each other on these points again, and again, and again. I also see it in the things people are saying to each other here in this forum. Perhaps it is true that the planned changes have to occur, perhaps they’ll work, perhaps they will crash the listenership, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps… but we must be aware that all of these matters are conceived and criticized within particular frames of judgment whose terms are never made clear enough. Remember, as I said above: it is in these zero-sum, limited-good contexts (a situation exacerbated by contemporary media politics and economics) where we are most able to be clueless about what others are saying about The Big Topics. It would be good if we could all be aware of exactly what ideas lie behind whatever it is we’re fighting for, so that we can be absolutely clear when we need to tell someone else exactly why their approach does or doesn’t work, without getting stuck behind abstractions that can cloud our perspectives, agendas, and mutual understanding.

Otherwise, no matter whose side “wins” the current debate, you can be sure that in some minds “community” will win and in other minds “community” will lose. Such is the genesis of bigger troubles down the road.

My opinion is that we are about to lose a wonderful unique radio station that is listener/volunteer-driven. I dispute the letter from the station management–Where are the 3 years of studies? Where are the numbers to prove the message in the letter? Where is the “community” in this? Of course they are continuing to train radio broadcast volunteers because they have government grants to do this, and that is the basis of what the station is founded on, so my belief is that they are most likely required to continue training. So that is not a concession to those of us who are against changing from the current volunteer-staffed music-centered programming. Also, given the current economic conditions, the financial statements look as if pledge income is up. Where is the financial crisis at KBCS? Who is the group that wants to move in a new direction toward more news and away from music? Who will play the historic one-of-a-kind music? Who will teach our children to love Pete Seeger? Why isn’t there a working board with published minutes so members can see what the direction of the station is? Why did they do a 2nd pledge drive without telling us their plans?

Is Lunch With Folks going away or not? Several comments above say yes, but the KBCS web site says “Feature current veteran KBCS folk hosts weekdays from 12 noon to 3 p.m., who will present
programming spanning the breadth of the American music tradition, from the early days of
country, folk, blues, and beyond, to today’s singer-songwriters and local artists crafting new music
not heard anywhere else.”

In any case, it seems the thrust is to make KBCS more of a public affairs station. I don’t want a mini-NPR, I want my variety of interesting music shows.

The goals of this kind of management seem to be “be bigger, have more audience, do what it takes to have more listeners and support a bigger budget”.

The music comes first to me.

Chuck

PROGRAMMERS: Please talk about this when you are on the air! Refer listeners to the website and let them voice their opinions. I’m SURE the majority of listeners will be outraged. Don’t let one person’s crazy ideas ruin KBCS! Do not roll over and die in silence! You have a perfect platform for mobilizing support to fight these changes: your air time. Don’t just play all these sad songs, SAY SOMETHING, please!

quote: ” the program director met with everything single KBCS DJ and explained, in detail, the upcoming changes and the reasons behind them. A vast majority of those DJs were also in agreement with the scheduled changes.”

I very much doubt that!! I told Peter he must be crazy to just “throw away” some of the favorite shows and the incredible knowledge and talent of the DJ/programmers who will be dismissed.

I really hope if this drastic change does happen, that some other radio station/s will be smart and quick enough to snap them up.