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An unvarnished blog that dips into the past and comments on the present of WBAI-FM, a once significant, intelligent New York radio station that for years has suffered chronic abuse from within and now nears extinction. Your comments are welcomed and will not be censored.
Wine In The Cesspool, Pearls Before Swine, and White People in Kathy's Station:
ReplyDelete“Most of WBAI’s shortfall is due to the $720,000 it pays annually for its Wall Street office and Empire State Building broadcast tower.”
Dan Siegel
Well, no. With all due respect, Mr. Siegel, these are what accountants call “fixed expenses” because they don’t vary with output. In the New York City real estate jungle, WBAI might at best cut these by one or two hundred thousand in the long run, but not immediately because of contractual obligations.
The problem lies with certain “variable expenses”. Yes, I am of course referring to salaries, which are not $720, 000, but $1.5 effing million. And these can be reduced significantly, immediately. Here are a few suggestions. Pardon me if I’ve mentioned them dozens of times before.
1. Combine the positions of General Manager and Program Director. Pay one person the higher of the two salaries.
2. Eliminate all sinecures like Interim Development Director, Public Affairs Director, Chief Announcer, and Premiums Coordinator.
3. Eliminate the paid/non-paid producer dichotomy. Take 10% of all money raised during fund drives and divide it equitably among all producers. This may necessitate limiting air time for Knight, Armah, and Hamilton. Too bad. The station could stand some diversity in its drive time programs.
4. Get rid of the announcers. Who the hell needs them? WBAI may have to pay Michael G.—Jesus, am I tired of him, and the hideous Ife, and others as engineers, but we shouldn’t have to hear them.
This could save the station $300,000 or $400,000. Sorry, salary information is not available from our community station.
One last thing. At the risk of sound xenophobic, if WBAI is a community station, why do so many employees come from the other side of the world? PDs from Australia and Saint Vincent (but it was Samori!), paid producers from Ghana and Guyana, General Managers from India, the Caribbean, Tipperary, and Haiti—where are the Tonton Macoute when we need them the most?
Yes, I’m sounding old and bitter. But who cares what I think? I’m over 60, not black, and not WBAI’s target demographic group, which apparently excludes anyone with an IQ of three digits. The station no longer publishes lists of its paid employees so closet racists like myself cannot complain that 95% of them are black and got their jobs through cronyism.
And 5% non-black is 5% too many. In the words of the great Kathy Davis, “What are all these white people doing at my radio station?”