Did you in your wildest fantasy imagine that there is something called the Pacifica Strategic Planning Committee? Well, there is and its members met via their respective phone devices last Monday, April 23.
The main attraction comprised Pacifica's iED Tom Livingston and WBAI's manager for life, Berthold Reimers; the hope was that we finally might get a good look at their respective crystal balls.
Did we? Here are the telling excerpts.... you be the judge.
Reimers on strategy
Livingston's questions and thoughts
I don't even know where to begin. This GM is out to lunch. Twenty good shows on this grid? Really?
ReplyDeleteReally? No ..Really? He can't answer a simple question about the number of members without inserting a boatload of caveats. He wants every show to get five wbai buddies. The same shows he himself says are not trained to do their shows and pitch. The same shows that are openly pushing the MNN deal.
This insistence on getting $15,000 a day is just nuts. What part of 'not going to happen with this grid' does he not get? He talked about how the morning shows would get all the funds raised per day. I question that but it does show that he is not really paying attention to the rest of the schedule. Its tough to listen to this guy talk about marketing. He can't even return an email and he is going to do marketing?
I detected somewhat of a panic beginning to set in on Livingston's part. The idiocy and delusions of the discussion finally prompted him to remind them they have no CFO going forward and that will be a problem. A bigger problem than any of them realize.
ReplyDelete- Kim Kaufman
Oh Yeah. Must've slipped their mind. They have six months to worry about that according to the settlement. As for the CPB funding...well that's not going to happen. Where's that extension form?
DeleteThe PNB's attitude to the need to hire a new Chief Finance Officer shows how sclerotic Pacifica is. The PNB seems to have switched off, preferring to bask in the glory of getting out of its ESRT contract & securing a loan to pay them. Since the start of April it has chosen not to go into emergency mode, not to focus on these four immediate aims: (1) start the CFO hiring process; (2) hire all the accounting staff needed at both the National Office & the stations (not least for the fiscal 2016 & 2017 audits), & ensure they have all the means needed so that all accounts & financial statements are always available in real time; (3) devise a fundraising plan to pay off the loan; & (4) supervise a plan to ensure each station has a full complement of managers (General, Business, whatever). That's the minimum work needed from April thru to June. Naturally, something as obvious & urgent doesn't interest the PNB.
DeleteSo consider Uncle Sam's resignation on 28 March. What's been done? Nothing. Pacifica doesn't practise transparency, such as that old-fashioned thing, the public statement, so those out of a loop of maybe three or four people try to interpret whatever snippets of info or rumour they come across.
I'll leave rumour to those able to guess their veracity, so I'll draw attention to two Pacifica comments made in passing, not even as part of a discussion required by an agenda. At some meeting in mid April, Wild Bill said that Sam may be agreeable to stay on a while, beyond his Friday 4 May leaving date. Then at the PNB Audit Cttee this Monday, the chair, Eileen Rosin, said, "there's a [written?] proposal from Sam to stay on a little longer" (9:19, https://kpftx.org/archives/pnb/audit/180430/audit180430a.mp3). Don't get excited, because no discussion ensued: this was during the reading of the proposed agenda, & 'Point-of-Order-Madame-Chair' Adriana swiftly brought the chair to order by pointing out that personnel matters are closed session only – so that put a stop to that door opening.
So come Monday, will Sam be there, or will he have left the auditors to deal with the newly-appointed PALO, the Pacifica Accounting Liaison Officer, aka the National Office cleaner, although they're only there Tuesdays & Fridays?
Clearly you are not familiar with the militant black experience. You need to check your white privilege and stop triggering the hardly working producers and their dozens of listeners. Perhaps you should attend a diversity awareness seminar before doubling your WBAI buddy contribution as per the latest guidance by the GM.
ReplyDeleteSounds like they put together another losing lineup this afternoon .
ReplyDeleteBetween the bad Brady "special" then Prescod boring anybody that is still listening to death
with the race based ,slavery crap .
They never learn .
No talent, no moral consciousness, no vision, no sense of responsibility, no justification for access to WBAI's air.
DeleteWith a few notable exceptions, these are scam artists of the lowest order. Brady is a shameless, certifiable nut case.
Prescod is focused on racism and seemingly determined to attract listeners by exacerbating rather than seeking solutions for the problem.
These are barstool agitators whose simple minds don't benefit anybody. The house of Pacifica should have been cleaned and disinfected at the first sign of gross mismanagement and corruption.