KZYX&Z

I’m John Coate, Executive Director of Mendocino County Public Broadcasting and General Manager of KZYX&Z.  I want to take a few minutes to talk about some of the financial realities that your radio station faces right now. 

It is true that we had two excellent pledge drives this past year and for that we the staff and board are deeply grateful.  Without your support at those drives, we frankly wouldn’t be here at all.  And yet, if you were listening at various times during those pledge drives, or on the two occasions where I substituted for Point and Click with a GM Report, you heard me say that the station has accumulated a substantial amount of debt over the past couple of years and that it costs about $1750 a day to run the station at current levels without falling behind.

I would love to report that we make that much money, but we don’t.  And we haven’t for quite some time.  In truth, this organization has lost money for each of the past three years.  According to the most recent audit, we lost a whopping $105K in 2008.  This year is a little better but we’ll lose about $60K this year.  It all adds up to a lot of debt on top of a lot of monthly expenses.

How did this happen?  Well, as many of you have experienced in your homes and businesses, there are a lot of factors, but the simple answer is that the station’s expenses grew and revenue shrunk.  We receive strong support from our core of members, but that core is no longer large enough to sustain us at our current cost of operation.  We receive grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but the size of those grants has gone down too.  And so it goes: underwriting, major donors, events, the auction – all doing fairly ok for the times, but not enough to carry us.  Meanwhile expenses constantly rise on every front: rent, health care, phone bills, insurance, programming fees, equipment – you name it.  It all goes up every year.

So, in this challenging economic climate, like many of you, we too are having a tough time and we have to make some difficult choices.  In order for KZYX&Z to live within its means and pay its debts we have to reduce expenses everywhere we can.  I wish we could accomplish this by small cuts here and there, but we can’t.  We have to reduce expenses by tens of thousands of dollars.  The cuts we have to make will begin within weeks as FY09 ends and FY10 begins.

You’ll notice the cuts most in the programming. 

Perhaps the most regrettable decision I have had to make is to eliminate one of our fulltime news positions: the morning news host.  Christina Aanestad did outstanding work for us in the past two years and we all thank her and wish her well as she continues her career as a journalist.

Other budget cuts will be in the national programming we buy, which is very expensive.  Most expensive of all is NPR news.  Some of you would actually prefer that we stop buying it, but most would not.  And if we lose our NPR affiliation we won’t be able to get it back.  Some other station will acquire the NPR franchise and that will be that.  We carry the only national news available on any radio in this area, and we’re not going to cut it.  It is a huge part of why many members subscribe and it’s an important community service. 

And we won’t cut our Pacifica affiliation or Democracy Now.  It’s just too important to too many people.

But most of the rest of the syndicated programming we pay for will have to go away, at least for now.  This means Car Talk, BBC, This American Life and A Prairie Home Companion.  This is a painful choice, but by doing this we’ll save $25K next year.

I know that is a lot to lose, but we have some worthwhile and more affordable alternatives that we think you’ll enjoy.  In the next few days we’ll have information about new programming.

We’re looking everywhere we can to save money.  And we’ll be doing a number of things to raise money in the coming year.  Because at the heart of the matter, we need a lot more members.  Consider this: if 1250 people become new members and they donate $120 each, we can pay our debts in the first year.  And if they stay members, along with the 2100 members we have now, we can pay our way.  Sounds simple, but that is a 50% increase in membership.  So if you listen and you haven‘t joined, or if you have friends who you think ought to join, there is no better time than right now.

Our “2 new members a day” campaign has begun.  We’ll probably have an additional pledge drive later in the summer.  The Mime troupe is coming soon, we’ll be hosting a wonderful luau in August at the fairgrounds in Boonville, and we’ll be putting on other fundraising events as the year goes on, including festivities to mark our 20^th anniversary on the air.

It’s going to be tough to function with extreme frugality, especially when we still need to improve our equipment in preparation for the winter months.  But we did get a new backup generator for the Philo studio and we’ll install a new main antenna soon.  We’re committed to improving the services we provide.

Please make no mistake about it.  These measures are about one thing only: keeping the station going and reworking the formula so we can survive and thrive in good and hard times. 

This is your community radio station and with everyone’s support, we can do this – we can make this work.