Sept. 2024 GM Report to the Local Station Board

2024-09 General Manager's Report to the LSB

I hope everyone is staying safe and hydrated with the heat wave. The heat has added to the technical, financial and other challenges that the station continues to face and works to overcome.

Programming

      The national election season means that we continue to air special programming. Having recently aired special Pacifica and Democracy Now! programming for the Republican and Democratic parties' national nominating conventions, and of the attendant protests and community reactions, we will be airing the Harris-Trump presidential debate, hosted for us by Mitch Jeserich of Letters and Politics, which will include Pacifica commentary and analysis after the end of the debate itself. Mitch will follow up on KPFK and KPFA with a one-hour special taking listener calls and appealing for support for our stations.

      We are also planning to air an independent debate hosted by Free & Equal Elections which was originally scheduled for the following Wednesday, but has been postponed until some time in October, date not available yet as I write this. They have invited  all the ballot qualified candidates, but it is likely to have participation only by so-called "third party" candidates.

      Some other programming changes have taken or will be taking place as programmers take break or to deal with other contingencies. The Blunt Post with Vic has returned to our schedule on the first, second and fifth Thursdays of the month. Dr. Ife Jie with Street Sankofa has been shifted into a late night slot with that hip-hop oriented program.

      We are planning to move Creative Frontline, a powerful anti-extractivism program from an Indigenous sovereignty perspective from the late night slot it has been in to strengthen and reinforce the environmental/pro-Indigenous quilted strip in the afternoons, that currently includes Be a Better Relative, XR Now! CA Solartopia and EcoJustice Radio.

      We have been in discussions with Monthly Review, an independent (eco-)socialist publication, with Space for Peace, and with other sources about developing programming for us. Some other programmers have decided they will be leaving the air either  temporarily or to produce only occasional special programming, including Voices from the Frontlines and Inner Vision. In the latter case, we have asked Dr. Nita Vallens for her recommendation for someone who might fill in during her leave.

     Interim program director Marlena Bond and I continue to work with our all-volunteer news crew to improve the newscast and make it more consistent. I have asked Thandisizwe Chimurenga, a broadcast and print journalist and author with extensive experience at KPFK and elsewhere to play a larger role with the newscast, and we continue to seek beat reporters and contributors from various parts of our extensive listening area to increase the local news component of the program and the coverage of events with field reporting and on-scene interviews with newsmakers.

Finances

      We continue to face financial challenges, partly because of expenses associated with the move and due to a further fall-off in revenues from on-air membership and fund drives, off set only partially by an increase in community events that benefit the station, such as a series of programs by the Spanish language programmers, and a current screening of Vigilantes Inc., Greg Palast's new film, a part of whose proceeds from ticket sales attributed to KPFK are benefiting the station. We are in discussions to revive the Film Club as a monthly film and discussion series to benefit KPFK. I have also urged all programmers to think about community engagement fundraising events they can sponsor that would attract and excite their listeners.

      As people may have heard, the anticipated sale of 3729 Cahuenga Blvd West, which was repeatedly delayed by a failure to be able to clear liens on the property, has fallen through due to serious heart attack suffered by one of the partners making the purchase. The brokers had continued to receive bids and expressions of interest on the property and it is my understanding that another buyer is going to purchase the building. This will mean on the one a much larger cash payment up front; and on the other hand, an end to the opportunity to move our operations back in rent free for a decade after renovations were carried out by the prior purchasers.

      This means we are likely to remain at our new location for the foreseeable future. I do not have full details on the new purchaser, the purchase price or when escrow will close. It is my understanding that the liens have finally been cleared or are very close to being; in the process, our obligation to the Small Business Administration for the EID Loan was reduced  considerably for the short term to a much more manageable 10% of the prior obligation, and the additional debt incurred by the failure to keep up payments previously has been tacked onto the end of the long-term, low-interest loan.

      We have paid off the arrears and are current with Southern California Edison, and more recently with Allegiance, which processes our donations and maintains our donor database. The latter is important because it means we should be in a position to  take fuller advantage of all the capabilities of the platform for donor stewardship. I will be meeting with the membership director later this week to examine the capabilities on Allegiance in greater depth and see how best to utilize them to personalize our relationships with donors.

      I have met with the Fundraising Committee of the Local Station Board (glad to see it constituted) and underlined the importance of Board member participation in donor stewardship, as well as in identifying potential underwriters and major donors. Another important are is helping plan and carry out community engagement events like the mandated Town Halls that can strengthen the station's base and financial condition. If there is a member of the LSB who could help with coordinating the underwriting effort on a pro bono basis, that would be a tremendous help.

Governance

     As noted I have been posting these reports from management to the LSB to the station website in a blod, and have also created a blog for the PNB directors' reports. We aired four nights of candidate forums last month in English and Spanish, and have been promoting the elections on the air, on the website (where there are links to listen to all the candidate forums on the front page) and in the station email Dispatch. We have a ways to go to achieve quorum on either the listener delegate or staff delegate elections. I will be sending out an email to all staff with the staff candidates' statements and urging all staff members to vote. We will also include an appeal for that on this month's zoom staff meetings later this week.

     I urge the LSB to carry out the Bylaws mandated town hall meetings to listen to listeners views, needs and concerns, and do the outreach necessary to have a valid election in terms of total listener turnout (10% at least of listener-members must vote to achieve a quorum; if it is not met initially, an extension will be needed at further expense, and a final failure to meet the quorum would mean that nobody is elected this time in whatever constituency rails to make quorum.

     I also urge the Board again, as I have previously invited you, to schedule an LSB report to the listeners on air with an initial delegation of LSB members who can also take and respond to listener calls, just as I do on the GM Report to and dialogue with the listeners.

Technical issues

    We have faced a number of issues including power outages at the transmitter on Mount Wilson, circuit breakers briefly cutting power in Glendale, probably due to the heat, problems with the air conditioning at the Glendale facility that the building owners and management continue to work on. Chief engineer Stuart Landau has had to make repeated trips out to the transmitter on Mount Wilson, and also up to the Santa Barbara site to restore the 98.7 FM Santa Barbara signal to the air.

     We are dealing with aging and decaying power supplies at the main transmitter. We have sent several out for refurbishing, which if the promised fix works and warranty holds will mean that we can replace many failed power supplies, which have forced to operate at less than full power. While this has meant lower bills from SCE, it has interfered with the quality and reach of our signal, which has thus suffered some recent raggedness in some areas.

     I am convening a meeting of our tech task force which includes both local and national radio engineers and other knowledgeable staff to prioritize and solve a number of problems which have emerged at the Glendale location, including difficulties encountered in enabling the broadcast studio to be used as a recording studio when not in use for live broadcast. We have also had continuing difficulties, possibly related to the heat or to the power supply issues at the transmitter, with maintaining the proper balance between the right and left channels on our stereo signal.

     We are continuing to work with national and local tech personnel and volunteers on getting our email server transitioned from Microsoft/outlook (which has had continuing nagging probems) to Google for Nonprofits, which all the other units have been using for some time. I anticipate getting that fixed this week. We have restored our streaming signal on various platforms including  TuneIn, but are still working with national and with Amazon to get KPFK available on their Echo platform (Alexa, play KPFK...). Ian Scott who was doing great work on this, identifying and helping solve problems on Amazon's end that they were unaware of, has had to take a step back from the amount of time he can spend pro bono on technical issues for KPFK, a big loss for us.

Staffing

     We have recently benefited from the months-long participation of a young intern from the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences, and on Friday, brought another intern on board from their program for a two-to-three month internship at KPFK, and we anticipate an ongoing and successful collaboration with the institution. We are also in discussions with CORO, a public affairs leadership training program, about the possibility of placing one of their leadership training fellows at KPFK for a month-long period, focused on identifying and establishing contacts at potential community partners in our geographically extensive and demographically diverse listening area. If funds can be found, I have asked the ED to bring Ian Scott on as a paid consultant to continue to get their benefit of his critically beneficial skill set. Especially since the departure of our full time traffic coordinator, the remaining paid and unpaid staff have been stretched very thin.

FCC Compliance

     We have had a couple of unfortunate lapses in integrating the mandatory FCC compliance training into everyday practices for fundraising and required sponsorship IDs on programming. These have resulted in the need to suspend two programs over violations of FCC regulations that have required the national compliance officer to file reports with the FCC.

     In order to help prevent any further such violations, which could result in fines, extension of the strict compliance and reporting period of the consent decree, national is continuing to offer FCC compliance training to those who still haven't taken it or who need a refresher, and I have scheduled a special session of our monthly zoom staff meeting on Thursday at which we will focus on best practices for in-air fundraising and membership appeals.

     The national compliance officer is preparing and will shortly circulate an extensive "FAQ" document outlining potential contingencies and scenarios, based on the Q&A from training sessions and on recent practice.

     I urge all board members to read, indeed study, that document when it comes out, and to take the next training on Wednesday and also attend Thursday's station meeting, to get a better understanding of the challenges the station and the programmers and other staff face in the current regulatory climate.

Respectfully submitted

Michael Novick, interim General Manager