KPFA: Listener Support is Higher in 2011 than in 2010

If a $40,000 shortfall (in a week when the stock market played gymnastics and prophecies of financial apocalypse were everywhere) is disastrous, what is the word for a shortfall of $90,000? Catastrophic?

Yet no email blasts were sent out by Save KPFA when larger shortfalls happened repeatedly in 2009 and the spring of 2010, no calls were issued for management to resign and KPFA ran vast deficits of over $550,000 each of those years, finally emptying out its bank account by the fall of 2010.

Did the repeated six-figure shortfalls of 2009-2010 represent listener dissatisfaction? Or did they represent a tortured economy where 25% of Northern California is unemployed or under-employed?

KPFA lost more than 25% of its listener sponsorship membership dollars between 2005 and 2009. By the metric used above, listener dissatisfaction with the existing programming must have been vast.

Maybe common sense indicates that rather than blaming programmers for this steep decline, the rational and humane perspective is we are all suffering from the looting and robbery of our assets by a craven government, and every community organization has had to reduce expenses and make sacrifices to survive. Pacifica is no exception.

How can it be?

The good news is that KPFA, while still facing some challenges, has UPPED listener support over the last 12 months while cutting expenses by 12%, which has reduced the operating deficit by 85% from the same time last year.

That is called surviving.