KPFA Board Elections: An All-Volunteer KPFA: A Recipe for Disaster

An All-Volunteer KPFA: A Recipe for Disaster

It sounds good: bring back volunteerism, end the tyranny of staffers who stay forever. Let people do what they love, work for what they believe in, and the reward is in the doing.

Hogwash.

I came to KPFA in 1975 as a volunteer receptionist. In those days, the paid staff was very small and consisted largely of department heads (the "Executive Producers" of their day), a handful of tech folks, a couple of people in News and on the Morning Show, and a few necessary administrative people. That was it. Oh, there was a volunteer coordinator who spent most of the time trying to find off-air volunteers who were both reliable and competent. The competent ones, if they couldn't get a paid job at the station, usually left within weeks.

Programs with volunteer hosts aired once a week or once a month, like today. Full-time jobs didn't (and don't) allow for more than that. The daily slots were filled by those few paid people who had the time to do the work. The public affairs programs were, to be kind, uneven, usually depending on whether the program was developed by a grant (i.e. the producers were paid) or not. Fund-drives lasted six weeks and earned a pittance. The station had minimal income and despite the brilliance of several individuals on the air, was marginalized by its unprofessionalism and its sectarian politics. KPFA now has a larger audience, much larger income stream, and a presence throughout the world. The station is sometimes still raw, but more often than not it holds its own in the media world of 2010.

KPFA today starts with its paid producers, engineers, and board operators, people whom you barely hear on the air but are doing their jobs quietly and professionally. Competent board ops: What a novelty in 1975. You were lucky if, when you dropped off your tape, the announcer didn't completely mangle what was heard on the air. The simple transition...show to PSA to station ID to theme cart to tape...sounds simple, right? Guess again. The good board-ops stayed a few months, then got jobs and left. The bad ones usually just stopped showing up, often without notice. Remove the paid board ops and the sound quality drops precipitously. Remove the behind the scenes people and force the on-air hosts to do the production work, and you'll lose half the hosts. Stop paying them, and they're all gone because they have to earn a living. Their replacements? Again, once a week or once a month, the best of the rest gone the moment a real job in radio opens up.

A volunteer station means an end to all the great locally produced daily programs: Flashpoints, Hard Knock Radio, Letters from Washington, the Morning Show, the noon programs, and of course the irreplaceable KPFA daily newscast, as well as special local news pre-emptions. Nobody else on the air covers local Bay Area issues and news from a progressive perspective. The loss would be incalculable.

So who would be left at this all-volunteer KPFA? Today's unpaid programmers who can grind through the lack of competent support staff; unemployed off-air people who vanish in a trice; angry ultra-politicos with axes to grind (and big egos to match); trust-fund babies; first-timers who learn radio and then get a real job; and a handful of quality people who come in with big ideas and leave a few months later, disgusted with the lack of professionalism and hankering to earn a living.

In the end, though, you won't even get that. The volunteer idea is just too unwieldy and the administrative effort too difficult. I know. I've been there. Pacifica will relent. They'll hire board ops and they'll download nationally produced programs from Pacifica syndication to supplement the music programs and the handful of surviving local volunteer talk programs. That's what most of the Pacifica network is like today, and what most NPR stations are like as well.

KPFA, as we know it, will be gone.

Volunteerism barely worked in the 1970s, and it won't work today. Keep KPFA professional, keep the programs you love on the air, and keep local reportage alive. I urge you to vote the SaveKPFA.org slate because in the end, what you'll be saving will not only be what you listen to today and the important information you receive that comes from nowhere else, but the heights that KPFA can reach tomorrow. KPFA was under threat ten years ago and the community saved it, and it's under threat today. Vote the Save KPFA slate.

For more information and the names of candidates, go to SaveKPFA.org

Thanks for your time,

Richard Wolinsky
Producer/Host, Bookwaves on Cover to Cover