Radio Survivor

Bonnie Simmons from the KSAN days. That's Tom Donahue on the right, Thom Ohair on the left.

Truly great news for community radio music lovers, long time music  deejay legend and totally awesome human being Bonnie Simmons has been inducted into the Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame!

Here is her Hall of Fame entry:

Bonnie Simmons – A pioneer in free-form radio, Simmons was instrumental to the success of KSAN during its Jive 95 heyday. She also worked locally at KFOG, Live 105 (KITS), KOFY-FM, Double 99 (KDBK) and KUSF, and currently hosts a weekly show on KPFA.

Radio Survivor was a huge supporter of this move, of course, and is very grateful to the Hall of Fame as well as to the many people who voted for Bonnie.

And get this: KPFA founder Lewis Hill has been elected too, not a moment too soon since he died 53 years ago.

Other winners include news guys Stan Bunger and Dave McQueen, influential radio columnist Ben Fong-Torres, and KGO pioneer Evangeline Baker.

source: Wikimedia commons

Since I wrote my last post on the calamitous state of Pacifica radio, various correspondents have complained that my figures on the network’s subscriber/staff elected board expenses were inaccurate. I roughly estimated them at “close to a million” since the organization has transitioned to an elected board regime.

“When we speak about these matters publicly, we should try to be accurate about the figures,” one Pacifica station KPFA local station board member lectured me.  “Pacifica does have financial stresses, but they are caused by many factors including structural operating deficits at several of the stations. We don’t help when we oversimplify or say things that are simply not true.”

This critic continued her quest for complex truth by blaming me for the chaos at a national board meeting that I didn’t even attend. Whatever. In any event, her post was useful, since it pointed to the network’s updated financial audits page (and Terry Goodman has some helpful annotations to my comments).

Sure enough, my guesstimate was way off the mark. The situation is much worse than I thought. Since the network began its process of democratization in 2002, by my arithmetic, Pacifica has spent $2,424,662 on its boards. And if the organization blows about the same sum that it did in 2007 on these wasteful and internally destructive elections, the figure will edge toward $3 million.

Here are the numbers with their accompanying line item descriptions:

Take a look at some of these numbers. Unbelievable. Nearly 400K in 2007. What on earth did Pacifica spend this on? A free chocolate truffle for every subscriber who voted? Single transferable voting fact finding trips to Australia? That probably would have been money better spent than the actual expenditures, which are not detailed in these audits.

In previous posts I’ve complained that board members spend most of their time on internecine politics and precious little on building up the organization. The 2008 audit says it all. Of that 377,977, the line item says 377,902 was spent on “management and general.”

How much was spent on “Fundraising and development”?

75 bucks.

(more…)

Bonnie Simmons from the KSAN days. That's Tom Donahue on the right.

Attention all Bay Area Radio Survivor readers, it is time for you to go to the Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame & Museum and vote for the Class of 2010’s best radio announcer. BTW: I’m urging you to vote for Bonnie Simmons of KPFA-FM.

Now if you want to vote for one of the other nominees, what can I say? That’s fine, I guess. But it just happens that Simmons is without question the best music DJ in the San Francisco Bay Area. I will simply repeat what I’ve written on this blog earlier.

“For two hours [8 pm to 10 pm on Thursdays] it’s like an alternate universe where nothing ever sucks. How does Simmons do it? Years of experience in the music biz, going back to the free form radio days: music director at KSAN, promoter for Prince and Dire Straights, deejay at KFOG, LIVE 105, and KOFY. Plus she managed Cake for eight years and currently hustles for Noe Venable and Etienne de Rocher.

Plus, I just love listening to her . She’s got this charmingly officious way of talking. “Oh so Beattle-y, and yet not . . . ” she crooned as she back announced the Phillips tune. Plus she’s endlessly meditating on the second half of the evening, Derk Richardson. “I believe that Derk Richardson will be in tonight ” she proclaims, as if she was warming up for the Prime Minister of some place. “I haven’t discussed this with him in depth, but I believe that he’s headed in.” She’s got this way of tartly saying Derk —drives me nuts.”

So sure, go ahead and vote for one of the other contenders. I won’t be bitter. I mean, here I’ve been busting my tail on this blog for a year FOR YOU and all I’m asking is this one thing, that you vote for Bonnie. Your choice. No pressure.

But I repeat that Bonnie is absolutely the best radio DJ in the Bay Area. She leaves those other nominees in the dirt. And I’m not talking about that good Bay Area compost dirt either. So do what I say and vote for Bonnie.

BTW: Interestingly, KPFA founder Lewis Hill is up for best radio station manager. But given that he died over half a century ago . . . well, your call.

PS: On line voting site here. Go vote now.

If you think the above title is long, here’s the one I suggested to Radio Survivor’s editors:

Dr. Michael LeNoir tries to have an intelligent discussion of Health Reform on the KPFA airwaves, and is mercilessly pummeled: A Case Study of the Left’s vilification of Obama and its dismissal of Partial Reforms

Last week, respected San Francisco Bay Area physician Dr. Michael LeNoir devoted his weekly “About Health” program to the just passed health care reform bill and the political debate around it. LeNoir is a pioneer in treating asthma in inner city children, and has a regular show on listener sponsored FM station KPFA in Berkeley. After saying that the bill is much less than he wanted, being an advocate of single payer, he said that it was important to understand what is in the bill, the good and bad of it, and to think about how we can use it as a foot in the door to widen and deepen the reform. He also said that he was disturbed that the Right seemed to dominate public debate about the bill, and he challenged his listeners to think about how we – those who want real reform – can have more of a voice in the debate.

LeNoir also expressed fear that unless we do that, the bill could be blocked, crippled and even repealed. The possibility that the Right could unseat those who had voted for the bill should be taken seriously, he warned.

This was clearly an attempt to engage in an intelligent and rational discussion of the bill and the political debate around it, but he got anything but that. Instead, a barrage of negative, polemical, incurious and dismissive attitudes were expressed by the eleven callers heard during the hour long program. Here is a summary of what LeNoir was told:

. A Single Payer plan is the only valuable option. Otherwise, all we’re doing is just making “them” richer. What we’ve got is just band aids “that will all fall down”. (more…)

Bonnie Simmons and Tom Donahue from the KSAN days (source: jive95.com)

Every Thursday night I drive home from Santa Cruz, where I teach at the University of California campus situated in that fair city. Soon as 8 pm comes around, I tune into KPFA to listen to the Bonnie Simmons / Derk Richardson music show, which I absolutely love.

To be accurate, they’re actually two separate shows, but I experience them as one. Folk rock, hard rock, classic rock, R&B, lesbo-womyn’s-punk-crossover-wuddever rock, just folk, ethnic,  plus wuddever by itself—they play it all. Or, to be more accurate, they play the good stuff. And it is so good. Trust me on this. I don’t even listen to rock and roll and I listen to them religiously, because they’ve got that mysterious, unexplainable thing called great taste in music.

First comes Bonnie Simmons. Here’s the first five songs of a recent Bonnie playlist:

I mean, who can argue with this? For two hours it’s like an alternate universe where nothing ever sucks. How does Simmons do it? Years of experience in the music biz, going back to the free form radio days: music director at KSAN, promoter for Prince and Dire Straights, deejay at KFOG, LIVE 105, and KOFY. Plus she managed Cake for eight years and currently hustles for Noe Venable and Etienne de Rocher. (more…)

Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez’s radio/TV program Democracy Now! is, without question, the most successful media vehicle in the history of the United States Left. Launched at Pacifica station WBAI-FM in New York City in the mid-1990s, it is now an independent venture, subscribed to by over 800 radio, TV, and Internet stations around the world. From the perspective of this media historian, Democracy Now! exceeds all previous attempts to spread an explicitly social justice oriented message via broadcast and/or print. No prior effort, starting with the The Masses at the beginning of the  20th century,  has ever come so far in terms of influence and reach.

I listen to Democracy Now!’s one hour broadcast on a regular basis because it is fast paced and timely, racing to wherever the action is—Haiti, Copenhagen, Washington, D.C, or Honduras. I don’t always agree with the program’s perspective, but I appreciate the effort DN makes to host debates and discussions within the Left about how to move forward, such as its recent debate about how to respond to the Obama adminstration’s health care initiative. The vast majority of community radio style public affairs programs, within and beyond Pacifica, simply ignore these disagreements and tout one line or another, as if the rest of the world didn’t exist. DN has far outpaced those efforts in part because of its willingness to embrace a broader perspective.

Here is some of what I wrote about Democracy Now! in my second book on Pacifica, Uneasy Listening: Pacifica Radio’s Civil War.

When she chanced upon WBAI in New York, Amy Goodman had just graduated from Harvard College and returned to the city. She had been raised in Bay Shore, Long Island, by a family of activists; her mother had spent much of the 1980s working for the Nuclear Weapons Freeze. Her father, an ophthalmologist, had been a civil rights advocate in the 1960s, taking a stand for school integration in a predominantly white suburb.

“I would go to the night meetings,” Goodman later recalled. “A thousand people would be screaming, and I would watch him stand his ground. There were death threats, but he just went on. I think that very much shaped my feeling about what was just in the world.” Now out of school and on her own, she had just finished a series of articles for Ralph Nader and Alan Nairn’s Multinational Monitor on Depo-Provera, the controversial birth-control shot. Goodman was about to enroll in Hunter College for graduate classes in biochemistry when a course on radio production caught her eye. WBAI’s Andrew Phillips taught the class. At the time Phillips hosted a show called “Investigations,” a program dedicated to what radio producers call “actuality” – the sounds of people talking and doing things on tape, speeches, demonstrations, street interviews. Goodman sat in on the first lecture, then talked with Phillips afterwards. The latter knew a true believer when he saw one. He asked her if she wanted to apprentice for him at WBAI. She protested that she had no radio experience. “That’s fine,” Phillips replied. That evening the two walked the mile from Hunter on the East Side to WBAI’s West Side headquarters. Phillips put his new student to work editing tapes for an upcoming program on the fortieth anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. “And I never left,” Goodman later explained. (more…)

#14 in our series on radio trends of the decade

One fine day in March of 1999, the Executive Director of the Pacifica Foundation’s five license network fired the general manager of its flagship listener supported radio station: KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California. When staff and subscribers revolted against the move, Pacifica shut the station down, triggering a march of 10,000 furious supporters through the city. Powered by the Internet and tired of top down decision making in public broadcasting, listener subscribers at Pacifica’s non-commercial outlets in New York, Los Angeles, Berkeley, Houston, and Washington, D.C. demanded the right to elect their local station boards.

Almost four years of lawsuits, demonstrations, sit-ins, shut-downs, and walk-outs later, they won, creating the most small-d democratic radio network in the United States. Every year thousands of KPFA, WBAI, KPFK, WPFW, and KPFT subscribers receive ballots in the mail for listener board delegates. Some of them even vote.

What was striking about the conflict was the extent to which it spread far beyond the frog pond atmosphere of community radio. The New York City Council and California’s state assembly held hearings on the battle. California’s Attorney General even endorsed a class action lawsuit against the Pacifica board, which was chaired by Mary Frances Berry, then head of the United States Civil Rights Commission. Hundreds of prominent activists, intellectuals, politicians, and artists signed statements on behalf of the rebellion, including Danny Glover, Ed Asner, Ralph Nader, Alice Walker, Noam Chomsky, and Joan Baez. And dozens of newspapers covered the conflict, among them the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times.

Not everybody is crazy about the results of this democratic revolution, which has done nothing to alleviate Pacifica’s famously contentious internal atmosphere. But it has redefined the possibilities for how to structure broadcasting in the U.S., and so it deserves a place in our list of significant radio trends of the decade.

Further reading: Uneasy Listening: Pacifica Radio’s Civil War

Alas, my favorite listener supported radio station is not immune to this awful economic slump. KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California has announced across-the-board staff cuts. Looks like everything’s getting sliced. Even the General Manager, Lemlem Rijio, has taken a pay hit.

“These cuts to KPFA staff have been the most difficult thing I have had to do during my tenure at station manager,” Rijio said in a press release sent around to station supporters (see below).

Everything is being retrenched by 20 percent it seems, including programming, operations, development, and administration. It’s all mandated by the Pacifica National Board, which owns KPFA’s license.

“The good news is because of the generosity of our listeners, KPFA is going to survive this difficult financial crisis,” Rijio’s statement continued. “The bad news is in order to survive KPFA will be continuing to cut cost across the boardover the next three to six months. These cuts will impact all programs and operations at KPFA.”

KPFA is America’s first listener supported station, founded by pacifists in 1949. Last time I checked the signal was programmed and run by about 200 people. My favorite public affairs program at KPFA is The Morning Show. My favorite music program is The Bonnie Simmons Show on Thursday nights.

I just renewed my subscription this evening. If you are lucky enough to have some money to spare in these lousy times, the secure online support page is here. (more…)

Andrea Lewis

It was a hard thing for me to learn today that Andrea Lewis, long time public affairs programmer at KPFA-FM in Berkeley, is dead. The statement from KPFA’s Amelia Gonzalez (see below) says that it may have been a heart attack. Whatever did her in, it’s a huge tragedy. She was 52 years young.

Andrea was a vibrant, intelligent and credible voice at KPFA, a spirited interviewer interested in everything and anything related to human (and even non-human) affairs. I was privileged to be interviewed by her on many occasions, and enjoyed myself thoroughly every time.

My heart goes out to Andrea’s parents and to all her loved ones, friends, and colleagues everywhere as we come to terms with this awful loss.

“It is we deep sadness that we bring you the news of the death of our own Andrea Lewis this weekend of an apparent heart attack at her San Francisco home. She was just 52. Andrea’s parents are on their way from Florida. We are planning a memorial service and will let you know as soon as we have details. Andrea came to KPFA in 1999 as a co-host of the Morning Show. She later became host of Sunday Sedition and an Evening News Co-Anchor. Andrea was a true Renaissance woman with an interest in politics, world affairs, sports, science, music and the arts. She was dedicated to discussing on and off the air the issues of social justice, especially in regards to racial and gender equity. Her booming laugh filled the hallways of the station. Andrea occasionally hosted Pacifica National broadcasts; she was an early host for Free Speech Radio News. Andrea wrote for the Progressive Magazine, sang with the S.F. Community Chorus, was a former Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University — and was an avid golfer. We — and the listeners — will all miss her tremendously.”

While we’re on the subject of public radio station fundraiser marathons, there’s a related event in progress: board elections at the Pacifica radio network. Subscribers and staff at all five Pacifica stations in New York City, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Houston are voting for members of their respective local station boards. There are a slew of candidates for each of these listener-supported non-commercial signals. If you regularly subscribe to one of these stations, you’ve probably gotten or will get your ballot in the mail soon. Make sure it’s in the hands of the election team by October 14 via that enclosed, addressed envelope you’ll receive.

It should be noted that, unlike the local advisory boards at many public radio stations, the boards at Pacifica really matter. They have a host of responsibilities, including reviewing the station’s budget and screening and selecting the pool of candidates for the station’s Program Director and General Manager. They also choose from among themselves delegates to the governing board of the Pacifica Foundation, which owns the network’s five broadcast licenses.

Not a whole lot of news about this event so far, at least not at KPFA, the station to which I subscribe. But an interesting endorsement caught my eye. It came from the San Francisco Bay View newspaper, and I’ve got to say that its editors, Willie and Mary Ratcliff, deserve credit for their openness. The two disclose that they’re supporting various contenders on the following criterion: (more…)