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An internal source reports that KPFK's first big fundraising drive since the station made over the program lineup to please the lefties is not going well. The pledges aren't coming in, and the audience is said to be turning off. Program director Armando Gudiņo sent out a note last night urging the on-air pitch people to do better.
Congratulation for getting through the first couple of days of this very important fund drive. On that note I regret to inform you that this very important fund drive is not all peaches and cream. In fact the entire network seems to be at a bit of a stand still. We are currently behind in our goal and must pick up the pace...[edited]
We are now a 3 million dollar operation and sustainability can be difficult.
Perhaps KPFK's politics have simply driven people away. The source says that prime-time afternoon pitching duties this week have been turned over a writer for the Maoist Revolutionary Worker.
Speaking of KPFK, Rip Rense of the Rip Post sends word that he has an interview up with Barry Smolin, the Hamilton High School teacher who hosts the Grateful Dead program at KPFK.
As a San Francisco (and Berkeley) expatriate and part of the last unhappy rock and roll staff at KSAN (see jive95.com) -- an expatriate recently much happier in comic sprawling Los Angeles -- I can say that KPFK's problem continues to be a politically correct left and humorless New Age rigidity beyond the point of SNL caricature.
KPFK still seriously pushes "Schwetty Balls."
Sad. Rigid worldviews lacking self-deprecating humor -- left or right or any either/or -- will not survive the momentum of a fluid and integrating social evolution.
The exceptionally current, fluid and urban KCRW owns their would be competing audience.
Posted by: Relevant or Irrelevant? at October 23, 2003 02:00 PMLet's see -- they fire or seriously curtail a number of their longest-lived and most popular programs (many of them non-political), and turn over a substantial amount of air time to Spanish language talk. On an otherwise English language station.
And management tells the peons (so to speak) that the problem is that they aren't hitting enough during the pledge drive?
Some of the stupidist people in the world seem to get jobs managing radio stations. And with KPFK, you get stupid wackos.
The most entertaining aspects of KPFK are, it seems, off the air and in the executive offices
Posted by: exherald at October 23, 2003 03:45 PMWhen I moved here 7 years ago, I thought this was the best radio I'd ever heard, but to fire 2 shows that have been on over 25 years makes no sense to me., and doing it right after the fund drive drove me away, I'm "down with the Revolution", but does that mean I can't like Heartfelt Music, or the Alan Watts Hour? KPFK used to have programming that drew in more than just the "converted" and that was its strength, besides the white middle class /Old Lefties are the ones who built this network, like it or not, and kicking them off for not being chic or militant enough shows a real lack of respect for ones's elders! I'm neither old nor white, but I know that kicking the white people out of "the movement" brings true diversity to a halt! The old programming was approaching perfection! Art/Science/Lit/even Music! Man cannot live by anger alone!
Posted by: onyx2626 at October 27, 2003 12:21 PM
of LA Observed
The biggest problem (to me) seems to be the Spanish-language programming. There are so many other Spanish-language stations that do it much better, I think they're confusing their audience.
I don't think it's a matter of being too "left" I think it's just a matter of not having enough popular shows. The left is the group that made last year's fund-drive the biggest ever, as far as I know.
Posted by: Ted at October 23, 2003 12:00 PM