by Lyn Gerry

I know, everyone, that you are ge1ng inundated with so much just now.  But I need to say that so much of the struggle all of us face today, I think, comes from the elephant in the room, which is Pacifica’s embrace of the healthy station project in the 1990’s. Pacifica chose to go this route. Paying producers and having strip programming. This is why the bills are so high at KPFA.  I think, partly and perhaps largely because of all the paid producers.  It is also why Margy and other engaged in the Save KPFA initiative – to bring back a paid producer who had been let go by Arlene to reduce the hemorrhaging at the station.

 I need to get the stats on most community radio stations – but I venture to say that most have limited paid producers or none and actually are  “community” stations with volunteers leading the way.  That’s our station in Atlanta. We refuse to pay any producers and kicked out the NFPB and CPB folks from our station when they insisted we became “healthy” by paying, for example, a blues producer in the morning to supplant all of our incredibly knowledgeable volunteer producers.  We didn’t let this happen.

We take no government money at this point. And yes we struggle but still no government money. Besides the CPB folks are still angry at us – we literally kicked Them out in the early 1990’s.

Lyn Gerrys efforts to rescue Pacifica from the yawning of irrelevance has been tireless. At the same time, she has been instrumental in developing alternatives that allow the sort of information that was once exclusive to Pacifica’s airwaves to pervade the internet and continue outward to disseminate within the new technologies and old networks. So while Lew Hill is being disassembled in a Frankenstironic spectacle, so his spirit is simply reconstituted on another plane by Lyn and all the folks at A infos Radio Project and Radio4all.