Berkeley – The resistance to the attempt to fire executive director Summer Reese by a newly-elected board of directors despite her binding employment contract has entered it’s second week with no signs of slowing down. This morning, support volunteers were turned away due to a lack of space in the teensy office to accommodate them all.
BY PAUL DERIENZO | Summer Reese, the executive director of the Berkeley-based Pacifica Foundation, was fired on March 14 in a closed session of the Pacifica National Board. No official reason was given for the firing, which was announced two hours after Reese publicly announced that she had paid the overdue severances of the majority of WBAI’s employees laid off in a financial crisis triggered in part from damage from Superstorm Sandy. Continue reading After director’s firing, WBAI sale is now rumored→
Berkeley-The Pacifica National Board, which attempted to terminate Executive Director Summer Reese only 7 weeks after signing a 3-year contract, and still has stated no reason for the rushed vote taken with no legal consultation, is floating a familiar face as her proposed replacement: a recently-resigned manager in their own network, Bernard Duncan who was the general manager at the LA station KPFK until a few months ago. Continue reading New Executive Director May Be Resigned Los Angeles Manager→
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.Continue reading The Elephant is the Healthy Station Project→
Berkeley–At the Pacifica Radio headquarters at 1925 Martin Luther King Jr Way, the March 13th late-night attempted firing of the executive director, looks to be getting expensive. The illegitimate dismissal, which happened at a late-night meeting with no prior notification and for no stated reason, looks headed to a court room.Continue reading Network Funds To Be Used To Finance Pacifica Board Coup D’Etat→
Berkeley: At the national headquarters of Pacifica Radio, the nation’s oldest listener sponsored radio network and the owner of 5 radio licenses, KPFK in Los Angeles, KPFA in Berkeley, WPFW in Washington DC, KPFT in Houston and WBAI in New York, a late-night board coup to remove the CEO seems to have backfired. Continue reading Pacifica Radio National Headquarters Open After Board Coup→
Berkeley –In a familiar refrain, the brand new chair of the Pacifica National Board could be found on the morning Friday March 14th barricading the doors of a small building at 1925 Martin Luther King Jr Way in Berkeley. After only six weeks on the job, the barricade was being erected against the organization’s executive director Summer Reese, a woman thirty years her junior, who had just been presented with a 3-year contract for employment only six weeks earlier, after working for 20 months as an interim in the executive director position. Reese had been the chair of Pacifica’s National Board for the previous 3 years, but she never found herself pressed into duty as an ad-hoc locksmith. The network’s employees, who usually work in the building on Friday, were nowhere to be found.Continue reading Here We Go Again: Locks and Surveillance Return to Martin Luther King Jr Way→
