Sounding a bit like stoned preteens with access to the liquor cabinet while their parents are away, the “new KPFK” premiered Safe Harbor last night in the time formerly curated by Roy of Hollywood in what used to be the most listened to late late night program in the nation’s 2nd largest radio market.
Berkeley– Pacifica has installed a new chief financial officer by the name of Sam Agarwal. The board moved quickly, making Agarwal the signatory for all bank accounts and vendor relationships within days of his arrival. Agarwal’s last full-time CFO position was with San Francisco’s Equal Access, a nonprofit that sets up media projects in developing countries. Equal Access, according to their 2014 annual report, was funded by the US Embassies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the US AID – Office of Transition Initiatives, The US Department of State – Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, The US Department of State – Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, The US Department of State – Middle East Partnership Initiative, The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Continue reading New CFO From State Department Funded NGO
Berkeley-Notes left on a conference room white board overnight at KPFK-FM in Los Angeles outlined GM Leslie Radford’s plans to replace the station’s longstanding and popular Roy of Hollywood overnight program Something’s Happening with programs on sex, therapy, and poetry labeled “Zulu” and “Friday Night Fights”. The contents of the white board can be seen here (picture below). While it isn’t clear why Radford would leave the information exposed except to create a hostile work environment, the proposed changes target the most lucrative of the station’s evening programs. The proposed change would reduce revenues, delaying if not finishing off entirely the station’s broken promise to SAG-AFTRA union staff that they would be returned to normal work schedules. Continue reading Zulu Sex Therapy
Berkeley- In this astonishing clip, IED Lydia Brazon reports to the audit committee, 4 months after predecessor John Proffitt told the national board that “things were ready to go” and the 2014 audit would be “wrapped up in a month” that only 12% of preparatory audit schedules had been sent to the auditor as of the evening of December 15th. Listening to the two sets of sound clips side by side reveals the misinformation being provided to the board of directors about the long overdue financial audit which was required to be filed with the CA Attorney General on June 30, 2015. Continue reading 4 Months Further Behind
Below is a response by former PNB Director Kim Kaufman to GCRC (LA wing of Siegel/Brazon faction) claims about the state of KPFK in Los Angeles, the biggest fundraiser in the 5-station Pacifica Radio network only two years ago. Continue reading Truth Or Dare at KPFK: A Response to GCRC
In a candidate forum, Siegel/Brazon candidate Chuck Anderson said the station “absolutely did not want” to keep paid programmers, called overnight programmer Roy Tuckman “goy of hollywood” and said “we absolutely want him off the air”.
Tuckman, who goes by the nom de plume Roy of Hollywood runs KPFK’s overnight programming from Monday to Thursday from midnight to 6am and is the only Pacifica programmer nationwide to substantively monetize the overnight hours.
Anderson mis-stated numbers: 70% of KPFK’s budget is not for “paid programmers”, it’s for salaries as a whole including engineers, membership/subscriptions staffers, managers, IT, traffic etc. The station, when fully staffed, has about 9 FTE for paid programming, about 1/2 of the payroll.
The Internet stream at Pacifica’s LA station KPFK has been broken for more than 100 hours since 9am on Wednesday November 25th.
The breakdown is suspected to have been caused by an inept repair of the station’s program archive uploader which was out of order from November 16th to November 25th. Continue reading KPFK Stream Gone for 106 Hours
Berkeley-The Pacifica Foundation, 19 months into a coup by the Siegel/Brazon faction, is starting to project its internal demolition onto on-air operations. In the past two weeks, LA station KPFK’s website has collapsed at least three times, once for 4 entire days and the station fell off terrestrial broadcast, the website at www.pacifica.org went dark, the website at www.kpfa.org went dark, WBAI-FM aired the Progressive Radio Network’s internet stream having misplaced its own programs, and the LA archives failed, storing only 15 of the last 132 hours of programming since 6:00am on Monday November 16th. Continue reading System Breakdown
Wednesday night, at the stroke of midnight, LA station KPFK’s website disappeared from the Internet for about three hours, putting a sad cap on a month-long fund drive that ended on Friday 11/6 at $608,000 or $142,000 short of the goal.
Why did the website completely go down? KPFK didn’t pay the bill. Continue reading KPFK Website Gone For Hours
Melting Pot host Michael Barnes announced on Friday November 6th that his last program would be that evening after five years on KPFK.
Off-air, Barnes said he “was done with the place and how badly it was being managed”.
Barnes is the fourth consecutive on-air host to announce a same day resignation citing new manager Leslie Radford’s mismanagement of the station.
Barnes kept it classy on the air, and here is his on-air goodbye to KPFK.
