• Excerpt:
• “https://pacifica-democracy-project.org/emails/help-prevent-the-shutdown-of-kpfk/
• “KPFK owes about $300,000 to the Pacifica National Office which imperils the entire Network. (According to the KPFK Business Manager in the KPFK Finance Committee meeting of Jan. 13, 2021 the exact amount is $294,632.) Pacifica owes its accounting firm over $200,000. If this firm stops work for us it could jeopardize our nonprofit status, delay our audits and violate the terms of our $3.2 million loan.

The Pacifica National Office no longer has reserves to cover KPFK shortfalls. According to Anita Sims, Pacifica interim Chief Financial Officer, funds will have to be taken from KPFA to cover them.

KPFK has a narrow window of time to maintain its independence. All efforts to improve KPFK income have either failed completely or been inadequate to make up for revenue declines. If action is not taken to reduce expenses immediately drastic measures very damaging to KPFK may take place. If KPFK can’t raise enough money to pay its expenses it may have to be shut down or its building sold.

Sharon Adams, KPFA Treasurer, has stated several times that any station that can’t pay its bills should have all of its staff laid off and be converted to a ‘repeater’ station. You can hear her saying this in the National Finance Committee meeting of Oct. 27, 2020.”

“

Thanks for this: Sidney Smith”Change your formats upgrade the tech refine your world view to attract new generations of progressives. Become more effective by going back to the foundations of the network. That is be interesting inventive humorous inviting thoughtful. Humane to all points of view. Even with those we don’t agree with…this was a foundation of Pacifica which was lost from the 70’s on. We became a cult an already converted choir to be preached to. The main critical sense I get from people is that we talk of what’s wrong, but rarely of how to actually fix it. Fix it in a way open to all as opposed to the doctrinaire. Do this, and an audience a 21st century audience will come. Don’t, and be stuck with an shrinking listenership of the stubbornly convinced. I joined WBAI when I was 28. I left or was forcible retired during one of the cyclic purges for the usual reasons at 63. So I have some notion of how things are. Circular firing squads of varying kinds. Some better some worse, but all in that circle. Open up to this now not so new century. This with all of the complex changes it has wrought. Mind I know many former staff, and supporters have been saying this since at least the 90’s. For 30 years such simple suggestions have been ignored. So here you still are hanging by the skin of your teeth. There are other kinds of Listener Sponsored radio stations, and networks out there. They mostly thrive. Ask them why. Hint…they advance, and change with the times, and eras. They are open to new ways of doing business performing on the air, and just being…being in this era, and looking ahead. I know this first hand having been part of a few since retirement. I expect this will be ignored by the entrenched powers or ruling ideological cliques. Though perhaps some individuals working in these digital fields of grass might pause, and consider. Regardless good luck you all.”

My dear friend Bob Fass has passed away.
He was a fixture in New York radio for 50 years, and more. I was honored to work with him during my broadcast career. He was noted for his courage compassion wit, and unique humor. Also the man could be impossible sometimes. Which was added seasoning to the experience of knowing, and loving him. He was much respected by the arts, and political communities. Below a very short video I recorded of him on air. Bless him.

https://slate.com/business/2021/04/substack-media-new-york-times-subscriptions-poaching.html?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits
Excerpt:
“This week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg granted a rare, live, hourlong interview to a tech journalist, where he revealed the company’s plans for a slew of new audio products. Normally, such a scoopy, wide-ranging interview would be a coup for the media company that landed it. But in this case, there was no traditional media company: The interviewer was Casey Newton, who writes a Substack newsletter called Platformer, and the setting was a new Discord server that Newton and seven other independent writers have created called Sidechannel. A thousand people—paying subscribers to at least one of the newsletters—tuned in.

It was the latest milestone in Substack’s ascendance as a platform for high-profile journalism. The company’s rise, punctuated by a venture capital round that valued it at $650 million, has been fueled by an influx of well-known commentators formerly employed by major media outlets such as the New York Times, Vox, and BuzzFeed. Some are lured by the editorial freedom, others by the cash on offer, which for top writers can hit seven figures. Several outlets have lost their biggest names to Substack (though not always unhappily); Slate and New York recently lost their star advice columni . . . . “

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-pirate-radio-broadcaster-who-occupied-alcatraz-and-terrified-the-fbi?utm_source=pocket-newtab

The Pirate Radio Broadcaster Who Occupied Alcatraz and Terrified the FBI

Over fifty years ago, John Trudell overcame tragedy to become the national voice for Native Americans—and a model for a new generation of activists.

Read when you’ve got time to spare.

Trudell had one thing the FBI could not stop: his voice. Image by Michelle Vignes/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty Images

He sat at the same table each evening, sometimes with lighting and sometimes without, a cigarette often in hand, a guest always by his side. In the background, the sound of waves rolling against the rocks and the stuttering of a backup generator were constants. Then, with a crackly yet true radio connection, streaming through the wires from an unthinkable place — Alcatraz Island — he began speaking in a calm, determined voice. The nation was listening.

In the Pacifica Radio Archives, located in a modest brick building in North Hollywood, you can hear what hundreds of thousands of Americans heard on those evenings.File through the cassettes and you will find more than a dozen tapes labeled with a single word: Alcatraz. Each is followed by a date, anywhere from December 1969 to August 1970.

But these were not simply programs about Alcatraz, that island in the notoriously frigid San Francisco Bay that was home to a federal prison until it closed in 1963. Rather, they were broadcast from the former prison building itself, from a small cell without heat and only a lone generator for power rumbling in the background.

The show was called Radio Free Alcatraz , and it was hosted by John Trudell, a Santee Sioux Native American activist and broadcaster.

By the winter of 1969, Trudell could be found in that austere cell, speaking over the rush of waves in a composed Midwestern accent. And by 1973, he had become one of the FBI’s most feared activists, with a file that would eventually run longer than 1,000 pages.

Why would the FBI compose its longest dossier about a broadcaster speaking from a rocky island a mile offshore? What was Trudell saying that frightened them so much?

Trudell was advocating for Native American self-determination, explaining its moral and political importance to all Americans. On air, he often revealed the innumerable ways the government was violating Native American rights: obstructing fishing access in Washington State, setting unfair prices on tribal lands, removing Native American children from local schools. But he didn’t just reveal the cruel contradictions at the heart of American society. He imagined a future in which equality — between different American cultures, and between all people and the earth itself — would become a reality

And for the first time, non–Native American communities were listening. More than 100,000 people tuned in to Pacifica stations in California, Texas and New Yo . . .