I know commercial radio only clusters that have more employees than 55. These public stations have their own HR and accounting departments.
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WQED to lay off 35% of staff due to federal funding cuts
- Thread starter Y2kTheNewOldies
- Start date
I know commercial radio only clusters that have more employees than 55. These public stations have their own HR and accounting departments.
Commercial clusters with that many staffers have either an all-news or all-sports station and they have a sales staff, which is not comparable with fund raising staffs for non-commercial stations. And lots of major clusters have a promotion staff to back, mostly, sales promotions. Not a valid comparison.
That works both ways. These stations are laying off staff because of a sudden, unanticipated loss of revenue. Just like anyone else.
Yeah, this was my thought, too.
Even still, how many people do you need for HR & accounting for 1 TV & 1 radio station? Even if we have one person for each of those functions, that still leaves 53 people.
I'm not saying to go gut the staff down to 5 people. If WQED was live 24/7 on both their FM & TV with all in-house production, I could see 55 people making sense. But they aren't. Not even close. And yes, I'm looking at their on-air schedule.
Once again, it's not about their on-air schedule. It's about the number of people it takes to run a building. The physical plant. Companies like iHeart and Cumulus sold their tower sites to other companies, and those companies handle staffing and maintenance for those facilities. In public broadcasting, you have membership staff. They deal directly with the paying members. They organize events for the members. At some stations, the membership staff is bigger than the on-air staff. A station like WQED has thousands of members. Someone has to herd the cats. Commercial stations used to do local events, but they got cut with the budget. Localism is still a big thing in public radio.
Just as an example:
WQED Events
WQED Events These are community events put on by WQED. Some may require ticketing or registration. Community Events With WQED These are educational or other community events that aren’t put …
www.wqed.org
One minor correction (though it was not mentioned in the article). There are actually two radio stations involved--WQED-FM in Pittsburgh (mentioned) and WQEJ-FM in Johnstown (not mentioned), which is a satellite of WQED-FM. While NPR and PBS are trying to figure out a way to handle the music rights agreements, I'm wondering if WQEJ-FM (as well as many other satellite stations of big city public radio outlets) is now in line to be sold.
Radio stations have not "staffed" transmitter sites for decades. And the bulk of maintenance is on the station's transmitter, associated power and audio and metering gear, a generator and the antenna. Stations did not ever spend a lot of time on "tower maintenance" which is not frequent or management time consuming.
Just like the sales staff at commercial stations.
Many stations still do client promotions and format-related events. And most do contesting, even if for tickets or t-shirts.
I donated to the LA TV public station after enjoying a particular show, and I got regular calls for further donations. The last one was in "Chingrish" and I could not even understand most of it. So they were using offshore call centers!
You should make a visit to WSB Atlanta. It's still staffed. Fybush can give a more complete picture of who staffs what.
My point wasn't that WQED staffs its tower site, but that it's local in-house technical staff is responsible. It's not handled by a national or regional staff.
The membership staff is responsible for way more people. There's a lot to do to keep the members engaged. And there isn't an issue of paying commissions, so they can have as many staffers as the budget can allow. With the sales staff, too many salespeople dilutes potential commissions.
The comparison to sales staff is more applicable to the development staff. They're the ones who apply for grants and make presentations to major sponsors. In their case, there might be commissions involved.
Depends on market size. For iHeart, they have a national team that oversees what the local stations can do. Especially in terms of artist & label relations. Same with Cumulus and Audacy. Whereas, WQED is all booked and staffed locally.
Yup. Bingo here, for sure. And with today's modern solid state transmitters, a cluster might only have one or two people total for the engineering operations. I've been to quite a few transmitter sites and have worked alongside engineers who have been in the business longer than I've been alive. There's not much "staffing" needed for a transmitter site today.
Exactly, David. And those commercial stations likely aren't doing the above with 55+ people...
Oh but it is about the on-air schedule alongside the number of people it takes to run a building.
As David noted above, unless public stations are still running tube transmitters alongside cart machines and turntables, there's really not much maintenance on the physical plant these days. Most of it is IT anyway. I know of radio clusters with 5 or 6 signals (not including translators) with no more than a single staff engineer.
I'd love to hear about that... I was under the impression that even most 50kw AMs no longer have transmitter sites that are physically staffed around the clock and haven't for... decades.
I want to be clear - I'm not suggesting that public media ought to just lay off everyone like the commercial conglomerates did and water everything down. Not at all. All I'm saying is the number of staffers at WQED seemed pretty high to me and probably double what I would've guessed.
I'd suggest the majority of WQED's staff is for the TV station, not radio. They're also where most of the cuts will come from. As pointed out, TV lost over a million in federal funds. Radio just lost a little more than 100K.
Go to Fybush.com and search for his pictorial on WSB.
Once again, there is no comparison because for the most part, TV companies don't own co-located radio anymore, and public radio stations aren't owned by groups. Public radio doesn't need to deal with stockholders and quarterly earnings. Everything they make goes into the station.
But I promise you that they will have no problem firing staff.
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Which in itself if problematic as how can you as a news source be expected to objectively cover government while at the same time relying on them at least in part to pay your bills?
Because reporters aren’t involved with the underwriting department of a public station, & they aren’t involved with the sales department of a commercial newstalk station.
There was a lengthy ethical discussion about this when GE owned NBC News. Especially when Meet The Press carried GE commercials. Hard to be objective about GE when they sponsor your programming. Yet they were. That's because they're professional.
In this case, there was no proof at all that government funding was being used for news coverage. In fact, it was quite the opposite. The bulk of the federal funding, particularly in the case of WQED, was that it wasn't being applied to news coverage. It was instead being used for children's TV.
The other part is that those who pushed for defunding were claiming that NPR & PBS weren't deferential enough to the administration. They didn't use the federal money to promote the president's agenda. That is in fact why he asked for the money to be rescinded. That if it wasn't being used in that way, then it was a waste of taxpayer money. The thing is that the money isn't coming from the administration, but rather the American people. Two very different things.
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I have less of a problem with situations like this. If a program like MTP was not sold out through the normal ad sales channels, the remainder of the funding is (to use an ancient term) sustaining, i.e. paid for by the ownership. "The ownership" in that case is NBC, which was owned by GE (and currently is by Comcast). If the default is for ownership to make up some of the costs of subsidizing the program by running ads for the owner's other businesses, that doesn't seem to me to present an ethical quandary. It's more akin to a make good situation. If it wasn't that, it would be PSAs or promos, right?
Now if you're being pressured to use unsold time to run political advocacy ads for the current administration, which is constitutionally disallowed (see: First Amendment), then we have a problem. The government of the USA and any of its subdivisions must follow the constitution, and Congress, which holds the sole constitutional responsibility to make the laws, "shall make no law" to interfere with programming decisions or news judgment of any non-governmental entity or person. That is a much more slippery slope.
As for WQED or any other public station/organization, if they received a specific-purpose grant, and they complied with the terms of that grant and created and/or aired programming consistent with the grant, then they earned the grant and it should not be rescinded after the fact. That's just flat-out thievery. Unfortunately, that is just another tool in the MAGA toolkit.
A lot of what you're saying is based on the independence of CPB, which is currently before the court. The president attempted to fire members of its board. CPB responded that he can't do that. The court didn't grant their injunction. So now they're waiting for a decision on the merits. Once decided, it will be appealed. It could take more than a year. But in the meantime, CPB's budget has been rescinded, so they can't make the grants that had been approved. Stations could sue CPB over the fact that they met the qualifications and were approved. But given the current administration and the legal limbo, it's sort of a waste of time.
I think I understand the mechanics of what's been done, but a shakedown is still a shakedown. If the courts uphold the legality of the (previous) CPB funding, and disallow the imposition of an ex-post-facto clawback of previously appropriated monies without legitimate cause, ordering that money to be restored for the terms of the two-year grants, then they could do worse than to also sanction the administration for the bullying tactics used in defiance of the federal statutes, and to do it by financially hurting Donald and his sycophantic appointees. That seems to be the only way to get their attention, short of a long walk into a hot prison.
I'm not aware that there's any legal challenge to the clawback. My sense is that the stations spoke with their reps on the hill, and were told that the reps have to do what the president wants. Perhaps at some future point, they'll find another way to get some money. The only legal recourse stations might have would be to sue CPB, but in six weeks, there will be nobody home.
But you're right that there was no "legitimate cause" given for the rescission. Everything at CPB was done properly and by the book. CPB was never called in to testify. The president doesn't like NPR & PBS, and neither of them get direct funding. So this was the only option. It's called "throwing the baby out with the bathwater."
That report is from two decades ago and says nothing to indicated that there was permanent staff there.