marshallstax's email reminds us that Pacifica's biggest "enemies" are inside the building. Relying on hundreds of volunteer on-air hosts, as if it's a mark of honor, has really kept their presentation value marginal, at best, during a lot of the broadcast day.
In the past, there were several times I heard lengthy dead air (like, 30 minutes or more) because the next volunteer host didn't come in for their every-third-week airshift, and the previous program host wasn't about to stick around to fill in for them. And they told us so on the air. Otherwise, hosts with timid quavering voices and lots of lip smacking and "ums" also tend to run recorded announcements at about half the volume that they should air. Really made it a strain to listen and enjoy, when the nervous energy overrides the programming. Unless you're so uber-contrarian that you take it as a requirement to be unprofessional, just to stick it to whomever! (Which does seem to summarize a lot of their core audience, from those I've tried to talk to about this over the years.)
No one without a masochistic complex will even apply for a management job at KPFA anymore, because there's always some wannabe-wounded soul with a tiny program ready to rally the troops to oppose any sort of management policy for how to conduct oneself on-air, or for a revision of the extremely complicated program schedule so that any but a self-chosen few can figure out what's on the air. I also think they've had an opening for a new general manager for at least 5 years now.
In summary, I think KPFA, for all of its laudible intentions, is a model for keeping radio irrelevant to the broader community, by being obsessivly focused on internal spats, etc, instead of trying to complete in the media landscape. KPFA could still cover plenty of controversial topics and have local discussion programming and esoteric music shows and attract three times their current audience - if someone would be given the authority to make programming changes, reduce the on-air volunteer numbers to only those with talent and a reliable track record, and then put more effort into making them better radio hosts, instead of wondering if someone is going to fire a bullet thru their window tonight.
Relying so heavily on specialized shows balkanizes the station's potential for being an outlet that more people would rely on consistently, when they know they're going to hear a host they like every morning or afternoon, and for more than an hour. I know that they have made some strides in that direction. But not nearly enough, due to the guaranteed bloodletting that occurs over every little thing, and with a snarky alternative press ready to further promote the cause of the ne'er do wells, and keep the station from being a geniune media competitor to themselves.
Saddest part of this, to me, is the number of small "community radio" outlets, particularly in the Western US, who model themselves after KPFA, and find similar levels of insignificance in their communities, apart from a too-small core of listeners who can't understand why everyone else doesn't owe them a contribution to stay on the air. Wonder how many more years these stations have left, since raising money is always a huge challenge for them, and the program schedule and presentation style have a lot to do with that, from what I hear.
There's lots of opportunity to compete with KQED, or to counterprogram it, and attract a significant Bay Area audience to another non-comm signal. Too bad KPFA, KALW, and KCSM all severely underperform their potential for gaining new listeners. Anyone care to speculate on why SF has public radio listening so heavily skewed to one station, when many other markets often have two or three different public radio outlets that each seem to attract audiences above a 1.0 share?
