Treat WXXI fairly in state budget

[TheBigA]

Maybe WXXI would get more support from the community if a press release was issued stating that the top executives at the station were taking a 10% pay cut to help ease the financial burden the station faces.

Or maybe not.

It's obvious you haven't read anything I've said (except what you want to read).

If your employer came to you and said they're cutting your pay by 50%, but you have to continue to do the same work, you'd object. Right?

That's what the state of NY is doing. They're cutting the station's money. This is not about executive pay. This is about funding for specific work that is done. Equal pay for equal work. That's what the union says. So if the state cuts the funding, those cuts get passed to the programs that funding supports. That means you look at the shows that receive state funding and cut them by 50%. Anything else simply isn't fair. Because what you're asking the station to do is bear the burden of the same work with less funding.

 

[The Voice of Reason]

If your employer came to you and said they're cutting your pay by 50%, but you have to continue to do the same work, you'd object. Right?

It is apparent that you have not been reading the newspapers lately because a number of companies have required their employees to take a pay cut in order to keep their jobs. And please tell me what is so bad about executives at WXXI doing what the President of the University of Rochester did and a take a 10% pay cut?
Let's turn your question around by asking if the public came up to WXXI executives and suggested to them that they take a pay cut in order to keep programs and personnel, should they?

That's what the state of NY is doing. They're cutting the station's money.

This is what you fail to comprehend. It's not the station's money, it's taxpayer moneyand why should we have to subsidize WXXI or any other non profit agency if we choose not to?
If you want to personally donate to WXXI, then by all means go ahead. But why should everyone, especially people who don't use that service?

 

[aaronread]

This is what you fail to comprehend. It's not the station's money, it's taxpayer moneyand why should we have to subsidize WXXI or any other non profit agency if we choose not to?

I don't terribly care for my tax dollars subsidizing the internet which allows you to rant and rail against WXXI at the slightest provocation. Why should I have to pay for that non profit agency?

Oh wait, maybe because it benefits a lot of other people and society as a whole...?

Yes, this post is meant to be obnoxiously snarky because I'm trying to prove a point. This horse has been flogged to death...the thread has seven pages for chrissakes! Let it GO already, people! :-\

 

[The Voice of Reason]

I don't terribly care for my tax dollars subsidizing the internet which allows you to rant and rail against WXXI at the slightest provocation. Why should I have to pay for that non profit agency?

Oh wait, maybe because it benefits a lot of other people and society as a whole...?

Yes, this post is meant to be obnoxiously snarky because I'm trying to prove a point. This horse has been flogged to death...the thread has seven pages for chrissakes! Let it GO already, people! :-\

Nice try to deflect the issue but you pay for your internet service because you want it not because the state takes it out of your paycheck through taxes.
If you're "snarky" it's because you want this subject to die only because I've made some very valid points. Sorry if I exercise my first amendment rights.

 

[SirRoxalot]

Actually, the state does force subsidation of high-speed Internet access throught the Public Service Commission, but that's neither here nor there.

Voice, you have railed on about the pay that the top brass at WXXI gets for at least two years. We get your point. You think that they're grossly overpaid. You've stated that you've withdrawn your support from WXXI for that reason. So be it.

I think that some of the management at WXXI is overpaid. I don't think that most of them are grossly overpaid when you compare their salaries to comparable positions in academia or broadcasting. Personally, I'd prefer Shel Silverstein to Norm Silverstein, but Shell passed away in 1999. I guess he's not an option.

There are many programs funded by the state serve a relative minority of taxpayers. That doesn't mean that they don't deserve funding. I'd bet that you get your taxpayer contribution's worth of value from listeing to or watching WXXI, so your tax dollar really isn't much of an issue, is it?

Don't sent money to WXXI. That's your choice. As far as the validity of your points is concerned, I believe that most of us have already determined their value.

 

[Bob1370]

'Voice of Reason' opines, "This is what you fail to comprehend. It's not the station's money, it's taxpayer moneyand why should we have to subsidize WXXI or any other non profit agency if we choose not to?"

Problem with your logic, Voice, is that a clear majority of households in the Rochester metro area view or listen to its services on a weekly basis (Nielsen Feb. 2009, Arbitron Fall 2008). It's one of the very few public services, using public funding to any degree, that is actually used by a majority of the people in the region, sharing that status only with police and fire service, transportation infrastructure and the public schools.

If public money shouldn't help support a service a majority of the people make use of, then what SHOULD it be used for, especially when the breadth of the benefit so far outweighs the tiny per capita cost? Using your logic, is it time to defund the police and fire departments, snow plowing and road maintenance, and the schools next, because you personally object to something they may be doing?

 

[The Voice of Reason]

'Voice of Reason' opines, "This is what you fail to comprehend. It's not the station's money, it's taxpayer moneyand why should we have to subsidize WXXI or any other non profit agency if we choose not to?"

Problem with your logic, Voice, is that a clear majority of households in the Rochester metro area view or listen to its services on a weekly basis (Nielsen Feb. 2009, Arbitron Fall 2008). It's one of the very few public services, using public funding to any degree, that is actually used by a majority of the people in the region, sharing that status only with police and fire service, transportation infrastructure and the public schools.

If public money shouldn't help support a service a majority of the people make use of, then what SHOULD it be used for, especially when the breadth of the benefit so far outweighs the tiny per capita cost? Using your logic, is it time to defund the police and fire departments, snow plowing and road maintenance, and the schools next, because you personally object to something they may be doing?

Amazing! You are trying to equate what the police, fire, highway departments and schools provide the general public to what your radio station does to justify your argument about state funding? : Even posters who may disagree with me on the salary issue wouldn't buy that logic for a minute. By the way do you agree or disagree that your CEO is overpaid and your station is top-heavy with management?
With regards to your first statement that a clear majority of households view or listen to your services. From the ratings I've seen, your radio station "averages" around 2.8; meaning that a little more than 2 percent of the total listening audience has their radios set to WXXI-AM. If you consider that over two (2) percent consists of a majority then we must have had different math teachers.
Here is food for thought. If your station, as you claim, has such a loyal following, and they know of the dire straits the station is in regarding state aid, why then did your TV drive fail to meet its goal? Why can't your station get more than the one out of ten households to contribute to your fundraising drives?
I do not wish you, or your station ill will. But you know as well as I do that the state legislature is not going to reinstate the $850,000 the governor has removed from your budget. And even with the monies raised in both your radio and TV drives, WXXI will still face a budget shortfall. That will mean two things: Layoffs and program cuts. You may doubt my sincerity, but I hope your program is not one of those on the chopping block.

 

[TheBigA]

And please tell me what is so bad about executives at WXXI doing what the President of the University of Rochester did and a take a 10% pay cut?

You seem to be fixated on executive pay for some reason. The executives at this station didn't screw up. They didn't lend out money to people who couldn't pay it back. This is a community organization that is about to lose a portion of its funding. Let's say, for the sake of discussion, the executives take a 10% pay cut, as you suggest. What's the point? Do you get a tax refund for that money? Come on!

As I've said before in other posts (that you've ignored), there are steps a CEO goes through when faced with a funding loss. We're at step one now. There are still four more to go. One may be salary cuts. But you don't get to vote on them like this is some reality TV show.

Let's turn your question around by asking if the public came up to WXXI executives and suggested to them that they take a pay cut in order to keep programs and personnel, should they?

Once again the fixation with executive pay cuts. Why should this station continue to air shows that aren't popular? Unless the public is all like you, fixated on punishing executives, they will understand why some less popular shows are being canceled.

This is what you fail to comprehend. It's not the station's money, it's taxpayer moneyand why should we have to subsidize WXXI or any other non profit agency if we choose not to?

I don't have any kids in school...so why should I subsidize public education? I disagreed with Bush's decision to invade Iraq. Why should my money subsidize his fiasco? On and on. We have a representative government that makes these decisions. At some point, the state of New York decided it would improve the lives of its citizens to direct a small sum of money to TV & radio programs. It is a SMALL AMOUNT. Your share of it is less than a dollar a year. So tell you what...we'll get the President of WXXI to refund you a dollar from his wallet. Would that satisfy you?

 

[SirRoxalot]

Voice, you persist in view WXXI as ONLY the AM radio station. There are multiple TV services and channels, multiple radio services, interactive web services, educational services, and other educational and entertainment presentations sponsored by the organization. Seems to me that you have the OPPORTUNITY to get more than your money's worth, and I'd be willing to bet that you take advantage of at least some of those opportunities.

Don't let a single issue (executive pay) blind you to the overall value of the enterprise. You've expressed your opinion about that issue, but the issue of funding for WXXI goes far beyond that one portion of their budget. Keep in mind the concept of "cutting off your nose to spite your face".

 

[Mark Giardina]

Allow me to try to put this subject to rest once and for all.

As I see it there are three options here:

1. Every person who uses public broadcasting, either by listening to the radio or watching TV, contribute to the station in their community. I know this is a pipe dream, but at least it's a suggestion.

2. Go the route the British have taken regarding the BBC. Everyone pays for the service. ( I know that won't be popular with at least one person on this board).

3. Stress the fact that donating to public broadcasting is tax deductible. Granted in this economy almost everyone is watching their spending habits. But there are still people who have the financial resources to give. And emphasizing that donations are tax deductible could push more people to write checks.

Public broadcasting, I feel, must divorce itself from government funding so that stations, like WXXI, don't find themselves depending on the whims of state or federal lawmakers when it comes to budgeting for the next fiscal year. The problem is how to encourage more listeners and viewers to actually contribute. After all if they can get a service for free, why pay for it?

Anyone else who has ideas, please feel free to add them.

 

[aaronread]

Anyone else who has ideas, please feel free to add them.

John Sutton, a well-known pubradio fundraising consultant, has opined on this issue extensively on his blog.

I will attest that John knows his stuff, he helped us increase our fundraising totals by at least 20%.

He, too, argues that public broadcasting needs to wean itself off of subsidies, be they federal, state or institutional (i.e. a college supplementing your budget). It's not like I don't agree with that sentiment, but something everyone consistently overlooks is that virtually all pubradio/TV outlets are hamstrung in their underwriting efforts by the FCC rules that prohibit commercial content on NCE licenses. Most businesses just do not understand that us NCE stations can't air their price info, or sale info, or have calls to action. And if they do understand it, they say that's why they don't want to advertise.

Granted, ad dollars are down on commercial radio, too...but there's always some huckster willing to go dollar-a-holler on the local AM station. Think about it, who're the biggest advertisers these days? Personal injury attorneys, beer ads and car ads...all three of which won't really buy underwriting because they want to talk about price in their ads, or at least some form of an inducement to buy/sell/lease.

Mind you, I think it would be an utter disaster to the quality of the product if NCE stations could air advertising. So I don't know if there's really an answer here.

Also FWIW, John has rightly challenged me to ask if our own station, WEOS, has already tapped out all the potential funding avenues under the current rules. He's right, we most definitely haven't...although I challenged him back by saying I seriously doubt we could maintain our current budget off fundraising and underwriting alone no matter how good we did there; there's only so much wealth to be had in the Finger Lakes...

 

[audio4tv]

There is a catch on the aspect of modifying the underwriting rules, to allow commercials on non-commercial stations that many of those arguing for this method seem to miss. If commercials are allowed, the station, by the nature of this change, would not be any different then their commercial counterparts. Thus, certain provisions of the law, and some would say benefits, would likely have to go away or be modified. This would include tax-exempt status, not paying taxes on income, no longer qualifying for any state or federal grants, and in most cases, from foundations. Under the current operational models for non-commercial stations (public radio particularly) is this a move that would solve the funding problem overall? We don't have a CBC or BBC type model in this country to support this for radio or TV at the present time. And with stations not owned by the government or a private authority of the government owning stations enmasse, this would likely not be a model that could be easily managed. It is more complicated then it actually sounds.

 

[aaronread]

Excellent points Mr. 4TV...although the assumption is that were NCE's allowed to air actual advertising, they probably could earn enough revenue to no longer need any of those exemptions anymore.

I would think that it could be possible to devise a tiered scheme where as a station's revenue grows, it qualifies for fewer grants and exemptions...all done over a sliding scale of time. You could even have it be a scheme that applies to each station individually (rather than forcing all stations to migrate over a fixed timeframe) and be managed by CPB until everyone was "out" of the scheme and operating on their own.

OTOH, another aspect here is that NPR goes out of its way to ensure that a certain quality of programming is adhered to by all their affiliates, and part of that is not sounding commercial. I seriously doubt NPR would suddenly restructure their program clocks to allow for the more-common 20 minutes of breaks every hour in commercial radio; right now most pubradio shows have about 4-5 minutes of time for actual underwriting (maximum...some just have 90 seconds).

Here's an idea for the TV side at least: why not allow pubTV, and ONLY pubTV, to enter agreements with cable-only content providers to rebroadcast the channel on a DTV subchannel? That way, for example, WXXI could have Comedy Central, USA Network, A&E and Lifetime on their subchannels. Amend the rules so that these subchannels still enjoy the same exemption from the FCC's obsession with obscenity that cable does, and waive the commercial/non-commercial rules. Or get even fancier - have them negotiate with PBS as a whole so that PBS affiliates across the country all carry the same channels.

I have no real evidence on this, but I would suspect there's at least a few decent-but-smaller cable channels...if not some of the biggies...that would pay handsomely for the right to be on OTA TV but still enjoy the protections they have on cable. And it would introduce some real competition to the cable monopolies in a very simple way. If my wife & I could get Comedy Central, Spike, Lifetime, USA and maybe F/X via DTV, I'd pay a few bucks to get my own DTV-equipped DVR, and cancel my TimeWarner Cable subscription in a heartbeat.

 

[fybush]

I have no real evidence on this, but I would suspect there's at least a few decent-but-smaller cable channels...if not some of the biggies...that would pay handsomely for the right to be on OTA TV but still enjoy the protections they have on cable. And it would introduce some real competition to the cable monopolies in a very simple way. If my wife & I could get Comedy Central, Spike, Lifetime, USA and maybe F/X via DTV, I'd pay a few bucks to get my own DTV-equipped DVR, and cancel my TimeWarner Cable subscription in a heartbeat.

You'd pretty much have to build your own DVR (not impossible)...but I think you're missing a huge part of the business model of basic cable, which includes not only ad revenue from spot sales (which would go up if the channels were available OTA for free) but also, and usually more crucially, per-subscriber fees from the cable companies. ESPN alone gets something north of a buck a month out of a typical subscriber's cable bill, and when you multiply that by a subscriber count in the high tens of millions, you're talking real money. Make those channels available for free OTA, and why would cable companies continue to pay those carriage fees?

There's a cross-ownership issue, too: Comedy Central and Spike are tied (albeit distantly now) to CBS, Lifetime to ABC and Hearst, USA to NBC and F/X, of course, to Fox. In each of those cases, the owners of the cable networks use their broadcast properties as leverage on the cable operators. They can give cable free carriage of their broadcast stations (which are still among the most popular signals on any cable system) in exchange for making them pay for a package of cable networks, which is why you get ESPNU and ESPN Classic and ESPNews in addition to ESPN and ESPN2.

If the business model for basic cable weren't so dependent on subscriber fees, you'd see the companies that own the cable networks putting that programming out for free on their own DTV signals - ESPN on ABC/Disney-owned stations, Fox News and FX on Fox-owned stations, and so on. Believe me, they make more money doing it the way they're doing it.

 

[TheBigA]

He, too, argues that public broadcasting needs to wean itself off of subsidies, be they federal, state or institutional (i.e. a college supplementing your budget).

I agree with his point of view, and his view that the system tends to downplay the indie stations. That's because a lot of public broadcasters are old school educational broadcasters, rather than broadcasters who seek to educate. Two very different approaches. The old schoolers like the sure thing, the constant and dependable money, rather than taking a few risks. The station I was at took risks. It had to. It had no state money, except for specific grants for specific services. (Arts reporting was supported by a grant from the state arts council. That sort of thing.) This guy's approach, however, requires a station to become more like a commercial station in terms of providing programming and services that attracts members. Sometimes, that means breaking format. That's hard for stations to do. Sometimes it means playing music that isn't Beethovan or Mozart, and that's hard for these stations to do. Some saw it as the commercialization of public radio, not in terms of running commercials, but in being motivated by audience response. My view is it isn't being a commercial broadcaster, but rather being a communicator, interested in serving the public interest. Still, it's very controversial.

Thus, certain provisions of the law, and some would say benefits, would likely have to go away or be modified. This would include tax-exempt status, not paying taxes on income, no longer qualifying for any state or federal grants, and in most cases, from foundations.

NPR itself attempted to do this in 1983 when it created it's profit-making division. They were located in a different building from NPR, and there was a sort of "church and state" approach to the two divisions. Unfortunately, it was still run by non-profit people, so it was a dismal failure. But there is precident.

 

[aaronread]

Thanks Scott, I didn't really think about the subscriber fee aspect to things.