Maine's WRFR LP FM: still growing pains, five years in....

As WRFR LPFM heads into its sixth year of operations, the station management, moribund for a quarter decade, has now moved into the hands of Cathy McGuinness. (CM) CM has a bit of experience at a west coast station; she hosted a show at WRFR for 6 months before being tapped for the station manager job, (to the dismay of some who felt there were more qualified. candidates) But so it goes...

Over the past month, CM has been busy reorganizing the station's operations and administration.

Major Change 1. Meetings. Formerly a democracy of volunteers debating and voting on policy and decisions, with the station manager executing those decisions, WRFR now has a more imperial management style. One whereby the station manager makes decisions unilaterally, with the volunteers relegated to committees , whose heads are to confirm or not CM's decisions.
Further, CM has dropped the historic use of standard meeting protocol (old business, new business, motions & votes) , adopting instead a 'briefing' style of governance, in which she presents her newest plans and decisions to the assembled, whose responses must wait until she's done. While questions may be replied to, there is no binding vote the volunteers can make on the new policies. The clumsiness of this approach is borne out by...

Major Change 2. The haphazard way that new DJs or spoken work programmers get approved to go on air.

Historically, a DJ wannabe showed up at the regular Saturday volunteers meeting, did a dog and pony show, filled out a membership form, asked to read the list of Do's and Don'ts. The new programmer would be asked to sit in on someone else's show once or twice to learn the basic procedures first hand. After which, the new DJ selects his or her first one hour slot and begins doing a show, typically with a veteran programmer at hand in case of confusion. That's it.

Now?
A programming committee has been set up. At its first meeting (which I didn't attend after CM assured me was only to discuss committee organizational matters) at least one new show was approved and another, a fait accompli grab of four hours by country DJ Larry Beckwith was recognized. More about him later.

But the response when proposals are submitted for two prominent local entertainers (comic Humble Farmer, and Blues guitarist/producer Blind Albert, is a waspish statement that the programming committee "is still trying to get it's self together and figure out which end is up."

Mindful of Gulliver's Big Endians and the Little Endians: the struggle between Lilliputians who preferred cracking open their soft-boiled eggs from the little end, and Blefuscans who preferred the big end; I'm not too sanguine that any end will be up any time soon.

But not to worry. A cheery note from the ProgComm: "Just hang tight, ok?"

Hanging on in Rockland.
Ron

Oh yes, Larry...... This gentleman is now up to twenty two hours on air; the average DJ on WRFR has 2 hours. The fact of this grotesque disparity is simply unmentionable to polite people, so I'll explain to all ye unwashed:

Mr. B, it is said, is a special case. How special? He simply takes any hours he wants. He threatens to drop all his shows if any of his hours including the newly acquired ones are trimmed back. He has physically assaulted several programmers, and thoroughly bullied the last two station managers; he has a criminal record of handgun violence; staff are warned not to upset him, lest....?!?

Ah, but this is counterbalanced in the minds of three successive station managers by the fact that he is over 70 years old and "has nothing else to do". Pretty flimsy rationale, but in the modern world, backing up threats with violence usually gets you your way. Snowy bearded and avuncular-as-Santa-Claus though he may be, Beckwith's use of fear and loathing as a programming tool, is probably without parallel in the known radio universe.