News Jun 5, 2013 at 4:00 am

Amid Culture Change, KBOO Votes for Union

Comments

1
A few things need to be noted here:
The article says members started a group called Keep KBOO KBOO. It should say A FEW members started such a group and it by no means represents the over 5,000 members. Other members have started other groups, such as www.campaign4kboo.org and http://savekboofromsavekboo.blogspot.com/ which also don't represent the entire membership.
Bullard Law sparked a backlash from perhaps 100-200 out of 5,500 members, vocal members yes, but only a few percent of the entire membership. Calling the actions of a few vocal opponents the actions of the broader membership is poor journalism.
Eugene Bradley is married to a long time staffer, so his quotes are not the freest of any conflict of interest.
Where is the source for Jamie Partridge's 15% claim? If 15% of Portlanders support KBOO they are noticeably absent from the membership list.
Madelyn Elder was a long-time host of the labor radio show and is very good friends with various staff members, casting doubt on her quotes.
If the target audience for KBOO is "a little bit left of center" then KBOO is doing a horrible job getting those folks to tune in and support the station. The folks quoted here and many of the 200 or so folks that showed up at the Tabor Space meeting are FAR left of center.
This article is incredibly one-sided and is seriously lacking in full-disclosure.
2
The union issue is important and the handling of change was not smooth. But KBOO is moving forward with negotiations on a contract with the new union and that's good. The real issue is if KBOO actually serves anything resembling "community" in the Portland Metro area.

The Metro area is about 2,289,000 people. The last time there was any audience tracking about 50,000 persons tuned in to KBOO for any program during a week. That's about 2%, including music shows, specialty community shows in Persian, Spanish etc. 5000 persons have contributed money and are "members" which represents 0.2% of the area potential listeners. Only 500 voted in the last election which represents 0.02% of Portland.

Why is no one listening? The people quoted represent a tiny part of Portland's political community, and the programming allowed on KBOO only serves the most narrowly defined viewpoints. Without making some small and thoughtful adjustments to the political and news coverage, KBOO will continue to slip into political and financial irrelevance.

KBOO can accomodate a few more viewpoints and can grow it's audience, without compromising it's core values, so long as well entrenched staff and volunteers don't insist it has to be their way or the highway. Keeping KBOO just the way it is makes it questionable if it really is "Community Radio" anymore.

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