Where are our members?
Why IS WBAI in such financial difficulty?
Several reasons have been offered in the current campaign:
- Our membership has dropped.
- We have high fixed costs.
- The economy is bad.
- Support for public radio is dropping.
"Justice and Unity" has focused on factors 2-4 - things over which we have little or no control. WBAI can't make the economy better. It seems unlikely we'll find a better place to transmit from than the Empire State Building. And so on.
In other words, according to "Justice and Unity," things are bad, but it's not our fault. We are helpless.
I don't agree. I'm confident that listener-sponsored Pacifica radio can successfully make a go of it in New York. Yes, things cost more here, but the flip side is that we have the most populous listening area of all the five stations. Membership should be higher - a LOT higher. But relative to the number of people in our listening area, we have the LOWEST membership of all the five stations, last time I looked.
As of January 2004:
| station | listening area population | station members | market penetration |
| WBAI | 16,486,000 | 18,500 | 0.11% |
| KPFK | 14,369,000 | 23,500 | 0.16% |
| KPFT | 3,741,000 | 10,300 | 0.28% |
| WPFW | 4,492,000 | 14,000 | 0.31% |
| KPFA | 5,971,000 | 29,000 | 0.49% |
("Market penetration" is membership divided by listening area population.)
What the table is saying is that five of every thousand people in KPFA's listening area are station members there, but only one of every thousand is a member here. That's why I think it's correct to focus on WBAI's failure to attract more station members. We should be able to do better. We need not reach the level of KPFA - even a small improvement would make our deficit disappear.
Why don't we? Fundamentally it comes down to programming. That's why people choose to support WBAI. There have been several concrete changes over the last several years that have hurt us:
- Wake up Call was better before 2001 that it has been since - back then the team of Amy Goodman, Bernard White, Robert Knight, and others were very good. No line-up since then has been quite the same, in my opinion. Wake up call is WBAI's signature program - more people listen to the radio then than at other hours.
- Also in the 1990s we had two gifted program directors in Samori Marksman and Andrew Phillips. WBAI needs excellent performance out of this position to thrive.
- The removal of Gary Null in late 2004 surely lost members. Gary Null had a large audience. Regardless of what one thinks of his program, his removal hurt the station.
- Fund drives have gotten longer and longer, cutting into regular programming and likely alienating some listeners.
- WBAI has, to a certain extent, alienated the peace movement by not covering marches.
And people can think of others. These things are under the station's control and thus should be of concern to the local station board.
Also, I have to say, the debate on the causes of WBAI's decline during this campaign has been much more extensive than anything that has taken place at the actual LSB meetings. At meetings, the topic is never raised.