Web links related to the Back of the Book program of October 8, 2007


It's Friday morning, October 19, 2007 04:38, and this page really is finished being updated. We spent a lot of time talking about the PNB meeting during this program. This was a very important meeting and it will affect WBAI for the foreseeable future. We aired a number of audio clips from the meeting, there are links to them on this page. Unfortunately, we didn't get to everything we'd wanted to get to. Some of that will be brought up on the next program, when we're pitching, and some will probably be Web-only content.

Did you know that I've got a brief synopsis of many of the WBAI LSB meetings? Well, I do.

The September 25th, 2007, WBAI LSB meeting was another toxic one. The faction currently in charge finally passed their fantasy budget at this meeting. It got rejected by the PNB days later.

WBAI has a program schedule up on its Web site. The site has gotten many of the individual program pages together to provide links and such, so check it out.

WBAI has an official Web stream of what's on the air at any time! You can go here and pick which type of stream you want! If this stream isn't working let me know. It was working all right at 10:20 PM last night.

WBAI is archiving the programs! Just go here and you'll be able to listen to the program any time for the next couple of weeks. Unfortunately, Back of the Book is not one of the programs that you can download, you can only listen to it on line. But maybe someone will change that at some point. NOTE: The archives have not always been behaved properly. We can't guarantee their condition. If this Back of the Book program isn't archived I'll post an archive myself. I'm glad to announce that with a new person doing the archives Back of the Book and Carrier Wave are properly named in the archive. Of course I'd recommend that you just listen to both programs in this time slot!

With all of the talk about WBAI's budget problems there has been a lot of talk about laying off the Paid Staff. I've been one of the people saying that if anyone should be layed off it should be Management! Well, the following has been posted on WBAI's official Web site.

Notice from AFTRA

Notice from Shop Steward, Jose Santiago, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the union that represents WBAI's Paid Staff.

AFTRA’s legal counsel has presented to management the cost saving ideas discussed during our last union meeting. They include our concerns about such issues as the charging of administrative fees to entities that run grant programs out of WBAI’s offices, the hiring of a full-time Development Director, which management says it no longer plans to do, and the need for management to comply with the provision in our contract that calls for better planning of fund drives.

The union also informed management that we will exercise our right to perform an independent audit of WBAI and Pacifica’s books, if they go ahead with some of the layoffs and staff salary concessions they have been discussing as they work toward finalizing the next budget.

Thank you.

J. Santiago, Shop Steward

We'll be pitching on the next program, on October 21/22.

We hope that you'll pledge to WBAI while Back of the Book is on at that time.

If you listen to the radio program on tape or via the Internet archives you probably won't be able to pledge during the program, but you can send us a check ahead of time. A regular one year membership is $25. So please send a check made payable to “Pacifica/WBAI” and send it to:

R. Paul Martin
% WBAI
120 Wall St. 10th floor
New York, NY 10005

And we hope that everyone who listens pledges or sends in a check.

I should also point out that we'll need help answering the phones. This aspect of things now requires that you get your name added to a list so you can enter the building. So if you want to volunteer to answer phones for this 'thon you should call the Volunteer Coordinator at 1-212-209-2826. We always need more folks to answer the phones.

We've been told for decades that the Large and Small Magellenic Clouds, a pair of nearby galaxies, were satellites of our own Milky Way galaxy.

Well, some new research seems to blow that idea out of the water!

Long time activist, and WBAI listener Susan Blake has died. She was a good person. She knew that the faction currently in charge was destroying the place and said it.

There's a memorial Web page to Ms. Blake here.

I went to the NY/NJ Pen Show this past fortnight, we didn't get to talk about it on this program but I'm hoping to do so on a future program.

We talked a lot about the Pacifica National Board (PNB) meeting that took place last weekend. Pacifica owns WBAI, and four other radio stations.

We played a number of edited sound clips from the PNB meeting, and the general theme was that WBAI and the Pacifica Foundation are in quite a financial bind.

Pacifica CFO Lonnie Hicks said of Pacifica and its stations at one point during the PNB meeting, “We are having a financial crisis at Pacifica. I don't know how we're going to make it through the year.”

I've decided that since this was such an important PNB meeting with so much information about WBAI and its budget being discussed that I've put up a Web page on it, which includes the pieces I played on this program plus a couple of more that we didn't have time for. Click here to go to the Web page about the PNB's September 2007, meeting on the budgets.

Pacifica's newly hired Executive Director Nicole Sawaya will start on November 12th. Here's a 55 second speech she made to the PNB meeting.

If you want to read some of the reports from this event you can view them here.

And in looking at these reports I found the WBAI interim General Manager's fourth quarter report to the WBAI LSB. This hasn't even been presented to the LSB yet!

If you want to listen to the raw audio of the meeting(s) you can go here and find hours and hours of them! Thanks to Otis Maclay and Sirius for the hard work of recording all of these meetings and then making them available to all of us.

Speaking of Executive Directors, Greg Guma, whose term as ED just ended the other day, gave what some are calling an “exit interview.” It's a video, and you can view it here.

There's been some confusion by some about the number of members that WBAI has. The members are those of you who have donated at least $25 to the radio station, or done 3 or more hours of work for the radio station, over the past year. Here are the number of ballots sent out for the past two elections and the number which will be sent out this election, along with a number from WBAI Management.

WBAI Membership
Ballots sent out 200420,873
Ballots sent out 200616,404
Ballots to be sent out 200715,519
WBAI iGM's reported statement of members14,571

I do not know why there's a difference of 948 listener members between the WBAI iGM's count and the number of ballots that the National and Local Election Supervisors are going to send out. And of course this number does not include Staff.

There are a lot of issues that are considered hazardous to talk about on the air at WBAI, even now that the gag rule has been lifted. However, there is the Internet! There are mailing lists which you can subscribe to and Web based message boards devoted to WBAI and Pacifica issues. Many controversial WBAI/Pacifica issues are discussed on these lists.

Probably the most popular list that's sprung up is the “NewPacifica” mailing list. This one is very lively and currently includes over 400 subscribers coast to coast.

Being lively, of course, it sometimes also gets a bit nasty. All sorts of things are happening on this list and official announcements are frequently posted there.

You can look at the NewPacifica list here, and you can join the list from that Web page too. If you subscribe to the “NewPacifica” mailing list you will receive, via E-mail, all of the messages which are sent to that list.

There is the option to receive a “digest” version of the list, which means that a bunch of messages are bundled into one E-mail and sent to you at regular intervals, this cuts down on the number of E-mails you get from the list. You will also be able to send messages to the list.

This list also has a Web based interface where you can read messages and from which you can post your own messages.

There is also the more WBAI specific “Goodlight” Web based message board. It is sometimes referred to on Back of the Book as “the bleepin' blue board,” owing to the blue background used on its Web pages. This one has many people posting anonymously and there's also an ancillary “WBAI people” board that's just totally out of hand.

When the computer in Master Control is working we sometimes have live interaction with people posting on the “Goodlight Board” during the program.

Our very own Uncle Sidney Smith, whose program Carrier Wave alternates with us, has a blog these days. You can reach his blog here.

My voice mail number at WBAI is 212-209-2996. Leave a message.

You can also send me E-mail.



WBAI related links

WBAI Listeners' Web page

WBAI Management's official Web site


Back to the Back of the Book page

Back to my home page.

The contents of this Web page are copyright © 2007, R. Paul Martin.