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 Steve Ramsey, GM of KBCS
Steve Ramsey, general manager of KBCS in Bellevue, Washington, reflects on 35 years of serving Seattle and the future of community radio.
Describe Seattle through community radio's eyes.
Seattle is the fourteenth largest market in the U.S., and we are the only community radio station. We're trying to take advantage of 3 1/2 million potential people who could hear us.
Who listens to the station?
Our weekly cumulative audience is about 50,000 people. The people who listen to us are your classic public radio audience. Seattle is blessed with several strong, high-quality public radio stations. It's your upper middle class, typically white, progressive, liberal, college-educated audience – the classic snapshot.
We have seen our mission in the past three or four years as one of social justice, which is pretty consistent with what Pacifica is about. We have been consciously trying to work more closely with local groups and organizations that work in that arena and have made a conscious choice to be involved in more than just lip-service in the non-white community in Seattle, so that we get other voices and other perspectives and points of view on our air.
Right now, we are probably 85% music and 15% news and information. The majority of our new volunteer core is involved in news and information programming, in covering the issues and concerns of their communities. And that has been powerful and transformative for us. The entire staff has taken anti-racism training. I just finished a 40-hour class so that I can teach these anti-racism classes. The whole concept of white privilege and racism is relatively new here but it's a critical discussion that we are trying to have with our community. Seattle is a multi-cultural landscape, and we all know that the media consolidation that has taken place over the last 10 or 20 years has shut those voices out. We see our role as being an outlet for those voices to be heard, to connect these disparate communities together.
Most affiliates without news departments want to build one. Have any advice for people starting out with small budgets?
You have to put your left foot in front of your right foot and just start doing it. It can be as modest as a five-minute news cast once a week; it can be as involved as you have the time and resources. Three years ago, Bruce Wirth started our public affairs offerings by partnering with the city of Bellevue and their office of cultural diversity. We developed a program called "Voices of Diversity," a one-hour call-in talk show that doesn't require a tremendous amount of production in advance. It requires a line-up of guests and someone who can ask leading questions, and then we open up the phone lines. It’s not just about race. It's about social justice, LBGTQ issues, hip-hop and the city of Seattle and the police department. There is no lack of topics.
A call-in talk show is an easy thing to undertake with not a lot of investment. Bruce established a program called "The One World Report," based upon what KBOO in Portland does, where you've got different volunteers contributing to the program as copy editors, as voice talent, production assistants, engineers. Our program just celebrated its second anniversary. It's a one-hour a week news program, available as a podcast also. We have just made some inroads locally with our fledging Northwest Community Radio Network. It's carried by probably close to a dozen different stations around the northwest, and we're happy about that.
What's fueled that has been this decision by Bruce and subsequently supported by the rest of the staff that we offer free weekly trainings to community members who want to learn about news and information. These are 90 minutes, once a week, on a consistent but rotating basis, where we teach people about effective interviewing, how to write for radio. All we ask is that they contribute once to our public affairs offerings. A surprising number of people have stuck around because of that effort. We wouldn't have been able to do this if not for the collaborative model that we set up with the city of Bellevue. We are trying to make that a more integral part of our ongoing effort, to collaborate with local community papers that have professional journalists writing for them. We can turn those local stories into radio stories with minimal fuss if we have the support and blessings of those local papers. Getting those collaborative efforts going is what we see as an opportunity that any community station can take advantage of. Every community of any size has a local community newspaper where professional journalists are doing the work. Getting the local print onto radio is what community radio can do. That way you are not competing with the commercial stations that have big news departments but you are empowering a group of volunteers to do work about issues that matter in their own communities. I've seen this time and time again; it really does work.
Your station projects a cohesive team spirit and a seriousness of intention. How have you been so successful in building such a team, keeping the peace and maintaining motivation?
You delegate the authority to do the work; you give them the tools that they need to do the work; and then you get out of the way. I don't come from a world of authoritarian management experience. If you tell the truth, show up and follow-through with what you say you are going to do, you build credibility that way. And I have said time and time again to people at this station that, if we don't have volunteers to carry out the mission of the station, then what I think doesn't matter. What matters is that those people feel empowered to do the work of the station.
We've been lucky at KBCS because I didn't inherit a factionalized radio station where there were various departments that were at loggerheads or various constituencies that were against each other. I've seen how dysfunctional that can be, and I promised myself when I came here that that wouldn't be the case. And we're lucky because I have the college to report to, and they have been great about delegating the day-to-day operations of the station to professional staff. This is an ideal situation. That isn't to say we don't have challenging situations here, because we do. These are people and people do inconsistent things. We try to treat everybody the same, to establish a code of conduct and ethics. If we make the wrong decision, we'll change it. A decision is just a decision. If it's right, that's fine. We'll be better for it. If we need to change it, hopefully we're smart enough and aware enough to see what needs to be adjusted.
Can you describe your fundraising and membership model and how you structure your underwriting.
Membership comes to this station or any station based upon programming. It's as simple as that. If you've got programming people listen to and you make an effective case during your regular membership drives, money will come in and you can craft a way to get them to join as members. If you have programming that people don't listen to or if you are a community radio station model where you are basically fifteen different radio stations during the course of the day, you've got to craft your message pretty globally on a macro level so you are fundraising for this station. You can't fundraise specifically for the blues show or the women's show. Getting that communicated through the group of volunteers who do programming is the biggest challenge, getting a unified message on the air. We've spent a ton of time training our volunteers, and every hour we spend on our volunteers on evaluations and crafting what they say on the air does make a huge difference. We also know that we could tweak our programming and probably gain a larger audience. And that's the challenge we're working on right now -- how best to maximize that.
We accept underwriting from businesses because I firmly believe that they are part of this community too. Do we accept money from large corporations? We haven't in the past. We did get a grant for a couple of years from Boeing, which has a good track record locally in supporting arts and culture. That was an internal discussion that we had, and we chose not to do it after that time frame expired. We don't go after big corporations. We have found that local arts presenters are more than happy to underwrite on the station. Local presenters are more than willing to trade logo space on their poster for an underwriting announcement on our air. These aren't faceless businesses. These are individuals who are trying to make it, just like the rest of us are trying to make it. They have a product or a service that our listeners use anyway. The relationship is already there; it's just a question of getting an announcement on our air that is consistent with who we are and what the FCC allows. There is no philosophical problem here yet. Of our $600,000. a year, it's probably about 10% of our annual budget. I'd like it to be more because, if we have more funds, that means we can do more work with our volunteers and for the community.
When did you discover radio? Did you think you end up being a station manager of a community radio station? How did you get here?
Radio became a huge deal for me when I was growing up and the great music that Top 40 AM used to play. I'm a musician, so music has always been what soothes my soul – hearing it on the radio and realizing that this just flowed through the air and came into your house through this little box. My parents had an old console radio that I thought was exotic and cool. I was inspired in the 1970's when my wife and I first got together and there was one of the last free-form commercial FM radio stations in Seattle. We lived in an apartment building with a couple of the deejays from that station. Because of the friendship, I was able to get into the station and help. When I went to college in the early 1980's, I gravitated toward communications and media. At the same time, I was in northern California and there was a great community radio station, KVMR, near the town where I lived. I started volunteering there. I ended up getting hired.
Tell us about the origins of KBCS, and describe your programming.
The station signed on on February 3, 1973 as a 10-watt student station operated by the English department at Bellevue Community College. 35 years later the station is still licensed to BCC but we are no longer involved in instructing students in broadcasting. As it is, we take our mandate from our community of supporters in Seattle.
The station began as a classic “student lab.” Sometime between the mid-seventies and mid-eighties, the station became a blend between student and community involvement. At some point, the people in charge of the radio station decided that in order for it to better serve the community, there needed to be volunteer voices involved as well.
Then in the mid-eighties, the college leadership brought in a professional half-time manager to oversee the transition of KBCS from a student-powered radio station to a community radio station. They hired Harriet Vasquez, and the station moved towards the community radio model – which we operate as today.
The station was programmed by volunteers. There was a fair amount of jazz on the air; the volunteers who were able to do programming at the radio station at the time were into jazz, so by default that became the format. KBCS distinguished itself locally as the station that played the "real jazz.”
The station continued for the next twelve years under Harriet's leadership. Then, an on-site analysis of the potential for KBCS produced a series of recommendations for the college leadership to pursue, including hiring a full-time professional manager, hiring a development underwriting director, solving the station's facility problems, trying to improve the signal, and creating more direct linkage between the station and the licensee, institutionally, by having the station involved in instructing broadcast classes.
I was hired as the professional manager in 2000. When I came, there was myself and a three-quarter-time program director. I immediately raised the program director to full-time, so there were two full-time staff people and two part-time staff people. Over the next eight years, as we've grown in audience and relevance in the local community, fundraising support has grown to the point where we have five full-time staff and four part-time staff. The station, when I took over, had an annual operating budget of about $180,000. Today it's about $700,000.
When did KBCS become a Pacifica affiliate? And why did you do it?
When I came in 2000, we were a Pacifica affiliate carrying the Pacifica Network News. This was at the beginning of the dark days for Pacifica. When I heard the Pacifica Board President break into the news and go on the air talking about the situation at the Houston affiliate, I thought this is an internal situation, this is not news, not something we need to participate in. We ceased our affiliation at that point. Once the National Board got its act together, we decided that being a Pacifica affiliate was an important aspect of our peace and social justice work here in the Puget Sound region. We also started carrying "Democracy Now!" on Labor Day of 2001.
Pacifica means that there is a national organization that can support a local affiliate like ours when we need it and it means that we're connected with a network of like-minded radio stations nationally. We're happy to be thought of as the Pacifica affiliate for the Seattle area. It means something to us.
What is your vision for how a national network of community radio stations could grow to be more meaningful or have an impact on radio in general?
If you lose credibility locally, it doesn't matter what you do nationally. A station like ours has to remain relevant in the community we are serving. And that's different for every community. The issues that people in Seattle are facing are different from the issues that someone in Miami faces or Rochester, New York. Even in this day and age when you can get a piece of music delivered to your iPhone in eight different formats, the thing that distinguishes one station from the next is their ability to meet the needs of the local community. If we've got many network stations who are meeting the needs of their local communities networked together, then we're having the same conversation in all those communities. And that's a powerful thing. The only way it can work is to be part of national network but to retain local identity. People can get the programming that we carry in other ways. People can get programming the NPR stations carry in other ways. So, what distinguishes us from anybody else is our ability to be meaningful in the community where we exist.
Talk about the Northwest Network, the benefits of a regional network.
The issues that face the people in the Northwest are in some ways no different from the issues facing anybody else. What we did with "Reclaim the Media" is to create a more quantifiable network of stations that can share content and share skills. Where is the next generation of community radio people going to come from? If community stations aren't providing that training, it's not going to happen. People come in the doors of stations like KBCS with a kernel of an idea and then we train them.
I don't think community radio stations are in competition with each other. We're in competition with the iPhone on my belt or the computer in front of me. What KBCS has been able to do, and I'm quite proud of, is create a training program that can be replicated throughout a number of stations. We've done that with Prometheus, at barn-raisings for regional LPFM's. We've worked with other stations in Washington on local and statewide issues to some effect. We've created sister station relationships where there had been competition. That's progress. It taps the potential of the series of local stations around here to tell their stories. I'd love to get content from a station on Vancouver Island or a Native American station somewhere. Hopefully, what the network will do is create the possibility that this can happen. It runs counter to the capitalist model where you have to kill your competition.
Where is your station headed? And what about the quirks?
Like a lot of community radio stations, we make do with what we have. We're broadcasting from a residential house, 1700 square feet, three-bedroom, two-bathroom house. The wall of one of the bathrooms is the same wall as our studio, so when the toilet is flushed and the microphone is on, you can hear it. If the window is open to the back yard in the main air studio, you can hear the fire station across the way or the dog next door barking. In an ideal world, we'd get a new facility. It's a bigger issue because of our relationship with the college. It requires relationship building with the licensee and that's what the strategic plan that we're drafting now hopes to address – quantifying a relationship with the college so that we can remain an independent community radio station model, but taking our experience in training people to help establish a more viable broadcasting program than they now have and spin that into a larger media training component, which may end up resulting in a new facility. This will be at least a ten-year project. That's the big picture.
We also want to quantify and codify the collaborative model that is the key to the future of community radio in general. Collaborating with local newsgathering organizations and cultural organizations is how you can market your station on little to no money. Their constituents find out about you; you find out about them; and it grows in an organic, grassroots way. Being open to those outcomes is what smart management is about.
Smart people think on their feet and adjust. As my older brother said, "You must adjust for available wind conditions and it will take you wherever."
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