"KQED offers buyout packages with layoffs potentially coming to cut costs"

"KQED is initiating staff buyouts, an effort to reduce costs in the face of a budget deficit, SFGATE has learned.
In an April 17 email to staff at the Bay Area’s best-known public broadcasting station, KQED President Michael Isip said the buyouts are a first step in reducing costs and that additional tactics might be necessary, including layoffs or a hiring freeze."

"early retirement packages are being offered to employees 55 and older who have been with the organization for at least 10 continuous years"

They lost $10 mil in 2023.

That’s terrible.

I think it's notable that some of the public-radio operations running into financial difficulties have this in common: projects to build new buildings, or significantly expand existing ones. I'm thinking of Colorado Public Radio, CapRadio, even CKUA in
Alberta, and now KQED. These stations made their plans and, in some cases, executed them during a time of cheap money. Interest rates have gone up and money isn't so cheap any more, so there's a pinch. You can't undo a capital expenditure once it's made so the operating budget takes a hit.

KQED, radio and TV, was somewhat notorious for having high overheads not directly associated with the broadcast product. I hope they address that before cutting what listeners and viewers value.

Hope everyone at KQED the best and hope they recover from this situation.

I'm pretty sure they got a huge windfall selling a UHF TV channel in the last auction / repack. So they likely still have some reserves. Still - you can't go on like that forever. This certainly would limit their ability to take over CapRadio operations (as speculated on the Sacramento board).

Dave B.

Mark Roberts said:

I think it's notable that some of the public-radio operations running into financial difficulties have this in common: projects to build new buildings, or significantly expand existing ones. I'm thinking of Colorado Public Radio, CapRadio, even CKUA in
Alberta, and now KQED. These stations made their plans and, in some cases, executed them during a time of cheap money. Interest rates have gone up and money isn't so cheap any more, so there's a pinch. You can't undo a capital expenditure once it's made so the operating budget takes a hit.

KQED, radio and TV, was somewhat notorious for having high overheads not directly associated with the broadcast product. I hope they address that before cutting what listeners and viewers value.

Click to expand...

Right on, Mark.

KQED has way too many people on staff. Listen to the credits at the end of the Forum hours. It seems like each hour has half-a-dozen or more producers, plus the engineer/board-op, plus the host, plus the EP. So by my count that's about 16 people to produce 10 hours a week, which are then repeated in the evenings. Michael Krasny used to host both hours himself, four days a week, plus a Friday host. Plus 4 or 5 producers for the combined 10 hours of programming. (And Krasny came from KGO, where he worked with a single producer/screener and one board-op, who also ran the controls for one of the adjacent shows.)

KQED has two minutes of news each hour, 6 AM-7 PM, that's 28 minutes a day. Plus a local 7 minute news segment at 6:22 AM weekdays (which gets repeated at 8:22). If there's a hot local story or two, they may commandeer NPR's time on one or two newscasts. There's also "The California Report", 7 or 8 minutes each weekday (repeated in two subsequent hours), and an hour a week of "Political Breakdown", and a half hour of their Friday "California Reports Magazine" (repeated once, after midnight).

The weekend newscasts often aren't even current, reusing stories that aired during the week.

And that's it as far as locally produced content. Call it 2-1/2 hours a week of original news and "magazine" content, plus the ten hours of Forum. How many people does this need?

So how are all these staffer being utilized? How do they have a headcount approaching 500?? How many podcasts and web stories can they be producing? Do they think they're producing a daily newspaper? Yes, there are engineers and tech people and admins who would need to be there regardless, and some of them are on the TV side (where next-to-nothing local is being produced either), but come on, this is a textbook example of Parkinson's Law in practice: The number of workers within bureaucracies tends to grow, regardless of the amount of work to be done.

KQED's Form 990 filings are a true revelation.

DaveBayArea said:

I'm pretty sure they got a huge windfall selling a UHF TV channel in the last auction / repack. So they likely still have some reserves. Still - you can't go on like that forever. This certainly would limit their ability to take over CapRadio operations (as speculated on the Sacramento board).

Dave B.

Click to expand...

$95 MILLION, Dave. They got KTEH for next-to-nothing from the San Jose Unified School District, and flipped that spectrum a few years late for $95MM. Leaving, BTW, the viewers who had been getting KTEH/54 over-the-air with no options if they were out-of-range of Channel 9's signal. (I know, I'm one of them, and lost all PBS content until recently, when it became available via the PBS streaming app.) That's another reason Bay Area people may feel less than charitable towards KQED.

When I was there, KQED used a program called Dalet for audio editing, playback, etc. The company that makes that program is headquartered in France. At one point when there was a problem with the program (I don’t remember what it was), some Dalet people came to KQED from France to figure out how to fix it.

Also, the KQED HQ remodel cost $94 million and was part of a capital campaign that raised $140 million:

Weiserguy said:

Right on, Mark.

KQED has way too many people on staff. Listen to the credits at the end of the Forum hours. It seems like each hour has half-a-dozen or more producers, plus the engineer/board-op, plus the host, plus the EP. So by my count that's about 16 people to produce 10 hours a week, which are then repeated in the evenings. Michael Krasny used to host both hours himself, four days a week, plus a Friday host. Plus 4 or 5 producers for the combined 10 hours of programming. (And Krasny came from KGO, where he worked with a single producer/screener and one board-op, who also ran the controls for one of the adjacent shows.)

KQED has two minutes of news each hour, 6 AM-7 PM, that's 28 minutes a day. Plus a local 7 minute news segment at 6:22 AM weekdays (which gets repeated at 8:22). If there's a hot local story or two, they may commandeer NPR's time on one or two newscasts. There's also "The California Report", 7 or 8 minutes each weekday (repeated in two subsequent hours), and an hour a week of "Political Breakdown", and a half hour of their Friday "California Reports Magazine" (repeated once, after midnight).

The weekend newscasts often aren't even current, reusing stories that aired during the week.

And that's it as far as locally produced content. Call it 2-1/2 hours a week of original news and "magazine" content, plus the ten hours of Forum. How many people does this need?

So how are all these staffer being utilized? How do they have a headcount approaching 500?? How many podcasts and web stories can they be producing? Do they think they're producing a daily newspaper? Yes, there are engineers and tech people and admins who would need to be there regardless, and some of them are on the TV side (where next-to-nothing local is being produced either), but come on, this is a textbook example of Parkinson's Law in practice: The number of workers within bureaucracies tends to grow, regardless of the amount of work to be done.

KQED's Form 990 filings are a true revelation.

Click to expand...

So how many staffers do you think it should take to produce a live and local two hour show five days a week? Have you ever pitched an idea to them? Either Forum or The California Report would most likely take pitches from listeners, if they’re good enough.

By the way, you forgot the interns for each show who also put in work creating show pitches, researching topics and possible guests, etc. as well as the on-call producers and the people who host KQED’s various podcasts and write stories for the website.

radiofan2023 said:

So how many staffers do you think it should take to produce a live and local two hour show five days a week? Have you ever pitched an idea to them? Either Forum or The California Report would most likely take pitches from listeners, if they’re good enough.

By the way, you forgot the interns for each show who also put in work creating show pitches, researching topics and possible guests, etc. as well as the on-call producers and the people who host KQED’s various podcasts and write stories for the website.

Click to expand...

You're right, I did forget to include the interns. Though they are temporary, and there primarily for educational purposes. (If you're lucky enough to find an intern who's ready and competent to step into the shoes of a fulltime employee, that's gravy, but not the typical situation. Your goal should be that by the end of their term, they've learned enough to produce one good program before they leave.)

On-call people are usually not included in an organization's FTE headcount.

I had written something about podcasts, but I accidentally edited it out before posting.

As for how many people a show like Forum needs, wouldn't you think a competent producer should be able to produce at least two hours a week? The equivalent of one 2-hr-a-day program. In which case the answer would be five producers, total, handling all the booking, administrative overhead, research, call screening, etc. needed to produce those two hours each week. Do you think that's unreasonable?

I know you've said you used to work there, what was it you did?

As someone who's actually produced and hosted public radio talk shows (in an extremely understaffed situation), I would love to hear from the critics here about what it is that they think producing a segment of one of these shows entails. The more specific, the better.

fybush said:

As someone who's actually produced and hosted public radio talk shows (in an extremely understaffed situation), I would love to hear from the critics here about what it is that they think producing a segment of one of these shows entails. The more specific, the better.

Click to expand...

You are going to get a serenade of silence.

DaveBayArea said:

I'm pretty sure they got a huge windfall selling a UHF TV channel in the last auction / repack. So they likely still have some reserves. Still - you can't go on like that forever. This certainly would limit their ability to take over CapRadio operations (as speculated on the Sacramento board).

Dave B.

Click to expand...

The speculation about that comes from the CapRadio Endowment, which is urging a KVIE (Sacramento's PBS channel) takeover of CapRadio's licenses and operations without assuming the existing debt. They'd buy the licenses and likely the all new broadcast equipment sitting in the unused studios downtown that Sac State now says CapRadio will not occupy.

The Endowment fears (and I think with good reason) that a KQED takeover would likely be a license purchase and no more.

KQED might have someone in Sacramento to cover the region (Sac, Stockton, Tahoe), or they might not. Apart from KQED's two-hour Forum show at 9 and CapRadio's one-hour Insight at noon, the vast majority of the two stations' weekday schedules are the same programs, occasionally in different hours, but often at the same time.

They could probably automate local weather and traffic reports that would air only in Sacramento. Otherwise, CapRadio would be a repeater of KQED, with a much bigger signal (and a resulting larger pool of potential donors) than it has currently with KQEI.

fybush said:

As someone who's actually produced and hosted public radio talk shows (in an extremely understaffed situation), I would love to hear from the critics here about what it is that they think producing a segment of one of these shows entails. The more specific, the better.

Click to expand...

TODAY: "You guys don't need all these people!"

(layoffs ensue)

NEXT MONTH: "Why does this show suck so bad?"

michael hagerty said:

TODAY: "You guys don't need all these people!"

(layoffs ensue)

NEXT MONTH: "Why does this show suck so bad?"

Click to expand...

RADIO CRITIC: "There's too much automation in radio. It should get back to hiring more people to do local, live programming."

(radio staffs up)

RADIO CRITIC: "Why do they have such a bloated staff?"

fybush said:

As someone who's actually produced and hosted public radio talk shows (in an extremely understaffed situation), I would love to hear from the critics here about what it is that they think producing a segment of one of these shows entails. The more specific, the better.

Click to expand...

Since it was apparently the last paragraph of my post that triggered several responses along this line, I remind all and sundry of what I wrote, with a key phrase emphasized:

KQED, radio and TV, was somewhat notorious for having high overheads not directly associated with the broadcast product. I hope they address that before cutting what listeners and viewers value.

Click to expand...

That is all. (Harrrrrumph!)

Following up on Mark, I detailed up above (msg #6 in this thread) what KQED-FM produces over the course of a week. Two hours a day of Forum, which is a talk/interview program on a single topic each hour, with a different host and team each hour. And less than an aggregate half hour of original, local news per day. That is it. I also mentioned that TV produces next-to-nothing. (Check Please Bay Area counts, but not for much.) I thought they had relaunched their weekly Newsroom program, but I just checked their schedule and even that's not there, so local news/public affairs content appears to be zero.

So given those parameters, answer your own question, Scott: how many people do you think they need? Or Mike? (Until he retired, I used to listen to Mike's very polished two minute local news inserts on CapRadio, while concurrently reading the variety of comments he'd add to discussions here on RD, and wonder how overworked he could possibly have been if he had the time to do both so well. And CapRadio's headcount was, even back then, a fraction of KQED's.)

(I will concede KQED does have a robust team in the fundraising department for producing all their pledge break content, which then seemingly repeats forever.)

Weiserguy said:

Following up on Mark, I detailed up above (msg #6 in this thread) what KQED-FM produces over the course of a week. Two hours a day of Forum, which is a talk/interview program on a single topic each hour, with a different host and team each hour. And less than an aggregate half hour of original, local news per day. That is it. I also mentioned that TV produces next-to-nothing. (Check Please Bay Area counts, but not for much.) I thought they had relaunched their weekly Newsroom program, but I just checked their schedule and even that's not there, so local news/public affairs content appears to be zero.

So given those parameters, answer your own question, Scott: how many people do you think they need? Or Mike? (Until he retired, I used to listen to Mike's very polished two minute local news inserts on CapRadio, while concurrently reading the variety of comments he'd add to discussions here on RD, and wonder how overworked he could possibly have been if he had the time to do both so well. And CapRadio's headcount was, even back then, a fraction of KQED's.)

Click to expand...

They were 90 seconds, and I wrote, produced and anchored them myself (even before the layoffs). I write quickly (this post took 30 seconds) and used my phone to do it.

My relatively light workload and ability to multitask shouldn’t be considered representative of anyone else’s.

Weiserguy said:

You're right, I did forget to include the interns. Though they are temporary, and there primarily for educational purposes. (If you're lucky enough to find an intern who's ready and competent to step into the shoes of a fulltime employee, that's gravy, but not the typical situation. Your goal should be that by the end of their term, they've learned enough to produce one good program before they leave.)

On-call people are usually not included in an organization's FTE headcount.

I had written something about podcasts, but I accidentally edited it out before posting.

As for how many people a show like Forum needs, wouldn't you think a competent producer should be able to produce at least two hours a week? The equivalent of one 2-hr-a-day program. In which case the answer would be five producers, total, handling all the booking, administrative overhead, research, call screening, etc. needed to produce those two hours each week. Do you think that's unreasonable?

I know you've said you used to work there, what was it you did?

Click to expand...

I worked on Forum. What you may not realize/know is that in addition to doing the 5 daily Forum shows (which are broken up into a more local focused first hour and national focused second hour, so producers and hosts are really doing/planning 10 one hour shows) for that week, the producers also work ahead on future shows, and some mornings have to scrap what they had planned for that morning’s show or change it due to breaking national news or a guest not being able to come in, if it’s a one guest hour. They’re also screening calls, talking to the host on talkback, doing rundowns, bringing the guests up from the lobby and getting them settled in the green room, then bringing them in and setting up the mics for them, etc.

Then there are the post show meetings where you talk about how the shows went, how the guests were, how the listener responses to the 2 shows went and using the listeners responses and other feedback to brainstorm ideas for future shows. You also have to get the release to the guests for them to sign, so the show can be rebroadcast. In addition, sometimes producers host the show so they have to do show prep for that. Michael Hagerty can probably speak to show prep regarding hosting, since Insight isn’t much different than Forum.

There was also a “listener hotline” where people could leave messages for the show, so that had to be checked every morning. I’m not sure if that was a perk of donating to KQED or what. There wasn’t one part of it that was more work than anything else.

There was also the time where someone said they were going to sue the radio station, because someone else allegedly libeled them on some comment thread under a show post. I wasn’t there at the time, but someone who was told me about it. As a result, we couldn’t ban posters from commenting, but we could delete their posted comments, and I think every comment had to be reviewed before it went live. Or maybe there was a word filter that would flag certain comments if they had cursing or something.

At one point, KQED was going to do online video streaming of Forum, but a lot of guests didn’t want to be video streamed, so that idea was scrapped. However, the cameras stayed up in the corners of the air studio.

What you said about the TV side not having much local content is true. If what they run isn’t bringing in the pledges/viewers, then they have reason to change, but they aren’t going to pour money into doing new local shows when they have $10 million of cost cutting to do.

rustyhodge said:

They lost $10 mil in 2023.

Click to expand...

What's shocking is that this happened at a station with a big audience, in one of America's wealthiest metros. If KQED can't make ends meet, I hate to think what PBS stations must be going through in much smaller & less affluent markets.