Last week we reported that WWOZ programming director Dwayne Breashears had resigned from his position with the beloved community radio station. Yesterday, NOLA.com dug deeper into the situation with a report of their own, which details the on and off air issues that have forced at least six employees to leave the station over the past year.
OffBeat has obtained a copy of a letter–written by former WWOZ Membership Director and longtime volunteer Dimitri Apessos–to the radio station’s Board of Directors. The note, which was penned before NOLA.com published its story yesterday, is titled “A Way Forward for WWOZ.” It dives into most of the issues addressed in yesterday’s article and lists five ways that WWOZ can rectify its alleged problems. The letter reads:
A WAY FORWARD FOR WWOZ
Note: This was written before the recent nola.com article but, if anything, its publication underscores the urgency I tried to impress upon you. The time for spin control, Orwellian double-speak, and one-on-one coffee dates between Arthur Cohen and those who speak out against his boss is long gone. We must act now if we are to save this gem of a radio station.
It is obvious– to anyone willing to take an honest look– that WWOZ is at time of crisis. A growing number of volunteers, staff, and former staff are speaking openly about their mistrust of the station’s leadership and their feelings that the management does not reflect the wishes of the community it is appointed to represent.
This rising tide of ill-will is not something that can be swept under the rug. Many of us affiliated with the radio station are receiving questions about the recent surge in staff departures and change in tone. We are being approached about this not just by friends and listeners, but by the press. The public departure of the Programming Director, coinciding with a disturbing rise in hiring of people with no previous ties to New Orleans, is creating a public atmosphere where everyone who has ever held a grudge against the station or its leadership is encouraged to voice it…and loudly.
To be sure, many of the recently resurfacing complaints have nothing to do with the current crisis. However, the level of anger and bitterness has reached a tipping point. As more people “in the know” are airing their grievances about WWOZ, they are emboldening less informed listeners and former volunteers to speak their mind about what they perceive as the flaws of WWOZ. For a cultural non-profit organization, which mostly exists because of the goodwill of the community of listeners and supporters, this can be fatal.
It’s not possible to go through and argue with everyone speaking out about the station one-on-one. In the age of social media, gripes and rants take on a life of their own. Drastic action must be taken in order to quiet the noise and get back to the task of being “the worldwide voice, archive, and flag-bearer of New Orleans culture and musical heritage.”
1- Immediate change in top leadership. Anyone with intimate knowledge of the station can tell you that WWOZ will not be able to move forward to its next stage without the departure of long-time General Manager David Freedman. His refusal to even consider a succession strategy through his time of ill health and increasingly public pressure to resign cannot be described as anything short of selfish.
His departure will not lead, by itself to the station’s salvation, but that salvation cannot occur with him still there. His departure would signal to the community a genuine willingness to tackle the job ahead. It would go a long way towards winning back many of the people he has alienated and angered over his 20+ year reign at the station. Maybe we can’t win many of those people back as volunteers or supporters, but at least we can stop them from bad-mouthing the radio station at every opportunity.
2- An honest accounting of management’s recent practices and hires. One of the main complaints being voiced is the hiring of people with little or no prior experience with New Orleans or its culture. Much of the hiring that Mr. Freedman has done personally over the past few years has been specifically from the New York area, and an open look at the payrolls will reveal that for them to be lured down to New Orleans many of these individuals are being paid salaries that are much bigger than those afforded to long-time, devoted, and knowledgeable local employees. In at least once case, a person was hired from New York and moved down to New Orleans for a job that many locals would be well-suited for. This job—video director– was not advertised until a year after it was filled, causing much embarrassment to the staff of WWOZ who had to explain to their friends and acquaintances applying for the position that the job opening simply “didn’t exist.” This is a scenario that has played out more than once in recent years, as Mr. Freedman seems to impulsively hire whomever he pleases.
In the case of CDO(Chief Development Officer), a devoted long-time New Orleans transplant and Loyola graduate left under tearful circumstances immediately after Jazz Fest 2015. Mr. Freedman first told all staff that Ms. Gross left for “personal reasons.” When confronted with knowledge that this was a falsehood, he changed to telling the very small, closely-knit department that he was legally prohibited from discussing the subject. The position was filled temporarily by Mark Laskowski, a consultant brought in, at the station’s expense, from New England. The development staff was told that Mr. Laskowski was coming in as a direct result of Ms. Gross’s sudden departure, despite clear evidence that the plans for his arrival had already been in place. I do not know how much Mr. Laskowski was payed for his services, or continues to be payed, but I know for a fact that we were asked by Mr. Freedman’s assistant to create a tax receipt for the friends of a board member who provided him with free housing in the Esplanade Ridge area for several months. When we refused to issue such receipt, we were asked to provide the owners of the house with a pair of Brass Passes to Jazz Fest 2016.
Training your new boss is never pleasant. Doing so under such burdened circumstances, and when said temporary boss displays no understanding of New Orleans culture, is downright painful to one’s soul. In the end, I filed a complaint with HR because Mr. Laskowski insisted on sending me personally addressed, hostile, and bitter emails to my wwoz.org email address. The HR officer, Ms. Leslie Molson, who is also Mr. Freedman’s personal assistant, facilitated a phone conference between myself and Mr. Laskowski, resulting in his promise not to send me further emails without CCing other staff members. Before this phone-call, Ms. Molson took time to explain to me that my documented complaint was dubious because Mr. Laskowski had lobbied for a raise in my salary. If hiring practices are to be this unilateral, having the GM’s personal assistant serve as HR officer is a huge conflict of interest.
I cannot speak as knowledgably for the hiring of the permanent CDO or interim COO. My understanding is that several members of the board and staff who were part of that process feel that Mr. Freedman hijacked the process to appoint people of his own choosing. I do know that while the CDO search was taking place, the vast majority of finalists had little or no prior knowledge of New Orleans, one of them flown in from as far as Alaska for an interview.
3- A focus on the station’s mission statement and principles. This will probably have to be accompanied by changes in the board structure to encourage greater involvement of community members, volunteers, and musicians. Having sat in on several board meetings and spoken with some board members, it seems like the anecdotal markers of success are stories like “My wealthy friends from Chicago who come to town once a year love the phone app.” While wealthy out-of-towners who do not actually listen to the station may be a great source of donations, they should not drive the management or programming decisions of the radio station.
Financially, the greatest marker of success has been the income from Brass Passes to Jazz Fest. Once again, that is not a true sign of success. I can tell you from experience that a large number of Brass Pass buyers are not active listeners or supporters of the station. The donation numbers are vastly inflated by including such transactional donors, a large portion of whose donation dollars go back to the purchase of the pass from the Festival. Another large sum goes to providing amenities and food at the Festival grounds. If selling tickets to Jazz Fest is a sign of devotion to the culture of New Orleans, then the Ticketmaster corporation deserves to have a statue erected in its honor in Jackson Square.
I am reminded of a conversation I had with Mr. Freedman during my job interview in the summer of 2013. When asked what I saw as problems with the direction of the station, I brought up a disturbing number of DJs addressing the audience in terms of “please come down to New Orleans,” as opposed to “you live in New Orleans,” with long distance listeners being people who are happy to eavesdrop. Mr. Freedman agreed with me that our out-of-state audience were people who wanted to pretend that they are locals, not be catered to as tourists. The overwhelming number of comments we receive from Internet listeners reflects that truth. WWOZ’s mission is first and foremost to serve the residents, musicians, and culture-makers of New Orleans. An increasing obsession with “out of state donors,” Brass Pass sales, and technology, as evidenced by management’s reports to the board, create a false measure of success for staff and consultants to justify their employment without furthering the stated cause and mission of the radio station. (Recently, Mr. Freedman has been especially obsessed with translating the station’s website to foreign languages.)
Refocusing on the main mission of the station will not be easy, as the current management has set its own goals and measures of success for way too long. Diversifying the management board would go a long way in that direction. There is a development committee that can continue to evaluate the success of Brass Pass sales. The sheer absence of music and culture as subject of conversation in board meetings is, frankly, disturbing.
At the bare minimum, the board has to set goals for management, rather than the other way around, and insist on follow-ups. The board meetings I have attended are more like magic shows than actual demonstrations of accountability. Management comes in once a month and finds something—anything—to be proud of, with no questions from board members. One month it can be sales of Brass Passes, another month it will be some good press. (Negative press is always censored or ignored.) Ambitious schemes that are introduced by management are never followed up. Two years after the supposed launch of WWOZ’s second stream, it is only populated by a handful of shows. The increased antenna strength that is supposed to take our signal all the way to Alabama; has anyone actually tested it and questioned Mr. Freedman about its success? Whoever replaces Mr. Freedman as GM cannot be allowed to simply grasp at straws once a month to provide positive news with no memory or accountability as to previously-agreed upon goals.
Recently, management has not simply been moving the goal posts in order to make themselves look good; they’ve been rewriting the way that the score is kept altogether. I invite you to compare the Manager’s report from a year ago to one from this year. Membership no longer reports numbers of members, or sustaining members; a true sign of support for the station. Instead, they report dollar figures, padded as they are by the bi-annual rush to get passes before an advertised price-increase in January, and other subjective criteria. Underwriting numbers are similarly inflated with “value” of sponsorships, which for the first time include the arbitrary amounts placed on underwriting given in exchange of services rendered. Once again, management simply changes criteria to make the station seem more successful than it actually is. In this case the emphasis is on hiding the effects from the mass departure of staff and demoralization of those who remain. It’s no wonder that management is so resistant to making the report available to the board before meetings. I suspect that a third-party audit of Manager’s Reports to the board would reveal several examples of this.
4- An honest look at hiring and promoting internally. One of the greatest advantages to being volunteer-driven is that we are already familiar with many of our entry-level job applicants before they apply for a job opening. Once hired at an entry-level position, or part-time position during membership drives or festival broadcasts, these applicants have a chance to show their skills and reliability in order to advance. Mr. Freedman has shown a total indifference, recently, to this successful system. He has very publicly bragged about the high salaries of the new out-of-nowhere hires, as has board member Mary Johnston Norris, who told the entire development staff that the new CDO, coming in with no prior experience, would be making “six figures”, while the majority of the staff was making around one third of that.
Mr. Freedman can now claim that no one is ready to take over in the event of his departure, but the case stands that both Ms. Gross and Mr. Breashears would have made worthy General Managers had Mr. Freedman not stayed at his position selfishly for so long that both of them felt they had plateaued in their careers by staying at the station. Under this hypothetical scenario, Ms. Gross’ or Mr. Breashears’ subordinates would have been promoted to their now-vacant position, creating a system of upward-mobility, rather than the mass-exodus and demoralization which characterizes WWOZ today.
5- Bringing programming back to its roots. The dysfunctional board and management of the station has crept into the sounds going out over the airwaves. A common complaint from long-time listeners is that much of what they hear on WWOZ could be played from just about anywhere. If WWOZ is going to continue to represent the people and culture of New Orleans, it must do a better job of including them in the sound.
The station has to become more sensitive to the fact that A- it’s not easy to find worthy DJ candidates who are free 9-5 on weekdays and B-that some of our best programmers may not be proficient at computer use. The answer to both of those is for the station to become more flexible in its training and recruiting of on-air talent. Many of the long-time DJs past and present that we like to brag about would simply not get on the air right now as the booth becomes increasing focused on computer technology. Does the station sound better now that the underwriting announcement comes from touch-screens and the records of music played must be kept electronically, as the show progresses, with no room for editing or correction after the fact? Most of our local listeners would probably say “no.”
It might be difficult for board members and out-of-state consultants who are at the top of their professions to sympathize, but many of the most unique and authentic voices in New Orleans do not want to volunteer their time in order to sit there and type data for three hours a week. A number of long time volunteers, such as Hazel the Delta Rambler, have complained about the increasing exclusive use of technology in the DJ booth, and their protests have fallen on deaf ears. I offer to you the modest hypothesis that the more that the operation of the volunteer equipment becomes geared towards college-educated, professional generation X people like myself, the more bland the station will sound.
Our DJs are volunteers. Our mission is to represent New Orleans culture; we can only add authentic and diverse voices and tastes to the air by becoming more inviting and flexible to the local musical community. In other words, much as we like to brag about his past involvement with the station, Ernie K-Doe would not last a day in today’s WWOZ. Neither would John Sinclair, Brown Sugar, The Ragin Cajun, Clinton Scott, or Billy Delle.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. I want to reiterate that many of these problems with the radio station are not new. It’s our failure to deal with them that has brought us to this tipping point. I believe with some public moves to address the issues above, starting with an immediate change in leadership, WWOZ can regain the goodwill of the community and go back to being a unifying bond for the entire New Orleans universe: those who live and labor here, as well as those who like to eavesdrop and pretend to be locals with affection.
It’s essential to recognize that change is not easy. I recommend an explicitly and publically transitional management for 1 or 2 years, ran largely by people from within, in order to preserve institutional memory and coherence. After that, a new permanent GM needs to be appointed who has displayed real devotion to–and knowledge of–New Orleans culture. This person should be a local, or even better in my opinion, a New Orleans native of color. He or she should be monitored by a transparent, diverse, and regularly rotating board. The greater or lesser involvement of the Jazz and Heritage Board needs to be debated. And for heaven’s sake, nobody should hold the leadership position for so long that they can’t imagine their lives without it. Much that has been done by the current GM recently has been done in the spirit of self-preservation; not with concern for the good of the station and the community it serves. The restructuring of the staff, the unilateral hiring, the silencing of opposition: All these are signs of a crumbling regime, not of a “volunteer-powered, listener-supported, New Orleans community radio” station.
Many of the recent hires have specifically used the term “I work for David” in justifying their deference to him. Let’s put the station in the hands of those who work for WWOZ, instead. The goodwill of the community we serve depends on it.
-Dimitri Apessos, former Membership Director, long-time volunteer.
