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Showing posts from August, 2004
Well, here we are, a couple of weeks into the reset of KBFR. We've pared down the number of DJ's from 45 to right around 20. I've got a set of folks as my captains council that are doing a great job of helping pull it all together. And several key folks who are stepping up and taking a very active role in the jobs needed to be done to keep the station going. But I remain slightly skeptical. Not that I don't believe everyone is committed and pumped up about the restart. It's more of a can it be sustained. These are good people, every one of them. Some of them are truly great people. But I've found that sustaining something like KBFR, over time, can be draining. I'm not really sure why it is that I keep this going as i do. I'm pretty sure I could just turn over enough equipment to keep it going to these folks and walk away from it and it would keep going. The hard parts been done. We've gotten it started, learned that the FCC's
Update on KBFR going's on. As some of our regular listeners may have guessed, the station has been down a week now, and I’ve giving KBFR a lot of thought. We shut down on Friday, August 6th, locking the van up and wiping the schedule clean. No DJ’s, no shows, just airing a play list created and running on our DJ Computer. The reasons for this were varied, from an extreme overuse of profanity by our DJ’s (who than claimed it was free speech and if people didn’t like it they could just turn the dial) and a general disrespect for the station itself to several of our captains (the folks who do much of the work to keep things going) quitting in frustration and disgust at the lack of support on the part of many of the DJ’s. We just got too big. 45 DJ’s in and out of the van all week long having a revolving party can be fun, but it leaves one hell of a mess to clean up and it’s not really giving back to the community we profess to serve. The question I had to answer was:
Well, it's been an interesting few days. On Friday, it became apparent that KBFR had sort of spun out of control (if control is the right word). So I shut it down. Fired everyone, cleared the schedule, locked up the van. Just a playlist off of a computer running until I decide, is KBFR something worth continuing. What the hell happened? Glad you asked: We had DJ's saying fuck (and cunt, motherfucker, shit, cocksucker, nigger, faggot, etc. etc. you get the idea) at a rate of 200 times an hour, PER DJ (with 4 DJ's). It was getting so bad I was getting daily emails from long time listeners asking what happened to the station they loved? It had gotten to the point where people simply couldn't listen to it unless they were alone. No WAY would they try at work or at home with kids around. We asked folks to moderate, and got a strange response: Hey man, this is FREE SPEECH, you can't tell us not to say fuck! Well, we didn't. We asked for mo