cover photo



blog archive

main site

artwork

bio






Schwarz



View current page
...more recent posts

"I'll keep this board up for a while, but I'm locking it for new posts. "
wfmu is a listener sponsored (and i would contend the best anywhere) fm and internet freeform radio station. that means that 100% of their operating budget comes from listeners. either by direct pledges durring their annual fundraising drive or in the form of support of their special events including their annual record fair. seven years ago they launched a message board in connection to the website. it served as an interface between some of the staff who contributed with postings and comments and the listeners postings and comments. some of the threads went into hundreds of comments providing interesting discussions of station, music and non station related subjects. many enlightning topics were worked through in this fashion. it was an incredible resource. it did however reveal in various ways a top heavy tendency to over steer and over control. seemingly innocuous posts and comments were wiped. large sections of archived threads were lost. an unmistakable aura of managerial contempt ensued. links to the message board on the stations main web-page were mysteriously removed at the same time their beware of the blog was launched soon participation on the board would dwindle to a couple of dozen. that handful persevered through an onslaught of spam. management refused to delegate to any non-administrative weekend spam monitor. pages of spam would stack up. still a few hung in there. these decisions all came from station manager ken who recently gave us some hope that he would begin to make an attempt to get the situation on track. today the board was sunk (posts and comments frozen) by ken who appears to believe that the blog and board cannot coexist. as with most blogs they pull in a few comments but not the serious interactive listener participation that is more natural on message boards. so fuck you back to ken for tanking an awesome board wether for the reason given or otherwise. fuck you back because you and your control issues are a slap in the face of the listenership of this listener sponsored station. fuck you very much. a few of us wont forget the dis!





[link] [2 comments]

sending out a personal message of respect for the fdny today


[link] [add a comment]

“They could have gotten Larry out,” Mr. Betts said. It would have meant writing a check, Mr. Zuccotti said, but it could have been done. Robert D. Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association, said the mayor and the governor “could have gotten in a room with Larry Silverstein and said, ‘You’re out of here.’ ”

But Mr. Yaro said the Port Authority had multiple motivations for retaining the Silverstein lease. “They saw it as their key to hanging on to the site,” he said. “They were afraid of losing control to the city or the state.”

Further, the Port Authority was counting on Mr. Silverstein’s aggressive pursuit of insurance proceeds as well as the more than $100 million a year in rent that the Port Authority depended on to keep its overall operation flush.

“I don’t think that should shock anybody,” Mr. Ringler said. “The World Trade Center was a moneymaker for this agency so that this agency, who pools its resources, can do all the other things we have to do.”

The World Trade Center site has been an even better moneymaker since Sept. 11, however, primarily because the attack coincided with the sale of the lease to Mr. Silverstein. While the Port Authority reported an average annual net income of $22 million on the complex in the five years before Sept. 11, it reported an average annual net income of $106 million on the empty site in the five years after.

“When you look at how much more profit we made,” Anthony R. Coscia, the authority’s chairman, said, “all it represents is monetizing an asset we sold before Sept. 11,” that is, turning the buildings into cash.

[link] [10 comments]