KZYX names new boss, can he lead station through Trump cuts, quarrels, all the way to the Ukiah promised land?

KZYX’s new boss, Andre de Channes, beat out nine other candidates and will absorb two jobs with a can-do, let’s all move forward approach.The latest in a long string of general managers at the Philo station, he will do the top job while keeping current job as operations manager.  KZYX has 110 programmers creating uniquely real reality and spoken art. 

de Channes will lead the station out of the  dilapidated and comfy Anderson Valley digs it has inhabited since the beginning in 1989 to its new Ukiah location. A newer challenge is figuring out how to deal with cuts from the Trump Administration. There is familial KZYX squabbling that has gone on for decades. 

He will face demands for more local news as well as more NPR.

Anything else?

“Yes, this is great! I love radio,” he said.

Arriving with the new GM is a new approach designed to improve communication between management and its prized herd of programmers. Longtime volunteer programmer, W. Dan (Houck) will now be the staff manager for all the public affairs shows (roughly half). W. Dan starts his job Wednesday.  Katherine Cole will continue to manage the music shows. Elise Cox is news director.  Eddie Haehl will keep it all working together, de Channes said. 

Haehl is credited with playing a vital role in keeping the station on the air during the past six difficult months. 

de Channes starts Monday with the extra GM badge. He wanted to talk more about how incredible it is to be able to enjoy terrific real radio in an era of automation and the stifling of local voices, than he did about squabbles that went on before he arrived. 

He loves to play, listen to and talk about music.

Last Sunday, de Channes was playing with his band at the Bob Dylan commemorative concert in Sonoma County.  He spent 25 years in the Sonoma County commercial radio scene, watching it contract and push out the DJs and the shows in favor of automation.

“I am glad to still be able to do what I do best at a radio station that is making a difference. We have seen community radio stations going away, and the current administration wants them to go away. This is all the more reason we need to keep the high-quality local programming and local news coming,” he said.

KZYX’s challenges include staying on the air and delivering a signal to its audience. That could be described as a billiards game in which three signals, one in Ukiah, one in Boonville and one in Fort Bragg have to be bounced off each other.  He says a new transmitter at the Ukiah station hopes to improve all this, mostly by sending the pool ball shot in the opposite direction from the way the ricocheting is done now.

The county’s towering fir and redwood trees, which keep getting taller have been increasingly limiting the signal in recent years.

Nothing says KZYX more than Sister Yasmin. The ferocious and sweet queen of Reggae got a bit run over during the controversies of the early 2000s.

Dead air that kept happening last year created the latest internal crisis at the station.  Interim general manager Dina Polkinghome fired longtime operations manager Rich Culbertson. The firing and the handling of it, and the lack of financial information being readily available from Polkinghome, caused an uprising among programmers. 

The dead air problem continued after Culbertson was ousted and even after de Channes was hired to replace Culbertson. but has now been resolved.

“I will say that after a few months of a vertical learning curve for me, the dead air issues have been mitigated in a big way. Stuff still happens like, PG&E outages, a blown transmitter in Ft. Bragg, STL power supply failure at Laughlin Peak, on-air audio hard drive failures, studio AOIP device failure (which all have happened), but overall things are definitely more stable. 

We’ve worked our way from dealing with prolonged outages to talking about transitions between programs. This is also why we need to move the mothership from Philo. She’s tired.  I am also looking at redundancy for our systems. We have too many single points of failure,” he said.

Culbertson nor dead air were subjects at this week’s board meeting, which was still contentious, in a too-closely related family reunion picnic kind of way.

Controversy in recent years has also included the ousting of Alicia Bales, who started her own blog called “unmanageable” after she said she was called that by former station manager Marty Durlin.  Culberton’s firing became a subject of acrimony on the MCN listservs and resulted in several long-time beloved programmers leaving,  including Jimmy Humble, whose bluegrass show, Humble Pie, delighted Saturday mornings for decades.

When some programmers complained loudly and demanded answers on KZYX’s internal listservs, the listservs were taken away. At the most recent meeting, some programmers asked to be given a list of all programmers so they could communicate with each other again. The board and Polkinghorne, seemed intent on presenting a unified front and bristled at criticism and argued against sharing the programmers contact information with the other programmers. Polkinghorne also shut down Cox’s effort to show a powerpoint on her trip to DC, saying the meeting agenda was already overfull.

Hearing it all, de Channes said he will have to make tough decisions.

“If you’ve got two people who are on polar opposites of what should be done. You have to pick a path to go and, and it’s not going to, you know, make everybody happy all the time, there have to be compromises and that is part of my job.”

“You can’t please everyone,” he said, quoting the Rickey Nelson song, Garden Party, where the general weirdness somehow makes conflicting people into a chorus and everything ends up all right.

“I have an extensive background in human resources, and I think that is very helpful in this position, because there are a lot of different personalities here, all of which can be beneficial together.The challenge is met by listening to the programmers and then having to make decisions around that, but having their input and having transparency about everything that’s being done, and we need to clearly state the reason the things are being done.” 

“I’m willing to talk to anybody at pretty much any time. I really have a very open door policy,” he said.

He is inclined to err on the side of sharing information and practicing openness, which would be a shift from the previous administration. 

He also assured critics that the commitment to local news would never waver while he is the general manager.

“Local news is extremely important to KZYX, and I believe that it is an integral part of our programming.  We need to know what is going on with local government, crime, emergency information, national news, and more. Without it we are in the dark. And like the phrase coined by Bob Woodward, “Democracy dies in darkness.”

While the Trump administration has made eliminating public funding to PBS and NPR a priority, so far the station has a plan on how to deal with impending cuts. A bigger issue is that already approved funding might be cut and the station wouldn’t find out till fall, resulting in a deficit situation. 

“The current Administration has a bullseye on Public Media and we are a part of that ecosystem.  CPB funding for Public Radio stations comes in two-year cycles. For us, it’s 25 percent of our budget.  Our already approved and allocated funding for the next two years (yet to be released by the Treasury) is at risk of being clawed back. That is an immediate hit to the station’s finances starting in our new fiscal year in July.  In addition, the next two years of funding has to be budgeted and passed by Congress, and the Administration is asking that it be defunded.  It is not a good time for Public Media in general, and that is why we called our just past pledge drive “Sowing The Seeds Of Resilience”.  

That pledge drive was a success, with the national free for all far exceeding any local squabbles among donors.  The meeting also came with the news that long-time programmer Chris Skyhawk had resigned.

An uplifting moment for all at the meeting was news that NPR has sued the Trump Administration, claiming the president exceeded his authority in cutting funding to public radio. Trump has lost other such challenges. The KZYX news reported that day that lawsuits against Trump’s efforts to overturn offshore oil drilling bans in his first term were denied by the courts, for example.

At the meeting, long-time public affairs programer Karen  Ottoboni described consistent communication problems and demanded more information about finances, especially the budget for the new Ukiah headquarters.

Polkinghorne and the board were able to convince Ottoboni that after the retirement of the in-house bookkeeper, using the old accounting system was impossible. And the transition to Quick-Books is a nightmare, but better numbers would be forthcoming. Ottoboni accepted the explanation and promised to continue to demand the board be more open.

While she says she has been losing heart in the station recently, Ottoboni is hopeful there can be a new direction. A new member to represent supervisorial district 5 (Mendocino east and south) was announced, Ottabani said she would be pleased to meet with Kristin Wiederholt and tell her some of the history. Wiederholt had a long resume at KQED, including being a news reporter. The board is now composed mostly of relative newcomers.

“These are all really great people from what I have seen. We just need to help them get tied into the community. She says it’s imperative that future replacement board members are chosen in a more public process. The board is elected, but appointments are made by the board when people leave, but only to fill out the remaining term.

The KZYX lovers and programmers I talked to, whatever their views on the recent ups and downs, all said one thing that makes de Channes right is that he is chill in an atmosphere charged by excessive drama at times. If he has a fault, they said, it might be he is more interested in enjoying the shows and playing his music more than staying late or micromanaging.

“I don’t think the board has done everything right but they made the right choice here. His kind of energy is what we all need right now,” one programmer said. 

The next board election will be May 2026. One caveat is that while a lot of people have criticized KZYX, few of them have stepped up to run for the board.

The KZYX board is designed to have nine members, one from each of the five supervisorial districts, three at large and a programmer’s representative. The programmer’s representative will be vacant until a means for programmers to get together and pick a representative is decided on. 

Like most people in radio, he was drawn to the medium, to the music and the diversity of voices, and did most every job along the way.

De Channes, from Montreal originally, came as a youngster to Marin county and acquired an interest in the most exciting thing happening in the Bay Area at the time, brand new personal computer technology. But radio’s charm also called right away.

“As a young person, as a kid, actually, I had an IT company.”

He got the job as IT man for KRSH (The Crush) radio and fell in love with the medium and the diverse and free messages, as well as coming to love being a musician.

“ I started doing a segment called ‘Geek Speak” where I talked about computer best practices and the challenges of making these early computers work,” he said.

The program director listened to the show and came down and found the computer dude working on computers.

“He said,’ you have a great voice for radio. Are you interested in being a DJ?’” The answer was most assuredly yes, and de Channes ended up doing overnights and even worked his way into the prestigious morning spot at one time.

Back then, that was a big deal. Radio personalities were prominent figures in the days before the internet and shows had big followings. 

The Crush, (KRSH) was an old fashioned real radio station with a variety of DJs ranging from the shock jocks to the Wolfman Jack wanna bees to people with intoxicatingly smooth voices (that sometimes put you to sleep as well)

“The KRSH was then a lot like KZYX is now, free form radio. It’s what I grew up with and I try to foster it.”

de Channes continued to work in Sonoma County radio, even as automation took over. He served as the Music Director and Program Director for KRSH (The Krush), and was Operations Director for the five stations at Wine Country Radio for over two decades. He came north to produce live remotes from the Kate Wolf Festival, Earth Dance, and other Mendocino County events, introducing him to that strange place on the map that runs from Hopland to Covelo to Westport to Gualala. He always loved listening to radio, a very well-written press release from KZYX said;. “NPR and community radio have both been fixtures in my home for years, so I’ve enjoyed getting to know the behind-the-scenes of this side of the dial since joining the KZYX staff last Winter,” said de Channes. “We have such a wide variety of locally produced news and music/public affairs programs. There really is something for everyone.”

With the Coast, KOZT, KZYX and a big reach for Humboldt’s KMUD and the likes of KNYO and other low-powered radio stations, Mendocino County now has vastly more radio choice than the much, much larger Santa Rosa area. I go to Sonoma all the time for work, I can’t wait to get out of zombie-programmed radio land and find the first sounds of Tom, Dred, Kate and Hugh coming in on KOZT at the fringes of the county, or KZYX, which is harder to get but always worth it.

Thus de Channes was happy to have the chance to get back in the thick of real radio, however contentious. He went through four interviews and competed against two other finalists. Several other candidates came from stations where the job of GM and operations manager were combined.

“In looking around the country, it’s fairly common to combine operations manager and general manager at public radio stations our size,” he said. I love radio. You know, I guess this is going on 25 years that I’ve been working in radio, and I feel that I’m good at it. I like working with people.”

“Not only is this free form creative radio, this is public radio that means something, this is not working for a commercial entity. It’s not just doing it for money. This is radio that actually makes a difference.”

The station was literally caught between the polished and snooty KQED of the Bay Area and the hillbilly/hippie artist vibe of KMUD.  

Too much NPR? 

The local yokels didn’t care for that and stirred trouble. Too much wacky stuff? The retired donor folks agitated. There have literally been intense, red faced feuds over what time shows like Democracy Now should air. The station has been the domain of leftists in the past, but that is in no way the case at all today.  But the biggest divides have never been the face that this county is not in any way a continuous community. Fort Bragg doesn’t care about Ukiah and vice versa. South Coast is the South Coast, forever Mendonoma.  Covelo is Covelo. 

The meeting provided many interesting exchanges and a who’s who of KZYX’s present and history.  It was led by interim GM Dina Polkinghorne, along with board president Susan Kanaan and board member Mary Golden. Golden announced she is leaving the board as 5th district representative but will stay on as the treasurer.

Those on hand included: Jeff Blankfort, Mark Spindler, Stewart Dickson, Liz Helenchild. W Dan,. Annie Esposito, David Strock, Jamie Roberts, Joe Wagner of KNYO, Jim Beatty, Kristin Wiederholt, Jill Hannum, Carol Wilder, Perry TwoFeathers. Joanna Wildoak and Karen Ottoboni, to name just those I wrote down. The board was not differentiated from the audience on the Zoom.

The programmers handbook creation, spearheaded by Johanna Wildoak Cummings is also intended to make the communication challenges with programmers work better, but is an example of how convoluted getting something done at KZYX can be. It’s now been through more than 20 revisions and its status still in limbo. The board praised Cummings’ persistence with the project.

In closing a line from Ricky Nelson”

If you gotta play at garden parties

I wish you a lotta luck

But if memories were all I sang

I’d rather drive a truck

But it’s all right now

I learned my lesson well

You see, you can’t please everyone

So you got to please yourself

• District 1 – Mark Spindler 2024 – 2028
• District 2 – Susan Baird 2022-26,
• District 3 – David Strock 2022-26
• District 4 – Stewart Dickson 2022-26
• District 5 – Mary Golden 2022-2026,
• Programmers’ Representative – Vacant 2024-2028

At-Large

• Vacant 2024 – 2028
• Carol Wilder 2024 – 2028,
• Jeff Zolitor 2024 – 2028,