Radio Milwaukee Joins PM4A
Jordan Lee, Program Director of Radio Milwaukee, offered the following about why they decided to participate.
“From day one, Radio Milwaukee’s mission has been committed to creating a more inclusive and engaged city. We looked in the mirror and asked ourselves how our staff and leadership can internally rise to the task we’ve set forth in the work we do. While we have seen great forward momentum here in Milwaukee over the past decade, there is so much more work to be done. Participating in Public Media For All not only helps Radio Milwaukee to remain focused on our mission, but it also provides us with tools to benchmark our progress.”
KERA Joins PM4A
Nico Leone, President and CEO of KERA, offered the following about why they decided to participate.
“KERA is proud to support the mission of Public Media for All. We are committed to the action items identified by PM4A and have made this work a core priority for our organization. Addressing diversity, equity and inclusion is a responsibility shared by every member of our staff, and we have encouraged our team to participate in this initiative in whatever way they choose. We look forward to being held accountable for our work. ”
KERA is a community-supported media organization that delivers distinctive, relevant and essential content to North Texans. Through programming that reflects the spirit and diversity of our region, we provide an invaluable alternative to commercial media.
The mission of North Texas Public Broadcasting is to serve North Texans through public television, radio and multimedia resources that educate, engage, inspire, inform and entertain.
KERA serves the fourth-largest population area in the country. Each week, more than 2.6 million people connect with KERA through our television and radio broadcast channels, websites, social media and mobile apps.
Susan Scott’s Remarks
In our webinar on Tuesday, November 10th, our day of action and education for DEI in public media, Susan Scott from UNC-TV gave an inspiring speech with actionable steps to improve diversity in public medai. She’s kindly shared her transcript notes with us here:
Hi, I’m Susan Scott – Chief Growth Officer at UNC-TV. I am delighted to have been invited to share a bit of my story with you as part of PUBLIC MEDIA FOR ALL’s webinar on their day of education and action. I’ll tell you a little about my background and I’ll share some of my philosophies and beliefs about hiring equitably, compensating fairly, promoting, mentoring and sponsoring people of color at all levels of an organization. I’ll also share some experiences and organizations that shaped those beliefs.
My background is steeped in media. I worked for more than 20 years in commercial media. My areas of focus spanned sales, content distribution, marketing, business development, general management and strategic planning. My commercial media career took me all over the world – from Europe to Asia to Latin America. The companies I worked for include brands like Comcast, The Weather Channel, Turner Broadcasting, Frontier Communications and Fox News Channel. Over the course of my career, I developed from a junior account executive to a Senior Vice President with responsibility for generating more than $100 million dollars/year. I have been responsible for leading teams as small as one other person and as large as 300 people. I was often the only black person and/or the only black woman in the room. I recognize that I was a “safe black person” – eager, didn’t challenge the social status quo and worked to assimilate, yet put my intellect and abilities on full display.
For the past 5 years, I have worked in public media. Outside of my current organization, I am still, often, the only black person in the room. I find public media thrilling and vital, yet I also find it insular and hide bound. I observe that the laurels we’ve rested on have been the work we do for others – not the work we do in support of each other. In spite of the public media missions, we do not yet have a strong, collective, unified expectation and approach to equitable hiring, compensating, promoting, mentoring and sponsoring people of color and women. Peter Drucker said “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”. I bet you’ve all heard “what gets measured, gets managed”. There are models that our industry could work to follow and learn from. I’ll talk about them a little later.
Everything that I believe about fair treatment of people of color was learned from my parents and in the industry where I grew up – the cable and broadband industry.
Let’s start with the third rail – compensation. At one point in my career, I worked for a Japanese-American man. As were negotiating my salary, he asked “how much do you earn now – please include your highest bonuses because I want it to be clear to you that we value your talents. And, we do not want a few thousand dollars to become an emotional roadblock for you”. He took my base salary, added bonuses and 10% and made that my base salary. I have never forgotten that level of respect. He also made it clear that every business development person was compensated within a small range of each other. Be as generous as you can and value positions based upon the work and the importance of the work – not the gender or color of the people doing the work.
My philosophy on compensation in the non-profit world is also informed by Dan Pallotta. Google his TED Talk. He talks about the “overhead myth” asks the public to rethink their assumptions about charities and non-profits needing to keep overhead low in order to win grants and donor funding. Pallotta wonders “why” if this is not a standard that businesses are held to? He wonders: Could a non-profit grow to a size big enough to tackle a problem by investing in great talent, in advertising and marketing and in new ideas?
Three months after his talk went live, GuideStar, Charity Navigator and the Better Business Bureau Wise Giving Alliance — three leading resources for nonprofit data in the US — announced that they were “denouncing the ‘overhead ratio’ as a valid indicator of nonprofit performance.”
The presidents and CEOs of these three organizations wrote: “We write to correct a misconception about what matters when deciding which charity or non-profit to support. The percent of charity expenses that go to administrative and fundraising costs—commonly referred to as ‘overhead’—is a poor measure of an organization’s performance. We ask you to pay attention to other factors of nonprofit performance: transparency, governance, leadership, and results.” Where I am able, and I have to admit that this is difficult in the non-profit world, I and UNC-TV work hard to lead and to be competitive in the non-profit space. It’s how you get and retain the best qualified talent.
Everyone can mentor – it is not the exclusive purview of the person with the biggest title. If as you watch this, you ARE the person with the biggest title, I am asking you – besides yourself -who are you sponsoring and are they a person of color? If you are early in your career, have you identified people that you’d like to learn from? If so – ask them to help you and be your mentor. When I was the SVP for Distribution at the Weather Channel we had 810 employees across the country and as a result of an employee survey, we developed culture improvement measures. One of them was a mentorship program. Every employee was eligible to request a mentor. I was the most requested mentor in the company. It was because I take the responsibility of leadership seriously. I asked deep and penetrating questions, I encouraged people to be themselves and did not censure them for their lack of experience or knowledge. I also guided without “telling” them what to do. I respected their individuality – and assured them that there was value in being themselves. I also challenged people to be realistic about the relationship between their reality and their aspirations.
In my experience, often, promoting people is one of the single best things leaders can do to strengthen an organization’s culture. Leaders have a responsibility to check their style preferences and their pre-conceived notions and focus only on the requirements of the work. I once had an opening for a director reporting to me. I had 2 people of color working within my team and they both expressed interest in the role. It didn’t require going outside, yet my boss at the time encouraged me to look for someone “new”, from the outside and then suggested 3 people – all of whom were white. It took some time to convince her that her perception and desires were steeped in style and comfort rather than the needs of the organization. It delayed hiring by 3 months. I ultimately chose one of the two and we outperformed in that category the next year.
There are two organizations that directly influenced my beliefs about mentoring, hiring, sponsorship and compensation. The first is Women in Cable Telecommunications. I volunteered within this national organization for many years and was the Chair of the organization 15 years ago. WICT’s mission is to “create women leaders who transform our industry”.
They do this by providing unparalleled professional development programs, commissioning original gender research, and supporting a B2B network that helps advance women. WICT is especially known for its WICT PAR Initiative that measures the status of women employees in the cable industry based on three main criteria:
Pay Equity
Advancement Opportunities
Resources for Work/Life Integration
It is a comprehensive advocacy program that helps companies set goals, institutionalize policies, measure progress and achieve results. the PAR Initiative showcases best practices in achieving stronger gender diversity. With a goal to improve diversity metrics for women.
The second organization that influenced my beliefs is the T. Howard Foundation. Its mission is to promote diversity in media and entertainment by increasing the number of diverse and under-represented groups and underserved communities within media.
They offer an internship program that provides a professional work experience and knowledge of industry careers and opportunities
A talent development program targeting young professionals and recent college graduates for skills development and training, designed to prepare them to meet employment and advancement opportunities
A diversity advancement program that helps partner companies attract, identify, secure and retain the best diverse talent.
Nothing I’ve mentioned can happen overnight. Yet, I wanted to paint a picture of what is possible, what I have benefited from and what our industry can learn from. I hope that something that I’ve shared will inspire or motivate you to reach up or back, support, question and change your behavior and expectations on behalf of yourself and on behalf of the people with whom you work. Be well friends.
Ken Ikeda’s Remarks
In our webinar on Tuesday, November 10th, our day of action and education for DEI in public media, Ken Ikeda from AIR gave an inspiring speech about disruption and innovation. He’s kindly shared his transcript notes with us here:
November 10, 2020
Transcript from Public Media For All’s Day of Action
Hi- My name is Ken Ikeda and I’m here representing AIR, the Association of Independents in Radio.
As the world has changed, so have we, and our community extends well beyond radio alone. AIR is an inspired network of professional journalists, editors, engineers and storytellers.
Collectively, a spirit of independence, the pursuit of stories and the craft of storytelling and reporting bind us.
We are about the work, yet as we know, work happens in the context of relationships, institutions, policies, practices and power that require constant negotiation.
AIR has signed on as an organizational ally in support of Public Media For All. We are here for a movement. One that leads to a change in what we are forced to negotiate every day- relationships, institutions, policies, practices and power.
I’ve always believed that great stories fuel movements. Stories have the ability to transform understanding, build proximity, and whether through empathy or rage, translate to engagement. Public media represents arguably the greatest community of storytellers, anywhere. The potential and power of this group is really unlimited.
So…I wanted to offer a few suggestions for how we might collectively proceed. This is an invitation, not only to participate, but to lead.
There is no particular order to what I am sharing and they are my own words, reflecting how I am choosing to participate in this moment, hoping that I might add value to this movement for change.
Break the rules. Break the rules…to win!
The rules in place now are there to maintain the current reality. Save your frustration with apologies and promises crafted by PR and Legal teams. They are mostly about self-preservation and cowardice. Let their awkwardness be met with silence. Lets focus on winning.
If you trust yourself to do right, if you are ready to lead and know the changes that have to be made, and how to deliver them, go for it, but don’t go it alone.
Leading through change is difficult, decisions that no one has asked for are often necessary to make, and there can be a cost to jobs in order to realize a greater good.
For movements to evolve, grow and sustain themselves through ups and downs, requires vision, persistence and courage.
The short game builds space but the long game wins.
Follow stories and moving speeches with deeply tactical work.
You know where you want to get to but how you and everyone else gets there is where you need to organize for collective intelligence.
Focus on what needs to change and not just who.
Who is delivering to President-elect Biden, the short list for new CPB Board Directors?
What are levers for change?
What system or station leaders would wilt under the pressure of 10 protestors in front of their building?
Who are you willing to call into the room and trust?
Who needs what information to better understand what they are missing?
Who can you call on to deliver this invitation and the lesson to them?
Can they become advocates and socialize the collective effort?
Are you operating with clear objectives and an ROI on your efforts?
Is it still clear that the sacrifice will yield benefit to others?
Is building up or burning down worth the return? Something else entirely?
Are you ready?
To fail?
To see jobs lost?
To step back to allow someone else to lead?
Disruption is the short game and everything beyond can’t rely on an organic process.
We are talking about change within a working industry and complex economy that will not wait on pubic media to work itself out.
Movements require more than one idea or possibility to persist. The ideas don’t need to be revolutionary. They need to be targeted and disciplined, to further independence, leverage operating advantages of being in public media, and shift power and innovation to new leaders.
A few ideas as examples- 1) Public radio stations as local internet service providers. This can be built on the trust of the public media brand and using the infrastructure of major telcos. 2) Consolidation among willing stations to build a new network that can renegotiate licensing terms, invite new investment, build new formats and grow the space for local voices to be heard in their communities.
These examples may feel easy to dismiss, but I’d argue what has kept them from happening are the rules that we have been playing by. An executive’s discouragement and their lack of willingness to take risks to disrupt what is working for just enough people or just the right people, keeps things running as they have been.
Don’t let them shut you down! Trust yourself and share your vision, persist and give courage to others. Don’t give up. Find others to join the movement and in moments of doubt, lean on them, and borrow their courage to recharge. The long game allows you to step up and step back when need to so that you stay in.
With a new White House administration on the horizon, we are editing our scripts and strategies. Lets not forget that we remain a divided country, or that we have colleagues in public media who refuse to acknowledge or see how they have built and condoned systemic racism.
Don’t let up. Draw a line in the ground and ask each person who stands in the path of change where they stand. Its amazing how fragility and the absence of deep conviction are revealed under pressure.
Lets deliver a movement that is undeniable, that reflects the public as producers and audience and represents a new mission through which we see meaningful change.
Public Media For All is a fight worth winning!
Thank you.
KALW Joins PM4A
KALW shared their recommended DEI resources and their plans for small group discussions with their staff on their website, and the following message from Tina Pamintuan, General Manager,
was shared in KALW’s November e-newsletter.
“Next Tuesday, Nov. 10, our staff will set aside their regular duties to participate in the Public Media For All Day of Action.
Of the 266 stations in the NPR system, KALW is one of 10 (with more to come) choosing to make the commitment to take a hard look at every corner of our organization. We will examine hiring practices, compensation, programming, journalistic sourcing, audience outreach, partnerships, and more, through the lens of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Most importantly, we will make changes and commitments along the way to do better.
Over the last few years, public media has experienced its own reckoning over racial and gender equity. I believe it is vital to discuss these issues with our listeners directly. After all, you deserve to know the circumstances under which public media is made, and how it is growing to serve all of our communities better. We invite you to be a part of this journey with us. Keep connected to your community by tuning in, asking questions, and sharing your thoughts.”