Phyllis Fletcher’s housewarming party Saturday, August 18, had a sad
subtext. When the KUOW reporter’s colleagues gathered in her new
Phinney Ridge home, most of the conversation was focused on the news
that KUOW’s longtime on-air host Ken Vincent quit on Friday afternoon
after a heated argument with KUOW Program Director Jeff Hansen.
According to Vincent, a 50-year-old news reporter and radio vet who
started with the station in 1984 when he was a Morning Edition host, he was frustrated with Hansen’s “edicts to dumb down the air
sound.” Vincent also says he was bitter about compensation issues and
was looking to leave, “although not like this.”
“It’s pathetic,” Vincent says, “that KUOW management won’t pay its
award-winning, nationally acclaimed air staff anything better than the
industry median salary while it socks millions of dollars into reserve
accounts.”
Assistant General Manager Marcia Scholl acknowledges that KUOW
salaries were below industry standards and says adjustments have been
made. Vincent, who worked the longest shift at the station (9 am to 4
pm), engineered daytime programming, fielded calls, and linked the
station’s programs together, editing and reading news updates and some
intros. He made $50,000, but notes cynically that his workload remained
the same while his job title was downgraded from host and producer to
“announcer.” His conspiracy theory: KUOW won’t get caught paying below
the median again because “announcers” will be getting paid host
rates.
At the Phinney Ridge party on Saturday, Vincent’s now-former
colleagues crowded around him and asked if they could salvage the
situation by calling an emergency meeting on Monday morning.
Vincent—whose frustration has been building since Hansen started
tweaking show “formatics” earlier this year—told his colleagues
that Hansen’s remodeling of noontime arts show The Beat was
the “final straw.” Hansen is giving the show a new name, Sound
Focus, and expanding its editorial scope in an effort to make it
more “magazine feature-y,” according to KUOW staffers. And, most
annoying to Vincent, Hansen added to Vincent’s workload by requiring
him to design and perform the show’s “billboard” (the regular intro)
rather than having the show staff do it.
It was over, Vincent told his friends, who lovingly describe him as
a “perfectionist” and a “drama queen.” As longtime KUOW personality
Marcie Sillman says, Vincent is “a consummate host: smooth, funny, and
irritating. It’s a big loss for the station.”
“I’m not going to bend over and let him continue screwing me with
simple cost-of-living raises,” Vincent says. Vincent’s visceral and
bitter feelings toward Hansen came through loud and clear as he
recounted the story. “I’m not going to introduce Soouuuund
Focuss!” he says, putting on a booming, mocking voice. “That just
sets off the gag reflex. It turns my stomach.” Vincent reports that
Hansen said he’d put Vincent on probation if he didn’t do the job.
Vincent then told him: “You can’t. I quit.”
Vincent’s issues with Hansen’s edicts are shared by the other KUOW
vets. Hansen has been program director at KUOW for seven years and,
according to people at the station, is taking the intimacy and
personality out of the shows by enforcing a clipped, robotic speaking
style. To give an example, here’s an old-style KUOW station
identification break: “This is Steve Scher. You’re listening to
Weekday. It’s 10:15, and you’re listening to KUOW at 94.9.”
Hansen’s new style: “Steve Scher. Weekday. 10:15. KUOW.
94.9.”
“I don’t know the reasons behind the changes,” says Sillman. “There
might be less resistance from us long-timers, more buyoff, if they
[management] articulated the rationale.”
“It sounds like shit,” another KUOW staffer grouses. “You feel like
you’re listening to the atomic clock.”
Says another longtime staffer: “It’s about control. [Hansen] wants
the on-air personalities all to be predictable, interchangeable, to be
invisible. It’s odd. It’s contradictory to why we’re successful in the
first place. The on-air personalities are what people like about
us.”
Another complaint of KUOW staffers is Hansen’s push to prevent hosts
from mentioning the time during their shows because he wants to be able
to cut-and-paste segments into other broadcasts—further
streamlining the once-unique programming into a depersonalized
sound.
The push for a less personal tone may have tripped up popular
Conversation host Ross Reynolds. Reynolds was reportedly
itching to start a personal blog but was shot down, says one colleague,
because management wanted total control over the station’s “editorial
voice.” Then management sent out an e-mail, according to staffers,
introducing their notion of blogs, co-opting Reynolds’s proposal.
Reynolds was reportedly angry, firing off an e-mail himself, saying,
“Hey, wasn’t that what I said?”
After Scholl’s initial comments, KUOW decided not to answer any more
questions for this story. “Ken’s resignation is a personnel matter.
We’re not going to comment further,” Assistant Program Director Arvid
Hokanson said in an e-mail. Hansen himself was on vacation and was not
available to comment on stylistic or programming changes at the
station. Some staffers did credit Hansen with making some controversial
and bold decisions that have benefited the station. He dropped
Fresh Air, for example, and helped get The
Conversation on the air. Those were both successful moves.
KUOW is a big success (it had $8.3 million in net assets according
to its latest financial filing)—which, Sillman posits, may be
responsible for the more institutionalized feel. According to its 2006
annual report, it has 351,200 listeners each week, listeners who, on
average, spend eight hours a week listening to the station. KUOW, with
a $6.7 million budget, ranks tenth among public radio stations across
the country, an impressive feat for a medium-size city.
Of course, a big part of this success can be credited to the
station’s popular personalities—Ross Reynolds, Steve Scher, and
Marcie Sillman.
“Marcie, me, and Steve—it’s through our work,” Vincent says,
“that they’ve been able to succeed [and build] their millions in
reserves.” 
KUOW’s loss of Vincent is significant. Losing Hansen would not be.
While Hansen’s ability to twiddle a budget, coordinate meetings, and push dubious style decisions is not trivial, it’s nothing that couldn’t be done by many other less-hostile managers.
It seems that the KUOW execs have made a classic mistake regarding the value of management: If you’re running a factory floor, the staff are cogs and the personnel value lies in your managers and designers. If you’re running a skilled labor or knowledge-worker business, the managers and coordinators are cogs, and the personnel value lies in the individual contributors with special skills. That goes double anytime the public knows your workers by name.
Hansen ought to pack up his back-room opinions and spreadsheets, and spend more time with his family. Perhaps Vincent could be lured back to KUOW with the right opportunity to apply some of the perfectionism he developed from actual on-air experience.
-Jon