One of the things with MPR/executive compensation is that it all comes back to Bill Kling's. I know a lot of people hated Kling because he got wealthy running a non profit. I'm not one of them.

Kling literally built the place from stringing wire in his dorm room at St John's. Even people who hate Kling, acknowledge that he was a visionary. Visionaries have a way of getting compensated.

His biggest deal was creating a mechanism for funding MPR, which involved creating a VERY successful for profit company to find the non profit company. And thats where he, his wife, his #2 and his wife got rich. They were the shareholders.

Many years later, MPR sold the for-profit company to Dayton Hudson. It's now http://Target.com . That's where the big MPR endowment came from. And it was a big payday for the Klings and Kigins.

We can debate Kling's compensation for turning MOR into the most successful public radio station group in the country, but of his ideas bore fruit. And, for the most part, MPR was Bill Kling and everybody else

Kling retires, but his salary structure for his position is already set with a rubber-stamp board of trustees, whom by the way, nobody at MPR ever meets except on their 15th and 25th anniversaries. They're like ghosts, those people.

New guy comes in.Makes Kling money. One problem: there's only one Bill Kling. Now, the executive team is overhauled to manage a sprawling empire that Kling could manage because it was HIS vision. So new Presidents and VPs, the HR department, once kindly, is now corporate henchmen

And all of their salaries are pegged to what the person at the top made. Millions of dollars in all. Accomplishing nothing that Kling didn't do. As with most structures, it began to exist for its own perpetual existence.

Meanwhile, the worker bees are cranking out the content that people support because it's what they hear and like. None of it is happening because of any senior management (well, except maybe Mike Reszler, digital boss, who's awesome)

The worker bees keep getting lectures about how the media is changing and the old ways won't work anymore, like it's the worker bees' fault. It's not, most every good idea comes from the worker bees, not senior management, who are primarily in the business of saying "no" to risk

...and "snowing" the Board of Trustees with horseshit slogans.

Even if the pandemic didn't come along, today was going to happen to a top heavy house of cards.

But none of the people at the top paid a price. Quote me no nonsense about executive pay cuts. It's more bloated at the top than it was 10 years ago, when a pledge drive theme was practically "we fired a bunch of managers."

Now, I get people who say, I'm not giving MPR another dime. Nobody wants it to go to the royals at the top. One problem: they'll let every one of the people creating that content you like, starve, before cutting their own.

This is where the Board if Trustees, as out of touch with that content creation as anyone could possibly be, has abdicated their responsibility. They haven't got a clue how content is created.

They schmooze with show hosts and think that's where content is created. It's not. It's the iceberg, I've written about many times. The 28 people who lost jobs today, we're mostly from the part below water that people don't see. But now the part above water, is gonna sink a bit

I don't know what to tell the "not another dime" crowd except don't be stupid and think the impact will fall on anyone other than the people who actually create what you like.

I think the reality is MPR's best days are behind it and they'll continue selling the good China until they run out of good China.

The nature of worker bees in media is they are FIERCELY loyal to the audience and, as we've seen, will literally risk dying to give them what they want.

As they've always done, they'll work even harder to compensate for the diminished resources. But they're now working inwhat is essentially a caste system.

My relationship with MPR the institution has always been entirely transactional. I sold them what they wanted until neither one of us was interested anymore. But those people... The 28 who've been laid off , the 14 who took buyouts, those that are left, goddamn it they were great

I wish there were a way Minnesota could take back MPR, and put the "Minnesota" back in MPR, before it's too late. But I fear it already is. //End