Financial woes forced the community radio station WBAI to abruptly shut down Monday morning after decades on the air in the latest loss to New York City’s local news industry.
The Pacifica Foundation, WBAI’s California-based nonprofit parent, announced the move to staffers in a letter and blamed the station’s demise on “ongoing and continued projections of further financial losses.”
“We realize this news will come as a deep and painful shock, but we can no longer jeopardize the survival of the entire network,” Pacifica said in the message.
After ending WBAI’s local programming and laying off its Brooklyn-based staff, the foundation said in a press release that the station had been “re-born” as the “flagship” of Pacifica Across America, a new service that will broadcast programs from the four remaining Pacifica stations.
The shutdown came as a shock to Jeff Simmons, a public relations executive and former journalist who was a volunteer host of two weekly WBAI shows.
Simmons said he had just listened to the Monday morning replay of his Sunday evening program a few hours before learning that WBAI’s employees had been fired. The station had about half a dozen core staffers along with several paid and volunteer hosts, he said.
The commercial-free network’s end is a loss not just for its workers but also the listeners who were its primary source of financial support, Simmons said.
“I think that we had such a good group of listeners who really needed a platform where they could weigh in on what often were progressive issues,” the 55-year-old Jackson Heights resident said in a phone interview. “The phone lines would light up because they wanted to be able to offer their opinions, and to me that’s the biggest loss is not having this platform for people to be able to reach out to.”
WBAI started broadcasting under its current name in 1955 and joined Pacifica’s nationwide network of nonprofit radio stations five years later. It served as a crucial platform for Vietnam War protesters, feminists and other countercultural voices during the turbulent 1960s and ’70s, according to Simmons.
The station’s current roster included dozens of programs with hosts such as Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now!” and Leonard Lopate, who was given a second chance on WBAI after WNYC fired him over allegations that he behaved inappropriately with staffers.
Pacifica shuttered WBAI less than a week after the Oct. 1 start of its new fiscal year. The station had launched a fall fundraising drive that day and raised several thousand dollars in the following week, Simmons said.
WBAI had repeatedly asked other Pacifica stations to help cover its costs as it grappled with longstanding financial problems, according to foundation board member Jan Goodman. Pacficia pledged in its letter to resurrect WBAI once it creates a “sustainable financial structure for the station,” but it is unclear when that may happen.
“We can no longer keep taking money for essential services from our stations in LA, (San Francisco) Bay, Houston and DC communities to cover WBAI’s continued shortfalls,” Goodman said in a statement. “This endangers the entire Foundation — and ultimately WBAI itself.”
WBAI’s end follows the gutting of several local news outlets in the five boroughs. The Village Voice alt-weekly and the news website DNAinfo have shut down in the past two years, and the New York Daily News’s editorial staff was cut in half last summer.
“It’s a sad day,” Simmons said.
