Layoffs, pain at KQED
The Bay Area’s most prominent public broadcasting station, KQED, announced Monday that it will lay off 20 employees as part of an effort to close a projected $7.1 million gap in next year’s budget.
The retrenchment, which also could include reduced hours for some employees and a staffwide pay freeze, is a response to bleak forecasts for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. Corporate underwriting of the station and its programs is expected to fall 20%, and membership revenues are expected to decline by 6%.
“This is a time like no other and circumstances we could not have predicted,” Michael Isip, the station’s CEO, wrote in an email to employees. “We’re all hurting today and I feel deeply for the staff we’ve had to let go.”
Five of the people being laid off are journalists, according to a staffwritten article on KQED’s website.
Three of them are science journalists who have been involved in coverage of the coronavirus — the medical scourge that has caused the same economic repercussions that KQED management wrote have triggered the need to reduce costs.
The station, which early last year had 450 employees, is in the process of rebuilding its longtime home at Bryant and Mariposa streets on the edge of San Francisco’s Mission District.
The $91 million project — most of which was funded by a capital campaign, and which includes subleased space in the Financial District during construction — is scheduled to be completed next year.