I'll tell you what we did with FREE VPR (Folks for Responsive and Eclectic Vermont Public Radio). First, we got organized very quickly. We were able to because they had fired Mark Hauser and cancelled his program, and he had a pretty big network of friends and supporters around Vermont, so there was a way of contacting people who cared. One of our friends was handy on a Macintosh doing newsletters, so we picked a name and put together a newsletter and sent it out to people. Of course now there's email so it should be infinitely easier. Anyway, we made a big stink about it. A group of us went to the next Board meeting and complained loudly. We called Board members whom we knew. We had several well-publicized public meetings to strategize. We called friends in the media to get television and newspaper coverage. We picketed the station. We contacted people in other states who had had the same problems. We encouraged people to call during fundraisers and write to the station and say they wouldn't give the station any more money until they put folk music back on. We researched the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to see if we could affect their funding. At the time, there was no Community Advisory Boad, which there was supposed to be to advise on programming stuff. Instead, they had some kind of lame advisory group that did nothing, so we went to their meetings and tried to pressure them to do something. Let me see. .... I don't remember everything.
But there were two other very important things going on that helped us. The first was that the station had been run by one person and his cronies since the very beginning, and they completely shut the public out, and a lot of people around Vermont were unhappy with the
station was run. So the firing of Mark Hauser became the rallying point for an effort to get more public involvement in Vermont's primary public radio station. Our complaints resonated with a lot of people, so the support broadened beyond an issue of folk music. The other thing that happened was that in the midst of this, the very long-time station manager left and a new one was hired. That was Mark Vogelzang. He realized that he had to deal with us, so he did. He met with a group of us and we formed a committee to write bylaws for a real Community Advisory Board. I think there might have been members of the Board on the committee. So we drafted bylaws establishing a CAB, and somewhere along the way - I think after the CAB was formed and members chosen and meetings of the CAB held, Vogelsang agreed to put a Sunday afternoon folk music program back on. The station put out a call for a new programmer for a folk music program and I was on a committee that we chose 3 - Mark Hauser and the others were Pete Sutherland and Robert Resnick. Vogelsang had reserved the right to make the final decision. He absolutely refused to rehire Mark, so it was between Pete and Robert. He chose Robert and he's been on for at least 10 years.
But of course, over time, unless people stay on top of things and constantly involved, the people who run the station end up getting their way and in Vermont that has meant amazing empire-building by Mark Vogelsang. He's made huge changes to the station, gotten repeaters all over the state, and last year they even eliminated the CAB. I was on it for the first few years - and I met some great people through doing it -- but we all eventually left and it lost its way.
So that's the long answer of how we got folk music back on VPR. I hope some of the things we did could be useful to you. I really think the most important thing is to be well organized, have a strategy, attack them from every angle possible, and be persistent so you wear them down before they wear you down.