MPBS Updates March 2024
Supervisory positions posted. Two main supervisory positions for the station have finally been posted from HR. These are Chief Engineer and Chief Content Officer. As this article from Dave Edwards highlights there is a nationwide shortage of qualified candidates for Broadcast Engineers. The Chief Engineer position has been vacant for close to 2 years now. Earlier postings did not produce any qualified candidates, and hopefully the most recent job posting will help us fill the position. MATC used to have a broadcast engineer program. This program was eliminated roughly 10 years ago. The college may want to consider bringing this back.
Additional staffing concerns. While these two positions are a start, the station is down staff in a number of areas. This is impacting station operations in a negative way. While station employees have stepped up to fill some of this workload, and two employees are acting in an interim capacity, issues arise where staff is uncertain who they should report to and take issues to.
No more volunteers at MPBS or MATC. Recently, the station has been informed that we can no longer have volunteers at the station and this is also true for at MATC. Many non-profits rely on volunteers to accomplish their work. We used volunteers to help with mailings, to answer viewer questions and problems, and to take calls during our pledge events, but will have to make do without going forward.
Special recognition. As you may or may not know, our master control operations are being handled by the ECB in Madison. Previously, this was done out of a facility in Jacksonville, Florida and before that the station did master control operations internally with our own staff. The ECB had an issue before a UPS upgrade took place and we lost our broadcast feed from them. Two of our engineering staff, Dave Schank and Kurt Schroeder, should be applauded for moving quickly to get us back on the air. They were able to do this quickly as they designed and engineered backup systems in case the feed from Madison was lost. The ECB resolved their issues and we were able to restore their feed within the day.
