‘CALIFORNIA TIMES’ RUNNING OUT OF TIME

Cynthia Perry looks and sounds young and fresh and energetic, but she is one of the last of a dying breed of radio journalists.

On Wednesday, Perry’s 7-year-old, award-winning, 30-minute documentary show “California Times,” heard locally Sundays on KRTH-FM (101.1), KLAC-AM (570) and KPCC-FM (89.3), ran out of money.

And unless she can find a corporate sponsor willing to buck the current thinking that seems content to let serious radio journalism wither and die, “California Times” will have become yet another casualty of the times.

In 1980, the California Council for the Humanities (the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities) awarded Perry a seed grant to produce the show for six months. At the time, nobody believed that an academically oriented documentary program about all things Californian from robots to wine making to the history of “California Okies” would ever succeed. Today, 52 stations all over the state air it each week to an estimated audience of about 250,000.

This year, Perry says, she needs another $200,000 to stay on the air. But strapped for funds itself, the council has decided that it can’t afford to invest nearly a third of its available grant monies on “California Times” any longer. Instead it will sponsor a more diverse menu of art exhibitions, anthropological conferences and an occasional film or public radio show.

Perry now has been pitching her show to banks, oil companies and computer chip manufacturers. But, so far, she has found the doors to the corporate world of philanthropy locked tight.

“I think an association with ‘California Times’ could be beneficial to some California corporation,” Perry says. “I can deliver 250,000, well-educated listeners each week. But, to them, radio is not as glamorous as television. They like the show. But they won’t help me.”

Perry’s predicament reflects the plight of independent radio producers everywhere. Only a handful of these journalists, who generally labor in obscurity to probe issues and injustices most of the news media choose to neglect, can make a living at it. Few are even trying anymore.

Jeffrey Chester, a prolific radio producer who frequently contributes to National Public Radio and recently completed work on a documentary on the ethnic minority peoples of China, is one independent who is getting out of the business.

The financial trauma of being an independent producer is easy to document. Chester, for example, calls himself a radio producer, but he makes his living writing for computer magazines. Many producers have jobs, sometimes as bartenders, that subsidize their journalism.

Though some independents applaud the Corp. for Public Broadcasting for instituting a $3-million National Radio Production Fund last year, many complain that the CPB awards much of its radio grant money to producers of classical music and other entertainment programs.

Independent journalists, Chester says, “have also been looked upon over the last six years as radical leftist troublemakers. The CPB has consistently opted for safer programming in established names. Someone at the CPB told me that you pretty much have to be Bill Moyers or Walter Cronkite to get a television grant. Radio is pretty much the same.”

Richard Madden of the CPB insists, however, that while journalists and entertainment producers all compete for the same money, this year’s radio grants were awarded to a wide range of producers and programs.

“We certainly want to assist in the development of young, emerging producers,” Madden says, “and at the same time we must have confidence in the ability and the experience of the producer to pull off the idea. It’s a competition of ideas, and the best ideas get the grants.”

On the state level, the story for independent producers is even bleaker. In 1983, Gov. George Deukmejian deleted the California Public Broadcasting Commission from his budget and virtually eliminated all state funding for public radio and television.

The governor’s philosophy, according to a spokesperson in his office, is that the media should not be subsidized by the state. Government funding, he believes, taints the independence of the media and consequently the stories they cover. Since 1983, the governor’s office has received few formal complaints about this policy.

Still, a small band of die-hards persist. Adi Gevins has won a “whole drawer full of awards” for her work in public radio and she keeps plugging along despite the nagging monetary insecurity inherent in the job. She doesn’t deny that it might take “a whole drawer full of Peabody Awards” to have much of a chance.

Funding for independent radio journalism these days is capricious to the point of total insecurity, Gevins says.

“I have in fact always lived second by second. But I do it because it’s very rare to find a job where you can work on projects you really care about, and have the time you need to create the projects.”

Cynthia Perry knows she won’t find that kind of job on commercial radio. “I worked as a television reporter for years and I never got any mail except to tell me how cute my new haircut was,” Perry says.

“But with this show, I’m flooded with mail. I get mail from new immigrants, from legislators, from teachers. I even got a complimentary note from Bo Derek. Bo Derek listens to “California Times.” “

Perry is spending four months, without salary, trying to scare up enough money to stay on the air for another year. She has sent a package of 17 repeat programs on California history to all of her stations so that “California Times” will survive at least through the middle of summer. “I’ve been considered weird because I can live off the money I make as an independent producer” (about half what she made as a television reporter), Perry says. “And now I’m about to become one of the ex-people who did it.”

It is small comfort to her that she is not alone.