Radio station blames financial woes for manager layoff.
On a range from good to bad, July 12 was a horrible day for Karen Sanchez.
First she had a root canal. Then, just after she left the dentist, she was fired from her job as general manager of KLBU 102.9 FM.
***image1***The firing shocked Sanchez and also surprised her colleagues. Since Sanchez came on board "blu" in November, 2003, she'd helped a team of six other employees carve a bold, on-air niche for the "chill" music station amidst northern New Mexico's perpetually stagnant music scene.
"I met all the goals of the station. I earned bonuses every month I was there. I'm shocked and devastated this has happened," Sanchez says. "Out of all the scenarios myself and the owners had discussed when we started the station, this was not one of them."
KLBU owner Ken Christensen says the decision was made out of financial necessity, and praised Sanchez's work for the station. Christensen, who owns the station with three partners through parent company BluVentures LLC in Fort Myers, Florida, says KLBU lost money 18 of the 20 months it has been on the air. It hasn't helped that BluVentures, which runs two sushi restaurants in Florida and up until recently operated a network of 15 Internet radio stations, has been struggling financially too, he says.
"We thought we'd be able to make the station profitable by now," Christensen says. "We would have hoped the advertising support of the station would have happened faster, but it hasn't. This was a brutal decision for us."
Neither Christensen nor Sanchez would reveal her salary.
According to Christensen, BluVentures bought the station in 2003 for $1.15 million from Will Sims and Don Davis who'd owned its predecessor, KENC. Blu then changed the format to so-called "chill" music, down-tempo trip-hop made famous by such artists as Zero 7 and Moby. When the station launched, KLBU was the first station in the US with an exclusively chill music format.
"We loved the music, and were looking for a small market, resort-style town which was open to new music," Christensen says.
BluVentures settled on Sanchez, a Santa Fe native who has worked in radio advertising for nearly 30 years, to get KLBU up and running because they wanted someone with a feel for northern New Mexico's musical sensibility and enough business savvy to woo local advertising. Intent on keeping the station's roots planted in Santa Fe, Sanchez brought former KBAC Radio Free Santa Fe jocks Joann Orner and Sam Ferrara to Christensen, and they were hired as well.
Two years later, however, some of that homegrown emphasis is gone: Christensen has taken over Sanchez's responsibilities and will commute back and forth from his home in Los Angeles until the station reorganizes.
The situation is hardly ideal, but Christensen says his hand was forced.
For Sanchez, however, Christensen's explanation as to why she was axed doesn't sit well, and she believes KLBU's owners knew it would be longer than two years before the station made a profit. She says that's what they told her when they lured her away from an advertising job at Citadel Broadcasting Corporation during the summer of 2003, before Sanchez subsequently agreed to help build the station from the ground up.
"They've had some bad luck in their other ventures, and so that became the main issue," she says. "I know this is a business, but I'm heartbroken. It was like having a baby ripped away from me."
Sanchez would not comment when asked if she was considering legal action.
As for the employees Sanchez managed, they too were apparently taken off-guard by her dismissal. Simply put, according to Account Executive Christopher Goblet: "This came out of the blue."
