The Vermont Guardian newspaper reported that their former editor is now the Executive Director of Pacifica Foundation.

Guma goes to Pacifica radio

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Vermont Guardian staff

BURLINGTON — Vermont Guardian co-founder Greg Guma has been selected as the new executive director of the Pacifica Foundation, a listener-supported national radio network with five owned stations and more than 80 affiliate stations across the United States that air its programs.

Guma replaces Dan Coughlin, who served as director for three years before resigning last June. The search and selection process for the post took six months.

Pacifica began as a progressive, listener-sponsored radio experiment in California’s Bay Area in 1949, and subsequently became the first nonprofit FM radio network in the United States. According to Matthew Lasar, author of Pacifica Radio: The Rise of an Alternative Network, it was created “explicitly to encourage communication and the breakdown of ideological barriers.”

Beginning in the McCarthy era, it became a haven for dissent and unconventional thinking, and challenged many U.S. policies through daring public affairs and news shows. It has since become known for highly its culturally diverse and sometimes politically controversial programming, as well as its frequent internal struggles. In 1996, it launched Democracy Now!, a daily news show hosted by Amy Goodman that is now heard throughout and beyond the network.

Guma comes to the job after almost four decades as an editor, manager, writer and progressive activist. Prior to co-founding Vermont Guardian in 2004, he worked as a daily newspaper reporter in the late 1960s, ran U.S. Department of Labor training programs in the early 1970s, owned two bookstores in Vermont and managed a third in California, and edited an influential alternative weekly, The Vermont Vanguard Press.

He also has been coordinator of the Peace and Justice Center in Burlington and director of a legal services organization for immigrants in New Mexico, and for 11 years edited the Vermont-based international affairs publication Toward Freedom.

Guma has written several books, scripts for political documentaries, and hundreds of published columns and feature articles. In addition, he has led studies on government structure and ecological planning, and organized conferences on independent media, the peace and environmental movements, and prison justice.

Pacifica’s owned, noncommercial stations include KPFA (Berkeley), KPFK (Los Angeles), WBAI (New York), WPFW (Washington, DC), and KPFT (Houston). Most programs are produced through the stations, but shows like Free Speech Radio News and Flashpoints, as well as a daily headline news service and special broadcasts like the U.S. Senate hearings this week for Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, are distributed nationally.

The foundation is governed by an elected Pacifica National Board (PNB) and local boards at each of the five stations. It has about 200 employees, most working at individual stations, and hundreds of volunteers.

Over the past 10 years, the organization has weathered a series of internal crises, initially sparked by concerns about a plan to
“mainstream” the network and alter its participatory governance. Coughlin, who had been the national news director, was one of several staffers forced out in the late 1990s, but he and others ultimately returned and several resulting lawsuits were settled.

In a letter to the PNB accepting the job, Guma expressed hopes to “nurture an open, civil, and consultative atmosphere that seeks common ground and looks beyond differences to pursue dynamic solutions, ones that promote sustainability and diversity, expand services and audiences, and help staff, volunteers, individual stations and the Pacifica network to realize their enormous potential.”

Guma will be based primarily in the Berkeley national office, but will work with staff across the country. Shortly after reporting for duty, he hopes to visit owned and affiliate stations during a cross-country trip.