Looks like my old stomping ground is in deep shit:
One of Sydney’s leading community radio stations could be closed as early as July, as the station scrambles to solve a funding hole caused by the exit of one of its financial owners last year.
2SER, or Sydney Educational Radio, is owned by the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and Macquarie University, the latter of which announced it would withdraw its funding for the station this year.
In an email to station volunteers seen by 702 ABC Sydney, 2SER station manager Cheryl Northey said the station understood UTS could not fund the station on its own.
Cheryl Northey told staff and volunteers that without secure funding, 2SER could close as early as July this year. (Radio National: Sophie Kesteven)
Ms Northey said it was trying to avoid closure, but the station needed to find a way to make up for the shortfall caused by Macquarie’s exit.
“Should the station close this year, which could be as early as July, 2SER must do the right thing by our staff. A decision to close would not be taken lightly, and work is being done to avoid that outcome,” Ms Northey said in the email.
Now I’m admittedly long out of the loop with SER, having left back in 2013, but I’m kind of astonished it’s taken me this long to discover Macquarie had pulled out of the partnership after all these decades. I’m guessing that this was not a casual decision on Macquarie’s part, and I presume there was some discussion with UTS about it for a while, so that the whole thing wasn’t actually as abrupt as it appears in the news story. Remember when FBi were in dire straits in 2008 and they were upfront about it? Would’ve been nice of SER to do something similar. The ABC article cites Robbie Buck, who was an SER presenter before he took off on Triple J, but he’s also cited in the Herald news story where I think he’s more pertinent:
Buck, a lifetime paying member and former staffer, told this masthead that he and others were perplexed to see the real possibility that an “institution and pillar of Sydney culture” could be wound up in just a few months’ time.
“The question we have is, how did it get to this without anybody in the community realising how dire the situation was?” Buck said.
“UTS is a billion-dollar-plus enterprise. The funding from UTS is less than half a million dollars per year. We see no reason why even after Macquarie has pulled this funding, there couldn’t be a paired-back version of 2SER that continues with just UTS funding until further funds are found.”
Yeah, there’s been major fuck-ups behind the scenes, I just don’t know if they’ve been perpetrated by SER management or higher up at UTS. Apparently Macquarie pulled out last September but it was only about a month ago that they finally started hunting up new partners. WHAT THE FUCK. And according to the SMH piece, SER was actually about eighty grand in surplus in 2024. What went wrong? And why were they apparently determined to hide it from the members until it was too late?