My understanding of the tax code is that you can not write off
unrealized income, but only out-of-pocket costs on deals like this.

As an individual you can only write off out-of-pocket expenses, but as a
business you can write off more... either way you can never write off the whole
amount (and there's also limits as to how much you can write off for donations
to different types of organizations... some are 20%, others are 30%, others are
50% - I have no idea what an NPR affiliate might rate at in terms of those
limits).

I know you can do this to a larger degree as a business mainly because a friend
of mine has done this same thing a couple of times for non-profits... he shot &
edited a TV PSA spot for one & recorded a live concert event for another. In
both cases he was able to write off more than just the out-of-pocket costs.
He's pretty careful, so it's not like he would've just loaded those things up
with phoney-baloney expenses to get a bigger write-off.

In order to write off the $50 per hour you would have charged, you
would have to record that $50 per hour as income, making it zero out
just the same.

Well, that method would be worse than zeroing out, as you can only write off
*at MOST* half of it, anyway.

NeilH