22 thoughts on “Have community access media organizations adapted to the digital age?”

1. Jeff Garland February 27, 2012 at 9:47 am

   Oh my word, someone finally gets it ! 😉

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2. ForPeople February 27, 2012 at 10:07 am

   Yeah, but one thing that it offers to everyone is video documentation and broadcast of public meetings, local government hearings, etc…
   Never discount the very large number of people who end up seeing something important and relevant on Olelo simply because they were channel surfing…

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   1. Reboot February 27, 2012 at 12:39 pm

      This is a very big part of Olelo Television. Olelo provides coverage of meetings from START to Finish.

      Some of the meetings are better than Korean drama. The last city council meeting at Kapolei tells us how arrogant the city council members can become.

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   2. Jeff Garland April 9, 2012 at 2:26 pm

      I don’t know how you can describe it as “the very large number of people who end up seeing something important and relevant on Olelo simply because they were channel surfin” when in reality the amount of viewers can be described as minimal at best as DCCA documents show:
      http://hawaii.gov/dcca/catv/designation-of-peg-access-organizations/olelos-application-for-designation

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3. Sean McLaughlin February 27, 2012 at 10:18 am

   Again, you may need to look at the least served communities to find the most important work in community access.

   Keep in mind the demographic for uptake of new media – and don’t lose sight of the influence in legacy media … most people still get most of their information via TV ..

   But your point is well taken, specially for the next generation.

   Nowadays, the leading innovators are developing community broadband and media access – as you suggest, for the masses!

   Digital Redwoods is a good example …

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   1. Jeff Garland April 9, 2012 at 2:28 pm

      http://digitalredwoods.net/Main_Page

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4. Randy Mills February 27, 2012 at 10:46 am

   While I agree with the above argument that “many cable companies, broadcast networks, and newspapers appear to be well behind the curve in adapting to the new potentials being opened up by technology,” and that, yes, even Community Access stations are behind the times in this respect, it is difficult for small non-profit community-based organizations to concentrate on their growth potential when constantly facing down legislation attempting to dismantle their existing programs and potential for growth and innovation.

   I would invite you to look at the Project YBEAM program at Akaku, as well as reiterate Sean McLaughlin’s mention of the Digital Redwoods program. As the Director of Project YBEAM, I can say with certainty and confidence that we are working diligently toward shifting our offered programs and services toward this new paradigm.

   I would remind you, however, that existing programs at these facilities still offer services, training, equipment rentals and support at rates many citizens in Hawaii, and throughout the United States, would never be able to afford otherwise, all while fighting hard to preserve your access to your own public rights of way.

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5. Keith Rollman February 27, 2012 at 11:57 am

   Olelo stuck to the old linear, analog model for way too long. In my opinion they attempted to become a mini “network” trying to control whose message dominated, including promoting their own agenda. While the rest of the world went digital, web-based and on-demand, they tried to maintain their “gate keeper” mindset. If they were really worried about serving the public vs protecting their own little fiefdom they’d have seen the light a long time ago.

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   1. Reboot February 27, 2012 at 12:41 pm

      I get more from watching Olelo than I get from the TV news and Star Advertiser. Bless all the volunteers who challenge the status quo.

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   2. Ken Conklin February 27, 2012 at 1:31 pm

      Keith Rollman’s observation that ‘Olelo TV served as a viewpoint gatekeeper is highly accurate. My area of specialization is Hawaiian sovereignty. For 20 years I have watched Channel 53, NATV, broadcasting hundreds of sovereignty-pushing programs and virtually nothing to balance it. And I do mean hundreds — “First Friday” with the Trask sisters; A’o Pohaku Ku (Rodenhurst) with her husband “Lucky” and their two sons; Keanu Sai with his “Perfect Title” stuff; Hayden Burgess (alias Poka Laenui); more recently Lynette Cruz; zillions of one-sided panel discussions from the UH Center for Hawaiian Studies where every panelist is a sovereignty activist, etc. The only balanced program I recall was a panel on the Akaka bill produced by a friend of mine using her own equipment featuring two attorneys favoring OHA’s position (Sherry Broder and Colin Kippen) vs. two attorneys opposing the bill and defending unity and equality (Paul Sullivan and Bruce Fein).

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6. Louis Diliberto February 27, 2012 at 12:13 pm

   Your basic premise is correct, that PEG?s are generally stuck with an old paradigm. On the other hand, it is still the only way to get on “television” at a price that most everyone can afford, granted you aren?t reaching millions, but you get to speak directly with your local community about issues that they care about. Besides, the media monopolies that control our public airwaves should be required to “pay” for the use of this public spectrum. Otherwise, maybe we should all become citizens of China.

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7. Larry February 27, 2012 at 2:19 pm

   The classes and the opportunity to take them are still valuable services of the public access TV services. No Internet tricks replace that.

   Once a person learns to produce broadcast-quality video, or to operate a professional camera, they can use that skill in many ways. YouTube has not yet replaced TV. As to the paradigm of sitting down in front of a television while a program airs, TIVOing is replacing that, and it makes `Olelo programs as accessible as Internet programming. They also keep an archive of on-demand programs, hard to do on an iPad.

   Finally, the video shot for `Olelo can be re-used. If you want to post it on YouTube, it can look great, as opposed to much of the home-made material commonly posted.

   I think, Ian, you can appreciate that learning to compose a picture in the viewfinder (remember those?) of a still camera is both a skill and an art. It’s the same for video. Going through one of the PEG classes is not much different from going through a beginning, intermediate or advanced photography class. There is still a reason why there are classes and still things to learn if one wants to move past the home-movie stage.

   I regularly speak to people who ask me if I’ve seen something on `Olelo. While not a big TV fan myself, I see its importance and power. Public access television always has its critics. It’s never possible to satisfy everyone. It has a large number of fans and viewers as well. Akaku shows that it can also grow and experiment at the same time.

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8. Jeff Garland February 27, 2012 at 2:39 pm

   ‘Olelo is 10 years behind the cutting edge, and more. They still have yet to provide stereo to highlight our wonderful local musical talents. There has been no focus on internet technologies, though the board was informed 15 years ago that is the direction they should be headed in. They just got a Facebook page last year 🙁
   Still spending large amounts of funds on non-TV promotions, and 1.2 million dollars in the last decade fighting transparency laws has turned them into a relic of the past. Perhaps they will turn it into a museum and give tours. 😀

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9. Ed Coll February 27, 2012 at 2:57 pm

   As someone who has worked professionally in Documentary film and video for 30 years I haven’t had a TV in two years. It is as dead as morse code as a viable communication medium. My advice 2 those wanting 2 build community get an Android hand-held device and RTMF! Everything ones needs to know about “Professional” media production is on the internet! Cheaper than Public Access. Anyone that expects to learn community media from the people running PEG in Hawaii in this age of hand held journalism has left early, haven’t arrived, and don’t know they aren’t going to! Use ALL the money to set up free community wifi.

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10. damon February 27, 2012 at 2:59 pm

    I think that anything taught at Olelo can also be found on youtube and more. The how to lessons on youtube can be done at home w/out wasting the time, gas or money in attending Olelo’s classes.

    I like Olelo don’t get me wrong… they are a bit behind though.

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11. Ed Coll February 27, 2012 at 4:53 pm

    Why is my comment awaiting moderation when a post posted after mine has already been moderated? Didn’t the first come, first served free speech ethos make it over the digital divide?

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    1. Ian Lind Post authorFebruary 27, 2012 at 8:33 pm

       Not every item gets moderated.
       If you’ve registered and had a previous comment approved, your later comments go through automatically.
       I may go back later and review, but it means the “first come, first served” doesn’t always work.

       -Ian

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12. Ed Coll February 27, 2012 at 4:57 pm

    It did indeed. Musta just been a screening. Mahalo!

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13. Tom February 28, 2012 at 3:55 pm

    Hey, isn’t the whole purpose of PEG Access to let people create video for cable TV? If all you wanted to do was create stuff on your own to put on YouTube then yeah, you don’t need Olelo.

    If you’re arguing that TV is dead, well you can’t really blame Public Access Television organizations for being part of the TV industry. It’s kind of inheriently linked.

    Saturday Night Live has known what’s up for a long time. Mike Myers did Wayne’s World and demonstrated public access video production. A few years later Jimmy Fallon and Horatio Sanz portrayed a couple of college kids hosting an internet video show. Both of these are still viable ways to get your show in front of viewers, but it would probably reach a slightly different audience. The only difference is that your PEG Access provider will provide you with all the expensive equipment you need a very little cost. If I want to do a sophisticated internet show I have to buy all my own equipment.

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14. skeptical once again February 29, 2012 at 2:29 pm

    I think the key shift here should be from “community access media organizations” to “community media training organizations”. There still seems to be a niche for training people.

    In fact, this might be more than a niche. The new paradigm might be educational. In a fast-changing world, societies cannot invest in technology that turns into a pumpkin at midnight. Even within technology, as with the iPhone, the real shift is away from hardware innovation to constant transformation of software. This might signify a historic shift away from physical capital toward intellectual and cultural capital. Perhaps societies like Japan dominated by powerful construction industries and unions who have a penchant for big infrastructure projects that smack of the 19th century are at a disadvantage today, especially compared to dynamic, Internet-obsessed societies like South Korea. In the 21st century, as soon as the concrete is poured, a sense of buyers remorse sets in. You just bought a dinosaur….

    In fact, film studies might be the major of the future. Here’s a 2005 article from the NYTimes:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/06/movies/06vann.html

    … At a time when street gangs warn informers with DVD productions about the fate of “snitches” and both terrorists and their adversaries routinely communicate in elaborately staged videos, it is not altogether surprising that film school – promoted as a shot at an entertainment industry job – is beginning to attract those who believe that cinema isn’t so much a profession as the professional language of the future.

    Some 600 colleges and universities in the United States offer programs in film studies or related subjects, a number that has grown steadily over the years, even while professional employment opportunities in the film business remain minuscule. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are only about 15,050 jobs for film producers or directors, which means just a few hundred openings, at best, each year.

    Given the gap between aspiration and opportunity, film education has often turned out to be little more than an expensive detour on the road to doing something else. Thus, Aaron Bell, who graduated as a film major from the University of Wisconsin in 1988, struggled through years of uninspiring nonunion work managing crews on commercials, television pilots and the occasional feature before landing his noncinematic job designing advertising for Modern Luxury Media LLC, a Chicago-based magazine publisher.

    “You sort of have this illusion coming out of film school that you’ll work into this small circle of creatives, but you’re actually more pigeonholed as a technician,” said Mr. Bell, who is now 39.

    For some next-generation students, however, the shot at a Hollywood job is no longer the goal. They’d rather make cinematic technique – newly democratized by digital equipment that reduces the cost of a picture to a few thousand dollars and renders the very word “film” an anachronism – the bedrock of careers as far afield as law and the military.

    At the University of Southern California, whose School of Cinema-Television is the nation’s oldest film school (established in 1929), fully half of the university’s 16,500 undergraduate students take at least one cinema/television class. That is possible because Elizabeth Daley, the school’s dean, opened its classes to the university at large in 1998, in keeping with a new philosophy that says, in effect, filmic skills are too valuable to be confined to movie world professionals. “The greatest digital divide is between those who can read and write with media, and those who can’t,” Ms. Daley said. “Our core knowledge needs to belong to everybody.”

    In fact, even some who first enrolled in U.S.C.’s film school to take advantage of its widely acknowledged position as a prime portal to Hollywood have begun to view their cinematic skills as a new form of literacy. One such is David Hendrie, who came to U.S.C. in 1996 after a stint in the military intending to become a filmmaker, but – even after having had the producer/director Robert Zemeckis as a mentor – found himself drawn to the school’s Institute for Creative Technologies, where he creates military training applications in a variety of virtual reality, gaming and filmic formats. One film he developed was privately screened for the directors John Milius and Steven Spielberg, who wanted to understand the military’s vision of the future.

    “That was like a film student’s dream,” said Mr. Hendrie, who nonetheless believes he has already outgrown anything he was likely to accomplish on the studio circuit. “I found myself increasingly demoralized by my experiences trying to pitch myself as a director for films like ‘Dude, Where’s My Car?’ ” Mr. Hendrie said. “What I’m doing here at I.C.T. speaks to the other interests I’ve always had, and in the end excited my passion more.”

    In recent weeks, members of a Baltimore street gang circulated a DVD that warned against betrayal, packaged in a cover that appeared to show three dead bodies. That and the series of gruesome execution videos that have surfaced in the Middle East are perhaps only the most extreme face of a complex sort of post-literacy in which cinematic visuals and filmic narrative have become commonplace.
    …
    To some extent, such broadening vision is already helping to make economic sense of film education, which in the past was often a long path to nowhere. “Most find their way, and the skills they learn from us are applicable to other careers and pursuits,” Dale Pollock, dean of the School of Filmmaking at the North Carolina School of the Arts, said of his students. “So we’re not wasting their time or money.”

    Still more, Ms. Daley, the U.S.C. Cinema-Television dean, argues that to generalize such skills has become integral to the film school’s mission. More than 60 academic courses at U.S.C. now require students to create term papers and projects that use video, sound and Internet components – and for Ms. Daley, it’s not enough. “If I had my way, our multimedia literacy honors program would be required of every student in the university,” she said.

    This might reflect a greater paradigm shift within education, which is the need for versatility. Students need to be trained to do projects independently on their lonesome, but also to collaborate on projects. Do universities really train students to be independent or collaborative? Perhaps neither.

    Also, the idea of a college major becomes problematic. Does a future businessman really need four years of business courses? Or just four really good courses? Instead of majoring in just one field (e.g., sociology, philosophy, physics), might it not be better to minor in several? Professors might want to fill empty seats with warm bodies in their upper division courses in order to justify their budgets, but the trick might be to have more lower division courses in one’s department and actively recruit students.

    The same might be true with vocational training in the community colleges. The best trade today, I’ve heard, is HVAC because the tradesman gets to learn multiple skills that are applicable across all disciplines. Perhaps more vocational disciplines could be created to encourage this kind of versatility.

    And why can’t electricians go to a four-year college to get a BS in their trade? After all, how different is engineering in that respect? Of course, electricians use their hands more than engineers in their work, but so do artists, and one can major in the fine arts in college. Snobbery and conventionality might be an obstacle to change in academia.

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15. skeptical once again February 29, 2012 at 11:10 pm

    Ian, one question that you did not ask, and which is the logical next step to questioning the obsolescence of public access cable stations, is the relevance of public television.

    This was asserted in the NYT in 2008.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/arts/television/17mcgr.html

    One will note the contrast between the fate of PBS and of NPR.

    Is PBS Still Necessary?

    FOR the eighth straight year the Bush administration has ritually proposed taking a hefty whack out of the federal subsidy for public broadcasting. The cuts would in effect slice in half the money that public television and public radio get from the government. If we follow the usual script, this means it’s time for upset listeners and viewers to rally to the cause, as they have in the past, and browbeat Congress into restoring the budget.

    Every year, though, it gets a little harder to muster the necessary outrage, and now and then a heretical thought presents itself: What if the glory days of public television — the days of “Monty Python,” “Upstairs Downstairs,” “The French Chef” — are past recapturing? Lately the audience for public TV has been shrinking even faster than the audience for the commercial networks. The average PBS show on prime time now scores about a 1.4 Nielsen rating, or a little over half of what the wrestling show “Friday Night Smackdown” gets.

    On the other side of the ledger the audience for public radio has been growing: there are more than 30 million listeners now, compared to just 2 million in 1980. “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” NPR’s morning and evening news programs, are the second and fourth most listened to shows in the country. Go figure. Who would have guessed 40 years ago, when public broadcasting came into being, that the antique medium, the one supposedly on its way out, would prove to be the greater success and the one more technically nimble. You can even download NPR broadcasts onto your iPod.

    Radio benefits of course from being a smaller target, and from attracting fewer political enemies. In public television especially it used to be axiomatic that attacks on the budget were retaliation for perceived liberal bias. Newt Gingrich was quite upfront about punishing PBS when he began his budgetary onslaught back in 1995. By now, though, that war ought to be over. These days the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is run by Republicans, and a few years ago, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, who was chairman of its board, wasn’t the least bit shy about trying to arm-wrestle stations into running a program whose host was Paul Gigot, editor of The Wall Street Journal editorial page. Unless you count occasional outbursts of hand-wringing earnestness on the part of Bill Moyers or David Brancaccio on “Now,” it’s hard now to see anything resembling liberal excess on PBS, if there ever was such a thing.

    Scanning the PBS lineup, in fact, it’s hard to detect much of a bias toward anything at all, except possibly mustiness. Except for “Antiques Roadshow,” all the prime-time stalwarts — “The NewsHour,” “Nova,” “Nature,” “Masterpiece” — are into their third or fourth decade, and they look it. Every now and then a one-off like “The War,” Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s World War II documentary, the most-watched PBS series in 10 years, comes along and makes a huge splash. The broadcast of the first episode was watched by some 7.3 million people, or about as many as tune in to the “NBC Nightly News.” But such projects are few and far between, and they’re so overwhelming and time-consuming that for many people they mostly serve as lengthy advertisements for the boxed DVD set, which you can view at your own convenience and your own pace.

    More typical prime-time fare — if you watch WNET, Channel 13, in New York, anyway — is the weekly rerun of “Keeping Up Appearances,” a BBC sitcom about class snobbery that was old 10 years ago. With her permed hair, dowdy clothes and fluty accent, the main character, Hyacinth, is practically a parody of a certain strain in public broadcasting: the one that puts on airs and wants to pretend to singularity.

    Forty years ago it really was different. There were only three networks, and none of them were known for challenging or high-minded programming. Indeed, public broadcasting came into being out of collective despair over what had become of the airwaves. Cable has changed all that. There are not only countless more channels to chose from now, but many offer the kind of stuff that in the past you could see only on public TV, and in at least some instances they do it better.

    The stunning (and stunningly expensive) BBC documentary “Planet Earth,” for example, which in the old days would have been a natural for PBS, was instead broadcast on the Discovery Channel, which could presumably better afford it. The Showtime series “The Tudors” is just the kind of thing — only better produced and with more nudity — that used to make “Masterpiece Theater” (now simply “Masterpiece”), once the flagship of PBS, so unmissable. Now it’s so strapped for cash that it has pretty much settled into an all-Jane Austen format.

    If you’re the sort of traditional PBS viewer who likes extended news broadcasts, say, or cooking shows, old movies and shows about animals gnawing each other on the veld, cable now offers channels devoted just to your interest. Cable is a little like the Internet in that respect: it siphons off the die-hards. Public television, meanwhile, more and more resembles everything else on TV. Since corporate sponsors were allowed to extend their “credit” announcements to 30 seconds, commercials in all but name have been a regular feature on public television, and that’s not to mention pledge programs, the fund-raising equivalent of water-boarding.

    In a needy bid for viewers, public television imitates just as much as it’s imitated, putting on pop knockoffs like “America’s Ballroom Challenge.” Even though a number of surveys suggest that a large segment of the viewing population still wants the best of what public television has to offer, there isn’t as much of that as there used to be, and when it is on, it often gets lost amid all the dreck.

    Considering how much it costs to create new topnotch programming, the best solution to public television’s woes is the one that will probably never happen: more money, not less. Here too public radio has an edge, because giving listeners what they want doesn’t cost nearly as much. NPR has benefited, moreover, from a huge bequest from the estate of Joan Kroc, widow of the longtime McDonald’s chairman, and you could argue that it has spent its money more wisely than PBS, spiffing up existing shows rather than trying to come up with new ones. Listeners complained mightily when Bob Edwards was booted as host of “Morning Edition” in 2004, a month before his 57th birthday, but the change invigorated the show and ratings are up. (Jim Lehrer, 73, has been with “NewsHour” since 1975, so long that some of his early viewers are now in assisted living.)

    But by far the greatest advantage of public radio is that, by not trolling after ratings, it has managed to stay distinctive: it does what nothing else on radio does and sticks to its core: news and public affairs and the oddball weekly show like “Car Talk” and “A Prairie Home Companion.” At the same time, public radio thrives, in a way that public TV does not, from internal competition: in addition to NPR, the old standby, there is the newer, hipper PRI (Public Radio International), importer of the invaluable BBC World Service news program and distributor of innovative shows like “Studio 360 With Kurt Andersen” and “This American Life,” which NPR did not fight for.

    Where would we be without this stuff, gathered so conveniently at the low end of the FM dial? How would we fill those otherwise empty hours when we’re held hostage in our cars? At its best public television adds a little grace note to our lives, but public radio fills a void.

    In a way, this reminds me of Woody Allen. Once upon a time, there was Hollywood on one side, and Woody Allen in Manhatten. Along came Robert Redford with the Sundance Festival and the Weinstein brothers, and now there is an established independent cinema. Well, there’s more to it than that, and in some ways independent cinema is no longer a movement, it has been co-opted and perhaps even no longer exists. But that okay, even Woody Allen has evolved.

    Interestingly, that NYT piece was written almost exactly four years ago, and it makes no mention of the Internet or of Netflix, the latter of which provides a lot of the BBC programming that the PBS used to telecast.

    Recently, Civil Beat had an article on a tech conference at KCC, and John Temple wrote about how he was impressed at how rapidly things are changing. That’s scary, because if a four-year-old newspaper article on public television fails to mention commonplace competitors to PBS like the Internet and Netflix, I wonder what is coming down the pipe right now that will be a game changer(s).

    http://www.civilbeat.com/articles/2012/02/27/15013-vitality-of-honolulu-tech-visible-at-unconferenz/

    Also, Civil Beat is in some ways similar to NPR, with its focus on public affairs. For a brief time, CB flirted with sports coverage and other popular topics, if I remember, but I find that gone. Maybe that’s a step in the right direction. But perhaps some type of offbeat entertainment unavailable in the mainstream media might be in order for CB (although I don’t know what that could be). It could be that CB needs more breaking news and news reporting, because there is a synergy there with news analysis. All I know is that I don’t read other publications now, so when there is a natural disaster warning, I turn to CB and they are left flatfooted.

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