From Frustration to 'Incredible Opportunity,' Pandemic is Hitting Public Channels
Scrambling to fill programming hours amid canceled community events and having to train public officials on the use of videoconferencing platforms are among challenges public, educational and government channels face during the pandemic, operators and officials told us. The smallest operations had the toughest time, and there are funding concerns the longer the pandemic goes on, said Alliance for Community Media President Mike Wassenaar.
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PEG operations that were heavily involved in equipment lending and relied almost universally on public-produced content have pretty much shut, Wassenaar said. Like libraries, public access organizations that lend equipment are struggling with how to deal with the public, he said. "We're not seeing solutions."
Educational and government operations have been doing far more emergency information communications about health, often translating it into multiple languages, Wassenaar said. As government meetings went virtual in March and April, so too has carriage of them on PEG channels as they integrate feeds from Zoom, Google Meets and other platforms into their broadcast productions, he said. Numerous educational channels have been supplementing the distance learning of students, aggregating or programming content for different grade levels, Wassenaar said.
Multiple PEG channels told us content has been a struggle. Some have staffers working remotely, others have people coming in to relatively empty studios and editing facilities.
Cardinale Greene, Buffalo's cable communications director, said the city's public access channel still is receiving publicly produced content, though the volume has declined since access to the city's studio and editing facility is closed. To fill the hole, weekly produced shows are now shown in two time slots during the week instead of one, he said. He said the city's educational channel is largely just notices or public service announcements.
Government programming also took a hit, Greene said. The city broadcasts Zoom-held government meetings, or updates from the mayor, he said. A lot of its programming used to range from elected officials to community groups coming into the studio, but "we're not doing any of those," he said. "We thought we almost were going to be at a standstill, with nothing." The lack of particularly studio-quality programming "is frustrating [but] it's working well under the circumstances," he said.
Community affairs and events programming on Indianapolis' TV2 channel "has dried to a trickle," so it's running content from a year ago, said station manager Ken Montgomery. "We will run the heck out of" a pair of upcoming candidate forums being produced externally in the next two weeks, he said. Channel 16, which carries government public meetings, broadcasts the WebEx feeds and the mayor's visits to the studio, he said.
The pandemic "has allowed an incredible opportunity" for reinvention of community media, with public access TV programmer Brookline Interactive Group (BIG) in suburban Boston focusing far more on community meetings and forums than it did before COVID-19, said Executive Director Kathy Bisbee. It also took such steps as training community officials on such issues as lighting and camera placement and made some limited equipment purchases, she said. BIG is mulling different approaches for reopening its video recording and editing equipment lending, such as curbside delivery, Bisbee said.
How long these channel shifts last is an open question, Wassenaar said. Issues like whether public meetings go back to being in public and how rapidly residents get used to town halls on Zoom "are going to be the drivers," he said. Funding is unclear because covering high school sports is often a revenue generator for channels, he said. Also potentially problematic is the accelerating cord cutting, meaning lower cable franchise fees for localities, he said. The economic decline will put a strain on local governments' tax revenue, he said: "It's an open question where we will be in six months."