Television in the making: Station
staffers Josh Bloodworth (left) and Rick Osborne
sweat the small stuff during a live broadcast.
CarvinEison and LaToya Campbell chat during a moment of downtime on the
set.
“Okay, people, let’s focus. How
much time do we have left?”
CarvinEison’s voice fills the
studio’s tiny control room.
“One minute,” comes the
reply.
Exactly one minute later
Eison’s speaking again, but this time he’s quietly addressing the camera — and
viewers in an unknown number of Rochester homes — from his seat on the set:
“Greetings and welcome to
this edition of Rochester TV live.”
Then, almost as an aside, he
adds: “Producing a television show is a complicated thing.”
The SUNY Brockport students
running this talk-show from the control room at Rochester Community
Television’s studio would probably agree with that.
Eison has been the station’s general manager for the past
two years and the professor for this class in television production. As he
hosts a roundtable discussion, his students are busily working the cameras,
adjusting sound, and orchestrating the whole effort.
“Pull out [camera] two…
down,” instructs LaToya Campbell, who’s assumed the mantle of producer for this
half-hour segment.
“Gimme
a single shot of whoever starts talking.”
Just five weeks ago,
Campbell and her fellow students had no experience in television. Today, as
something of a final exam, she’s directing a crew of her peers.
For Eison, what Campbell and her classmates are doing represents the future of
non-commercial media in America, a slice of the coming electronic public square.
They’re using the community television station.
Here’s how community
television works: Giant cable companies like Time Warner and Comcast get to use
public infrastructure and rights-of-way to run the cables through which they
pipe programming (and increasingly, broadband internet and digital
communication services) into homes and businesses. But in the course of doing
so, they make substantial profits. In return for the use of public property,
they have to give something back to the public.
That “something” comes in
the form of funding for a community television station and space for a channel
in the cable packages. In Rochester,
that’s cable Channel 15, which is available to between 65,000 and 85,000
households in the city. (That’s only the number of households that can watch
the station if they want to. Its viewership is too low to be measured by
ratings and auditing firms.)
Historically, says Eison,
about 90 percent of the programming on the station has been produced by
religious groups, to the point that when he describes Channel 15, people tell
him they thought it was a religious station.
“There’s nothing wrong with
that,” he says, but then adds: “What has been missing from community television
is all the rest of the community.”
Eison ticks off a list of examples, including arts
councils, neighborhood associations, civil-rights groups, political parties,
and youth groups.
“My vision of the station is
one that shows all those things,” he says.
Sheila Driscoll is one of
the people whose job it is to implement that vision. As a part-time
special-projects manager, her job is to “get new organizations involved with
the station,” she says.
“I’m just trying to get the
word out that we’re here and that we exist,” she says.
And that may be the
station’s biggest challenge. Both she and Eison often repeat the phrase “under
the radar” to describe the station and its work.
“The biggest impediment is
that people don’t know about it,” Eison says.
If that’s the case, the second biggest impediment may be convincing people to try using it
once they know about it.
“People are positive about
it in theory, but they don’t know how to use it,” Driscoll says. “It takes a
little bit of effort to use a community television station if you’re not
familiar with it.”
And then there’s that rogue
streak of perfectionism in us all.
“People
are afraid that they’re not going to rise to the standards of the movies, so
why try,” she says. Part of Driscoll’s job, she says, is to remind them that
the importance of the message they have to share trumps concerns about
production values.
For someone like Eison, who
last year made the documentary July ’64 about Rochester’s civil-rights-era race riots, that issue is a bit
more complicated. On the one hand, he says, the rough warts-and-all appearance
of community television is the stamp of authenticity.
“It
shouldn’t look too polished or slick
or commercial,” he says. “It’s regular people using this medium to express
themselves.”
But on the other hand, the
professional in him balks at throwing production values out the window. After
all, if it looks too bad, no one will take it seriously.
“All
of these things affect perception and help get your message across,” he says.
“It’s powerful.”
That dilemma — creating
access for regular folks to a medium that requires substantial technical skills
— is at the heart of Eison’s push to get the community more involved in the
station. With FCC rulings in recent years allowing for concentration of media
ownership in a market, this kind of community access to the tools of mass
communication is more important and relevant than ever, he contends.
“The first thing about
commercial broadcasting is that it’s paid speech. Well, paid speech isn’t free
speech,” he says. “There still has to be a place for that [free speech].”
To prove his point, he whips
out a tiny video player he keeps with him and plays a public-service
announcement created by city teens. The 30-second spot opens with a couple
kissing, then parting ways. It cuts to a group of girlfriends gossiping. In the
course of their discussion, they discover that a friend’s boyfriend is sleeping
around. The message? Unsafe sex isn’t worth it.
This is no Super Bowl
mini-film. But surprisingly, it also doesn’t come off as amateur, either. And
it has a gritty authenticity to it; if you look close enough, you’ll probably
even recognize the street from landmarks in the background.
This type of message isn’t
likely to run on one of Rochester’s
commercial stations, Eison says. Even if the production values were up to par,
there’s still the high cost of paying for air time. And some messages simply
don’t fit in with the commercial bent of these stations. The result?
“Important messages are
eliminated from the marketplace of ideas,” Eison says.
Still, the problems of attracting and keeping diverse programming remain. Beyond the
lack of awareness and initial reluctance, for many there’s also the simple
difficulty of regularly carving out the time to create shows.
“That’s why we’re trying to
get organizations into it,” says Driscoll. Organizations, once they’re trained
in the technology, can spread the workload among their volunteers. That makes
for more regular, predictably recurring programming.
The station is also doing
other things to bridge the tech gap. One is offering informal classes similar
to the one the Brockport students took for credit. That’s quickly become a popular
option.
“There is a waiting list a
mile long to take those classes,” says Eison.
Another is offering quality
video-editing equipment, which the station hopes to have in place by the first
of September. That will allow people using the station to explore a far wider
range of formats, especially shooting footage out in the community and later
splicing it together, just as a typical newscast would.
If all goes as they hope,
one of the first groups Eison and Driscoll hope to involve in the station is
the city’s youth.
“The thing that I’m most
interested in is helping young people shape and mold messages,” says Eison.
Citing recent violence and
dropout rates, Driscoll says both the need and the hunger are there.
“I think there’s tremendous
concern in the community that we are neglecting young people,” she says. “One
way to start addressing that is to give them a voice.”
To some extent, that’s
already taking place. Through the city’s rec program, teens are producing
“Youth Voice One Vision,” a series of eight 20-30 minute shows on different
themes — politics, public health, and so forth — says Driscoll.
“How often do you see a show
by 15 teens about how to improve high schools? I don’t think standardized
testing would be mentioned on that show,” she says. “Teens have a lot to say.”
With her help, she hopes,
they’ll soon have one more opportunity to say it.
This article appears in Jul 20-26, 2005.
