Find out when North Bay Area preschools
enroll, thanks to public access news!
Screen grab courtesy KFTY Channel 50
Otherwise, I'd never even know there WAS a public access channel.
KFTY-TV in Santa Rosa, Calif., fired most of its news-gathering staff earlier this month and claimed to be moving to viewer-produced news. That, and some nice community news and event dates. Sounds oddly like . . . uh, public access TV?
I worried greatly about viewers in Santa Rosa--maybe they don't have public access TV! (Holy crap!) Looking to save the viewing audience from such a lack, I looked into the cable TV offerings (enter 95401 as the zip code) in Santa Rosa and found, thankfully, Comcast customers can tune to channel 69 for all public access TV needs. (KFTY is on Comcast channel 10 in case you missed the the same boring stuff on channel 69.)
Gathering news is hard. It takes time, intense attention to detail, and a keen bullshit detector. Oh, and it takes some money, too. But asking if Citizen Joe will replace Journalist Joe as the producer and arbiter of news content is exactly the wrong question. If Citizen Joe wants to do his own journalism, he can try this nifty gizmo: swarmcasting software, which turns anyone's PC into an Internet TV station.
KFTY is clearly making a final gasp before drowning for good. Even its executives admit the station hardly registers with Nielsen ratings. Clear Channel made a mistake when it purchased KFTY, and making the station "viewer-driven" merely draws out the death throes of this tiny TV station.
I like the "public access" approach to the topic. It shows that we have tried this kind of thing already, and tells us how well it didn't work.
I feel the term "citizen journalism" was slighted by Spendlove and Clear Channel. They really aren't interested in a grand experiment (or even being trendy). They just want to milk out a few more ad dollars.