Staccato

There are many Public and Government Access television stations in the Capital Area. However, many people agree that the quality of most public access television in our area has declined in recent years. The main reason for this is that Cable Franchise Agreements, which create public access stations, have been negotiated by individual cities and townships. Thus each station has only a small share of the regional market. As a result, the costs of doing business have been too high and public access services have been reduced or eliminated.

In addition, local public access stations have been operated by cable companies for local government. For good reasons, these stations have been evaluated in terms of how well they served the requirements of these institutions, rather than assessing the overall community benefit. Without pressure to creatively serve the whole community, the content of local public access television has not been as competitive as it might have been.

A non-profit, regional public access station could address both of these problems. A cable station spanning only Lansing, East Lansing and Meridian township would reach nearly a quarter of a million people, yet it would cost no more to operate than any other public access station to operate.

If the station were organized as a mission-driven non-profit controlled by a Board of Directors it could aggressively develop competitive content. The Board could evaluate staff performance in terms of the quality of the content of the broadcasting. Over time this would tend to make the station an effective vehicle for promoting our community.

The primary benefit of creating a CMC is that it would create new opportunities to promote our community and encourage healthy, sustainable development. This would be accomplished because a CMC would create a new culture for community-based communication. With a mission-driven board and a full time director, it will be possible for the CMC to serve a threefold purpose as a learning tool, a vehicle for social connection, and a focus for regional cooperation and development.

As a learning tool, a fully staffed CMC will provide ongoing opportunities for people to become proficient in using a variety of communication technologies. Through both informal learning opportunities and formal training modules, community members will be guided in ways to sharpen the visual interest of their message, find and engage an audience, and nurture solution-focused dialogue on critical issues facing the community. These skills will in turn serve to educate community members who are currently disengaged from such dialogue or who feel alienated from community decision-making processes. More concretely, the CMC could form partnerships with educational television in schools and with local colleges and universities to support training programs.

Just as the products of the CMC will serve as a tool for virtual connection, its physical location will serve as a new hub for social interaction and connection by diverse parts of community. It will raise consciousness of the ways in which neighborhood and community groups can utilize all forms of media-from newsletters to on-line forums-to engage and mobilize community members in constructive action. Whereas many people today feel more connected to the world than to their own community, the center will become a place where "the community meets itself," serving as a link between groups and initiatives working to strengthen relationships between stakeholders that are largely disconnected today.

Finally, a CMC will encourage regional development by fostering programming that promotes our community: events, issues, opportunities, history and stories. And a CMC will provide an excellent model for cross-jurisdictional governmental cooperation. Once they have seen the mutual benefit to be derived from a collaborative effort, elected officials from Meridian Township, East Lansing, and Lansing will work together to bring about that benefit. The process may well in turn create new relationships and modes of interaction for tackling other areas in need of a regional response, such as land use, education, and job creation. The most successful CMCs actually make money and reinvest it in their communities. For example the Grand Rapids CMC led and was a major donor to a capital campaign to redevelop a downtown theater which is now in business. And it is in the process of repeating this success by guiding the development of a public wireless canopy for the City. While we couldn’t expect such things from a CMC in its first years of operation, it is true that MidMichigan needs a similar champion for development in our area.

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About the Capital Area Community Center continued...