I Want My CTV (Page 2 of 5)
February 21, 2008By:
Vogel, an Ohio native who received his Masters in Arts from the University of California Los Angeles, moved to Knoxville and began working as a volunteer camera operator at the station in 1984, joined the staff in 1987 and took over as general manager in 1990. He is, as one might suspect of someone who has worked at CTV for more than 20 years, an enthusiastic proponent of public access television.
He says the purpose of CTV is to provide the necessary resources for community residents to produce their own shows: Anyone with the $24 equipment-training fee and something to say can relay his or her message weekly to thousands of local cable subscribers.“[Public access] provides a voice to those without resources to commercial television,” Vogel says.
He sees PEG channels as a unique, necessary resource for allowing local communities to utilize what is ostensibly a corporate-dominated, commercial medium. According to its Web site, CTV reaches more than 106,000 households in Knox County. The station is non-profit, operating on $50,000 per year, which is supplied through the city and county government fiscal budgets, as well as Comcast and Charter cable revenues.
Including Vogel, CTV has a staff of five full-time employees and one part-time employee, a number that was almost twice as high a few years ago — before technological advancements such as digital production streamlining and remote control cameras led to a staff reduction. Staff members handle the day-to-day operation of the station, train and assist those who wish to produce their own show, maintain the Web site and produce government programming.
Vogel says government meetings are the most watched cable access feature nation-wide, and Knoxville’s City Council and County Commission meetings are not only aired live, but re-ran multiple times at various hours to allow people who work when the meetings take place an opportunity to view them.
CTV’s Web site, www.ctvknox.org, is a growing component of the station’s mission, providing links to local government information and educational resources, as well as online tutorials for the station’s portable camera and program production. The site is being developed to allow online streaming of the station’s programming, and eventually producers will be able to upload their programs a la video sharing sites such as YouTube.
WISE has grown significantly since then, with programming managed by Knox County Schools from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekdays. KCS airs school board meetings, student videos, student art events and other Knox County-related educational events. Most of the programs are also available on the WISE Channel’s Web site, www.wisechannel.org. The remainder of the programming comes from the Annenberg, NASA or Classic Arts satellite channels.
In addition to its civic and educational services, many viewers find the most entertaining shows on public access television are the ones produced by community members. Localized citizen participation is one of the hallmarks of public access, and though the number of participants waxes and wanes from year to year, Vogel says there is always a healthy interest from people wanting to put a show on the air — the number of weekly series being produced usually hovers around 70, with the majority using CTV’s studio facilities.
Approximately 20 percent of the station’s programming is devoted to government meetings, 20 percent to staff-programmed non-profit shows, and the remaining 60 percent is shows produced by community members. Of those shows, a whopping two-thirds are religious-themed, whether it’s the broadcasting of local churches’ Sunday morning services, Bible studies held in producers’ homes or gospel music performances.
The remainder of the shows cover such topics as wrestling (the ever-popular “Terry Landell Show” and “Wrestle Talk”), health (“Healthline”), aging (“Beautiful People,” “Aging Advantage”), environmental issues (“Be Pretty Proud,” “Ijams Nature Center”), politics (“DTV,” “One on One”) and various other topics.
