Thanks to an audible.com account, an iPod connection in my car, and a long commute to work every day, I’ve been catching up on the reading for which I’ve otherwise lost time over the last few years. Two books in particular – an unlikely pair and both of them from 2006 – have got me thinking about the future of local television: Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma.12 Both authors are concerned, to one degree or another, with new economies of distribution and with the sustainability of small-scale, niche, and local production. Both are also concerned with the issue of abundance: how it is created, managed, and consumed.

In his chapter on the local food market, “Greetings from the Non-Barcode People,” Pollan writes that “a successful local food economy implies not only a new kind of producer, but a new kind of eater as well, one who regards finding, preparing, and preserving food as one of the pleasures of life rather than a chore” (259). While the metaphor stretches thin quickly, the simple act of substituting the word “food” with the word “media,” and “eater” with “consumer,” “viewer,” or “user” invites us to think more deeply about the impact of new media economies on local production, distribution, and consumption. What might a successful local media economy look like? What kinds of demands and commitments does a local economy make on local consumers? What kinds of new opportunities arise?

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see that the local media economy in the U.S. is fading fast. The April 13, 2009 edition of Broadcasting and Cable ran a story – increasingly familiar – about the end of local news at WYOU, the CBS affiliate in the Wilkes Barre-Scranton DMA.3 This fourth-place station, with a news division run by its co-owned sister station, WBRE (both owned by Nexstar), discovered that it could save nearly $900,000 in costs annually by simply eliminating its unprofitable news operation. Fueled by regulations allowing duopolies in smaller markets along with the inability of these markets to adequately support four competing newscasts in the same time period, and business models tied to the broadcasting past, the local television news market is shrinking. In fact, the entire local television market is on the brink of major contraction with the threat of the major broadcast networks opting for bypass via cable, satellite, and the web an increasingly viable reality.

But is this contraction inevitably negative? What are the opportunities for local television production and consumption brought on by new technologies and new economies? Again, Pollan might be instructive: “Local food, as opposed to organic, implies a new economy as well as a new agriculture – new economic relationships as well as new ecological ones” (257). Much like the industrial food chain that Pollan describes, the media industries can be seen as comprising the industrial (conglomerates and subsidiaries), the industrial organic (locally situated organizations that make use of the production and distribution strategies of the industrial system in order to capitalize on a nominally local market for information), the local (small-scale, independent, and locally situated producers that exist largely outside traditional distribution channels – think of the “alternative television” movement and community activist media), and the personal (producers who have no interest in distribution beyond individual use or the closest circle of like-minded individuals). If we concentrate on the interplay between the different levels of this structure, we might find some useful potentials for a sustainable culture of local production, but only if we rethink the purpose and function of our larger media economy and “agriculture.”

So what might this media economy and agriculture look like? Some have suggested that locations like YouTube have opened up spaces for a variety of different producers to get their wares “on the shelves,” leveling the disparities of access between the industrial and the personal and everything in between. This is largely the point that Chris Anderson stresses in The Long Tail. For Anderson, recognizing the potential value of the area under the long tail of available products encourages digital aggregators and distributors (such as iTunes, Amazon, and eBay) to provide the variety that is absent from “bricks and mortar” retailers like WalMart and Borders. In the world of the long tail, scarcity is no longer a problem. Scarcity (of spectrum), of course, is the structuring component of broadcast media. So, in a word, the new media economy is built on variety; and an agriculture built on variety is much more sustainable (and sustaining) than a monoculture.

But variety itself is not necessarily local. The health and vitality of local television stations, in fact, may be waning in the face of that very variety. With so many other options for news and entertainment available, why would we limit ourselves to the relatively circumscribed world of local television, caught up as it is in the strategies of the industrial system? Why wouldn’t we turn to alternative sources that can be easily accessed via aggregators like YouTube? For anyone interested in creating and sustaining a vibrant and truly local media culture, two reasons come to mind. First, aggregators like YouTube are not local in their presentation. While the variety on YouTube is exciting and obviously useful, it is without particular location – and location does matter still in terms of locally situated politics. Second, aggregators such as YouTube are too reliant on standard economic relationships that are now threatening to alter the seemingly egalitarian structure of the service. In a recent Slate.com article, Farhad Majoo explains that the cost of running YouTube for one year exceeds $700 million.4 This figure includes the cost of bandwidth as well as license fees for high-end copyrighted material. But the site only generates about $240 million in advertising revenues. And since advertisers are unlikely to select politically challenging videos (let alone my personal home movies) to showcase their products, the likelihood is that a hierarchy will emerge that will necessarily feature the industrial or industrial organic rather than the local or the personal.

Despite its problems, though, the new and emerging media economy and “agriculture” can benefit local media. First, the potential contraction of local network television affiliates (still far off) could yield a stronger local ethos. Without network demands, and needing to differentiate themselves in the larger media market, locally based media outlets could find that producing for a truly local audience is actually a sustainable practice. For their part, audiences could find that locally conscious media production could be as satisfying as the best of the industrial offerings. Finally, thinking about the long tail of local media, by taking on the role of community media aggregators on a small scale, local media outlets could open up new opportunities for increased community activity and increased flow between traditional and emerging distribution outlets (television and the web, mobile devices, etc).

The troubling thing about Pollan’s book is that there emerges no untroubled option to the dilemma of “what to eat.” Similarly, there are no easy or simple solutions to the problem of “what to watch.” And Anderson seems too interested for my tastes in how to build a business model for the already powerful players. But, like Pollan, it’s worth thinking about what problems face our contemporary media environment, and to address honestly the fact that for many people in many ways it has become unsustainable.

Image Credits:
1. Local TV
2. The Long Tail
3. New Production Spaces: YouTube
4. Local Television Station
5. The Ominvore’s Dilemma

Please feel free to comment.

1. Anderson, Chris. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. New York: Hyperion, 2006.
2. Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin Press, 2006.
3. Malone, Michael. “Killing News to Save the Station.” Broadcasting and Cable. 13 April, 2009: 14.
4. Manjoo, Farhad. “The High Cost of Running YouTube.” Slate.com. 14 April, 2009. http://www.slate.com/id/2216162/pagenum/all/. Accessed 21 April, 2009.

“Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.”

In September of 2006, California’s Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, signed into law a bill that promises to effectively put an end to Public Access Television as we know it. The bill (AB 2987), known as the Digital Infrastructure and Video Competition Act of 2006 (DIVCA) was the first of now several state laws across the U.S. that removes local authority with regard to negotiating cable franchise agreements, giving this authority to the state. In the case of California, franchising agreements with video service providers would fall to the Public Utilities Commission. In Indiana, the state in which I currently live, both the state House and Senate passed bills (HB 1279 and SB 245, respectively) in 2006 that follow the example set by California. Nearly 20 other states have similar legislation on the books or in progress.

Put very simply, these measures are responses to pressures from telecom companies like AT&T and Verizon who want to compete with cable operators for customers but who balk at the idea of negotiating thousands of local franchise agreements. Having states regulate video delivery systems and grant franchises would, the argument goes, streamline the franchising process, increase local competition, and (theoretically) bring prices down for consumers. It’s a classic market perspective.

An important part of local franchise agreements has typically included a provision for local public access channels, otherwise known as PEGs (Public, Education, and Government), to be included in basic cable packages. These channels are most often funded either through fees paid to the city or county which then in turn subsidize a non-profit organization to house equipment and facilities and to administer production, or by the cable operator providing these facilities, training, and equipment directly to the general public.

The potential loss of these stations raises a number of obvious (and oft-stated) concerns. The most common complaint leveled against these kinds of contractions in local authority is that they threaten the very foundation upon which a democratic polity is built: diverse and competing voices hashing it out in the pubic sphere for the common good. And from this perspective it’s all too easy to see MSOs and Telecom corporations as Terminators: hulking monsters lurking in the shadows, single-mindedly pursuing the ultimate eradication of anything resembling the public sphere – remorseless, fearless, immortal.

The End Is Here?

But state-level legislation has not simply usurped all local authority with regard to video delivery franchises. In fact, DIVCA contains a stipulation that local communities are still entitled to a 1% PEG fee from local providers on top of a franchise fee (the percentage is based on the annual gross revenue of the franchise). These fees are designed explicitly to safeguard the existence of pubic access programming.

So why did 11 public access stations in L.A. go dark? Two reasons, one physical, one fiscal.

First, the law relieves the cable franchises from supplying the physical studio facilities (including playback), equipment, and training to the local community: the backbone of public access. And so communities that relied on companies like Time Warner to actually supply and administer their public access facility, including playback, were left without that access as soon as it was legal for the company to shutter the facilities. The channel space itself still there, of course, but now it could be used by Time Warner for its own purposes until a reasonable claim could be made on the sustained use of that channel space (a common definition of “sustained” in this case is typically eight hours of programming each day).

A prime example of the new approach to public access can be found in my current hometown of Terre Haute, Indiana where Time Warner offers a “community access” channel that is programmed each day with a combination of advertisements for Time Warner digital services and paid programming. My own attempts to find out how a community member could access the channel have been funneled (tellingly) through the ad sales department, and my calls have thus far been left unanswered. The answer, though, is clear I think: there is no public access at Time Warner in Terre Haute without a third party organization to program and offer playback services; and Terre Haute has no such organization.

Bloomington, Indiana however, does: CATS (Community Access Television Services) which is housed in the Monroe County Public Library, and funded through a combination of local PEG and franchise fees, funds from the library itself, and underwriting grants from local businesses. And this points to the second reason that Public Access stations could go dark. While the new state franchising laws do require that PEG channels remain available on the video delivery system, in the case of California, the law creates a division between capital expenses for Public Access, which video systems are required to pay (and which pays for equipment and facilities), and the more substantial operating expenses (payroll, rent, etc), which these franchises are no longer required to pay. Without these crucial operating funds, organizations like CATS could easily find themselves hopelessly miniaturized, marginalized right off the delivery system.

Community Access Television Services (CATS)

As media educators, activists, practitioners, and just plain concerned citizens, we need to focus our critical attention on the proper target. Time Warner, Comcast, AT&T, and all the other MSOs are indeed interested in terminating public access. And they are gathering up the legal strength to do it. But we can’t possibly be surprised about this. Their objective is transparent: access to the millions of dollars that could be generated for their bottom line were they to get control of this channel space. They are easy targets, but perhaps the wrong targets.

And so I offer a proposal for media educators and students to aid in the regeneration of public access television:

1. Pressure city councils (people whom we can actually access) to push back against legal loopholes that hamstring Public Access operations, and to use franchise and PEG fees for their intended purposes.

Show Me The Money!

2. Work with community organizers to strengthen and/or establish non-profit organizations to oversee public access stations that can be sustained through regular programming.

3. Encourage high schools and universities to produce quality, innovative programming for these channels.

4. Train more students in video production and encourage these students to offer their services to these pubic access organizations in terms of training community members in production.

5. Extend “media literacy” education to include a more rigorous engagement with media regulation as a key component of the political economy of the media.

With an eye trained on the real targets of media reform with regard to public access, and a sustained and organized commitment to a project that most agree is worth the effort, public access television can be reconnected.

We’ll be back.
Image Credits:
1. The Governator
2. The End Is Here?

3. CATS
4. Show Me The Money!
5. ROX.COM

Please feel free to comment.

Several years ago, working on a student film about local bands in Portland, ME, one of my interviewees told me: “You know what local means? Local means ‘not-as-good-as’ – that’s what local means.” This frustrated yet keen observation referred to the dominance of certain music “scenes” – Seattle, Minneapolis, Austin, Athens – each with their own locally branded sound that had moved out of the merely local and into the realm of the imagined local: corporate-funded nationally or internationally recognized acts with a localized identity. Listeners’ enthusiasm for the merely local bands in Portland, ME had the habit of wilting in the hot glare of an imagined local band from Seattle. As a result, merely local music production was (and is) diminished, rendered nearly invisible.

The same can be said of local television. It is increasingly invisible – its local character increasingly imagined.

On Thursday, October 2 at midnight WTHI-TV, the CBS affiliate in Terre Haute, IN went dark. Kind of. They were still broadcasting, of course. You could get their signal with a good, old-fashioned antenna, or if you were a satellite subscriber. Anyone tuning in via the local Time Warner cable franchise, however, was out of luck. Viewers were greeted Friday morning by a somber looking scrolling announcement:

WTHI recently denied permission for Time Warner Cable to carry its signal on our cable system. WTHI can be accessed for FREE over-the-air with the use of a TV antenna. Your favorite CBS programming can also be viewed online at www.cbs.com. We will continue to negotiate with WTHI (LIN TV Corp) on your behalf and appreciate your understanding.

What is at least notable (if not surprising) here is the way that this simple strategic message highlights the tensions that structure the relationship between local affiliates, broadcast networks, and cable/satellite MSOs (multiple systems operators) while simultaneously negating them through the aura of inevitability, painting WTHI’s demands as a kind of petty disruption of the natural order of things. In what follows, I would like to briefly trace three arenas in which the changing economics of electronic media are leading to the increased negation and invisibility of local television: ownership patterns, contractual relationships, and the forced infrastructural change to digital broadcasting.

First, and most obviously, the imagined quality of local television is underscored by the fact that ownership of local stations now rests firmly in the hands of a relatively small cadre of “station groups.” According to the latest figures from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the top 20 station groups own 546 local stations. Stations owned by these groups (of which the major broadcast networks comprise the top 4), can centralize their sales operations and pool capital in ways that allow their stations to run more efficiently and profitably. But even these groups are running into trouble in the wake of the current world financial crisis. According to Broadcasting and Cable, the stocks of Gray Television, Belo, and Nexstar have each lost well above 80% of their value in the last year (Malone 221). These declines in value promise to fuel the increased traffic of stations into the hands of largely unregulated and relatively secretive private equity firms that have little interest in the requirements for or vagaries of localism. FCC commissioner, Michael Copps stated in December 2007, when the FCC approved the sale of over 60 Paxson TV stations to CIG Media, an affiliate of Citadel Investment Group: “We do not know the identity of the investors in this particular fund [series], and we do not know how this fund has treated other companies it has owned in recent years…We don’t have anywhere near the information or context necessary to know whether this change in control will harm viewers” (Marich2). As the identities of owners become less apparent, the operations of local stations become invisible to both communities and regulators.

A second area that points toward the invisibility of local television is the changing contractual relationships that define the daily operations of local stations. Gone are the days when networks compensated local stations for the use of their licensed airwaves. In order to help defray escalating production costs as well as increasingly high fees for the rights to air MLB, NFL, and NBA games, networks have mostly eliminated or, in some cases, reversed compensation agreements, requiring stations to pay networks for access to their programming. Elimination of compensation removes a significant revenue stream from local stations, further fueling the cycle of cost-cutting and centralization that further erodes their ability to engage in merely local production beyond news, and further encouraging private investment. The loss of this revenue stream from the networks also forces stations, regardless of their market power, to seek compensation from cable providers in the form of retransmission fees. As with WTHI, these transactions typically involve the cable operators using their channel space to paint the station as unfairly and greedily seeking money for what is commonly understood as a free service. Perhaps ironically, this process usually involves the cable franchise (Time Warner in this case) positioning itself rhetorically as negotiating on behalf of the local community while highlighting the non-local station ownership (in this case, LIN TV) that, by contrast, does not put the community above its bottom line. Of course, ownership by station groups already moves most local television into the realm of the imagined local, but the new ground-level economies of local broadcasting discussed here work together to further erode both the capabilities of local broadcasters as well as the allegiances of local communities.

Finally, the forced infrastructural change that is the convergence to digital broadcasting also leads toward the imagined local. Most obviously, the switch to digital requires an enormous amount of capital investment beyond the direct means of many locally owned stations, making them ripe for quick sales to station groups and/or private equity firms. In terms of programming, the promise of digital broadcasting has been sold to the consumer in part as the promise of more access to local production (particularly weather and sports) on the additional digital spectrum. The reality of additional programming space, however, turns out to be the promise of more imagined localism in the form of centrally produced weather reports via outlets like NBC Weather Plus or new programming networks such as “Dot2” that are designed specifically for local digital subchannels. These digital networks share advertising with local broadcasters and provide opportunities to insert local news broadcasts into their schedule seamlessly. Trading the potential development and expansion of merely local programming for the imagined local programming of these types of networks represents perhaps the height of invisibility for local programming.

But it’s not just the rationalized operations of large conglomerates and mid-sized media moguls that render the local invisible by encouraging imagined localism. Media studies has been largely blind to the importance of local television. Too often understood as simply “not-as-good-as,” local television productions and operations have received relatively scant sustained critical attention; what it has received has been typically either dismissive or coldly scientific in tone. So what are we to do? If the history of broadcast regulation teaches us anything, it is that localism is impossible to define on a national scale. It is only at the local level that it can be understood, and even then only provisionally. If we’re serious about media reform and preserving some semblance of a commitment to localism in its purest sense – as merely local production – then we will need to confront the slow and steady erosion of local television with something more formidable than sentimental regret. Perhaps we can take hold of this moment and begin talking locally about what local might really mean and how it might be realistically achieved.

Image Credits:
1. Local TV
2. Local Set
3. Author’s screen shot
4. Local Audience

Please feel free to comment.

1. Malone, Michael, “Dark and Stormy.” Broadcasting and Cable. 17 Nov. 2008: 2, 22
2. Marich, Robert. “Private Equity: Buying In To Cash Out.” Broadcasting and Cable. 25 August 2008. Accessed 18 Nov. 2008. http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6589724.html