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ARTICLE 2: I didn't know you did that: services to
make your operation indispensable
by
Brad
Clark, Station Manager, Madison City
Channel, City of Madison, WI
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Raise your hands if your station came into
existence as your community’s version of C-SPAN – if your raison d’etre
was to be the channel through which residents could keep track of their local
government through coverage of government meetings. Put your hands down now –
that was unanimous! Covering the meetings of local government is, indeed, Job
One. But is “just” covering these meetings good enough anymore? Is the “C-SPAN”
model for our channels still the only or even the best way to
provide value to the public? And, perhaps more importantly in these days of
tightening state and local budgets, can we afford to have meeting
coverage be the only service we provide?
No doubt for most of us, meeting coverage will
likely remain the “meat and potatoes” of what we do, but since we are basically
service organizations staffed by creative people, we can be – need to be
– creative in the services we provide and in how we provide them. The more
services we can provide to other agencies and the public, the more valuable our
organization; and, the more valuable, the less vulnerable we’ll be at
budget-cutting time.
How our channels are funded is an important first
consideration in this discussion, because you obviously have to be able to
afford, within your budget, to provide a service. Regardless of how your
operation is funded - by some combination of franchise fees and/or “PEG” fees,
general fund (property tax) or other revenue - you’ll have to determine the
affordability of new initiatives. That said, it’s quite likely that one of the
first “additional services” many of us began providing was as a video production
facility. After all, we have the cameras and other equipment, and by producing
public service announcements, training, recruitment and outreach videos, we’re
helping other agencies disseminate information they deem important.
There are, of course, some basic questions to ask
in deciding how to provide this service. One is technical – while the equipment
used to cover a Council meeting can be similar to that needed to create a
recruitment tape for your Police Department, it’s not the same, so chances are
you’ll have to decide if the investment in additional resources is possible
and warranted. In Madison we constantly promote ourselves as a
production facility, with annual needs assessments, questionnaires, demo tapes,
and other marketing tools.
A second basic question is funding. Who’s going
to pay for the staff time to produce that video? Are these dollars built into
your budget (or could they be?) or are they part of the client agency’s
budget? To bill or not to bill – that is a big question. Some channels, such
as Los Angeles Cityview, have money set aside in their annual budgets for these
types of productions, with different mechanisms in place to determine which
projects get priority. Others – and Madison falls into this category – bill the
client for production services based on rates we’ve established. This service
therefore pays for itself and provides us with a revenue stream.
This is a tricky area, this business of charging
for services. To have real value, of course, services must be sustainable;
people have to be able to expect that we’ll provide the service from one year to
the next, and that of course is primarily a function of resources. On the other
hand, if other City agencies feel like you’re going to ask them for an account
number for everything, they may be less inclined to call.
A logical offshoot from being the video production
facility can be as the City’s multimedia center. Since we are the experts in TV
and video, we can advise other City staff about TV equipment, assist others with
their A/V needs, or provide basic training in simple camera or editing equipment
operation. In Madison, any agency’s potential video equipment purchase must get
our OK, so that an agency doesn’t spend money on a TV/VCR unit when another
agency has its own rarely-used unit collecting dust next door.
In Rye, N. Y., James Kenny and staff, when
requested, videotape public buildings and storm damage for insurance purposes.
So far these requests have been infrequent enough that the issue of staff time
hasn’t come up. In Dayton, Ohio, Randy Bellinger and his staff routinely monitor
and videotape “...local newscasts to keep abreast of how other local media are
portraying the City.” Talk about sustainable! In Louisville, Kentucky, staff
have worked out an arrangement with the Kentucky Department of Transportation
which nets them 2 hours each morning of real-time traffic camera views, complete
with lower thirds identifying, say, eastbound I-65 traffic as “heavy” or “light”
– at no cost to their station at all.
Partnerships with other agencies can reduce or
even eliminate the costs of providing services. In Madison we’ve been streaming
and archiving most of our regular programming for over two years. By working
with the folks from Information Services, we were able to present this
initiative as simply another form of E-Government, so they purchased the
needed equipment. We were also able to incorporate streaming into our regular
procedures so that it doesn’t add significant staff time to our efforts. Even
when we “index” meetings (that is, identify items by agenda number so that
people viewing a four hour Council meeting can go directly to the issue they’re
interested in), we provide a million-dollar service without significant ongoing
costs.
Partnerships can also provide revenue. Since
another aspect of the modern “multimedia center” can be helping other agencies
utilize the Internet, in addition to streaming our stuff, we also (for a small
fee, equal to our dubbing rates) will digitize videos and link them onto
agencies’ sites (links listed at the end of this article). Our I.S. Department
is responsible for helping agencies create their web presence. However, the
folks in I.S. don’t have the background to create useful, easy-to-navigate and
ADA-compliant sites, whereas our staff has experience in Bulletin Board and
other graphic design. So, when an agency contacts I.S. for help with their home
page, they’re referred to us, to work with them to design and construct – for a
fee, which is a small fraction of what these agencies would pay if they went to
an outside vendor – their sites.
We’ve also developed a relationship with the
City’s Convention Center. As events book space in the Center, they often want
speeches taped, or sometimes just need a camera and operator to send the
presentation to other rooms in the facility. We bill the Center for our
production time as per our rate card, and they pass the cost along to the
client. You know how we all always say we won’t do weddings? Well, if the
Center books a wedding and their client wants video – hey, we’ll take the
business.
And speaking of revenue sources – why limit your
clientele to just the agencies within your unit of government? We’ve produced
videos for County agencies, nonprofit groups –even a local business or two. We
don’t market our services to the “for-profit” sector, even though there’s
no legal reason why we couldn’t, simply because we want to avoid any
possible ill-will of a nonprofit government agency (with its lower rates)
competing with local for-profit businesses to produce commercials for Al’s
Restaurant. An inexpensive mention in the “Video Production” section of the
local Yellow Pages nets us phone calls on a fairly steady basis. In Torrance,
California, Michael D. Smith and his staff have worked around this conflict by
establishing two sets of rates – a lower version for public sector entities, and
higher rates that more closely parallel those charged by commercial video houses
for private businesses.
In terms of services to the general public, few
initiatives have as much immediate value as providing emergency information.
Contra Costa Television in California, in a community near a number of
refineries and chemical plants, is part of a local system providing information
on shelters in the case of hazardous materials spills. In the past year their
system (which doesn’t cost the station anything) has been triggered 3 or 4
times. In St. Tammany Parish in Mandeville, Louisiana, Suzanne Parsons’ channel
was kept busy in September of 2002 carrying road, building and event closure
information as the area was rocked in back-to-back weeks by Hurricanes Isidore
and Lili. Similarly, Radnor Township in Pennsylvania carries regular updates of
school and road closings.
And of course let’s not forget good old meeting
coverage itself! There are many ways of enhancing the value of this service:
-Highlighting agenda items, perhaps with lower third CG or even a
pre-meeting segment identifying the “big ticket” items on the agenda:
-Streaming and archiving meetings on the Internet (see Steve Toler’s
article in this issue).
-Closed-captioning or signing of meetings for the hearing-impaired
community (see Robin Gee and Darren Doerschel’s article in this issue).
-Interactivity - utilizing telephone or emails to allow citizen
input into policymaking sessions such as Council meetings. Although the
technology exists, how or whether to use it is a policy issue for elected
officials. In Beverly Hills, California, viewers are invited to and routinely
do call in during Council meetings; what’s more, Mayor Thomas S. Levyn includes
a “Beverly Hills Historical Quiz” in each meeting, a trivia challenge which
offers prizes to viewers for correct answers!
This also leads into other ways of making your programming available
to citizens. Besides streaming, who doesn’t have some sort of policy on
providing dubs of your stuff (another potential revenue stream)? How about
making programming available at the library? Residents of Northbrook, Illinois,
have this option, thanks to Cheryl Fayne and her staff. And who among us has
never gotten a call from some intrepid producer looking for footage of our
cities? A stock footage library can bring in some revenue and/or lead to lots
of “footage courtesy of...” credits.
The list is almost endless, and we don’t have the space here to
cover all the possibilities, but here are a few more ideas that our colleagues
are making happen:
-Most of us probably already run a character-generated bulletin
board during off-hours or in between regularly scheduled programming; in these
days of channel surfing, a frequently replayed PSA for a local non-profit will
get seen.
-Since we are the place for viewers to turn for local government,
shouldn’t we also be their choice for coverage of local politics? Forums with
candidates for local office (perhaps in conjunction with a group such as the
League of Women Voters) can play an important role in a well-informed
electorate; a debate carried on the Government Access channel may well be the
public’s only chance to hear or see candidates before election day. For the
2002 election, the Maui County Clerk’s office funded a series of voter education
PSA’s produced by Judy Starbuck and her staff at Akaku; Maui Community
Television. And speaking of Election Day, many of us can partner with our
Clerk’s office to provide official results throughout that important
evening.
-If you are already streaming programming or are
working in a nonlinear editing environment, you can probably create DVDs or
CD-ROMs.
-There are also many ways stations like ours can
work with public safety agencies. Besides producing and as appropriate playing
training videos and other materials (perhaps on a separate, scrambled channel
devoted to such purposes), many of us can help with evidence videos, digitizing
photos – perhaps even video arraignments. Some such uses of technology can be
expensive to start up, but you can make the case that if future budgets
are likely to look even grimmer, a wise investment in technology today can
realize budget savings for years to come.
We’ve touched upon a number of services that
somewhere or another, channels like ours are providing to their City staff and
to their community. Undoubtedly there are many more ideas we haven’t
discussed. It’s up to you to decide which services are most appropriate for
your community and your budget, and to decide what partnerships can be pursued
to bring your ideas to life. Coverage of meetings will probably always be the
staple of our services and our programming. The more creativity we can
demonstrate and value we can provide to fellow agencies and to the public, the
more secure our futures regardless of budget constraints, and the more an
integral part of our community’s interaction with its local government we will
remain.
LINKS:
Links on Madison’s web site:
"Proper Handwashing Techniques" produced for Madison Public Health Dept"
Madison City Channel Production Rates
Indexed
Madison Common Council meetings
Here are links to the channels mentioned in the
article:
LA Cityview
Dayton, Ohio
Torrance, CA
Rye, NY
Mentor, Ohio
Akaku, Hawaii
Santa Monica, CA
Beverly Hills, CA
Northbrook, IL
Contra
Costa
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