Bay Area Video Coalition
(The Renaissance Journalism Center has awarded a $20,000 Media Greenhouse mini-grant to the Bay Area Video Coalition to develop sites that will enable local residents to produce news at three neighborhood mini-studios for San Francisco’s public access television network.)
By Jaena Rae Cabrera
As a nonprofit media arts center, the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) has tried to engage under-served communities in San Francisco for more than 30 years. By providing community members with journalistic skills and access to technology, BAVC sparks social change by enabling diverse groups of people to tell their stories, their way.
As operator of San Francisco's public access television station, its newest project is the neighborhood news network—or n3—which will enable residents to produce television news at mini-studios in their neighborhoods. To do this, BAVC plans to tap into a mostly unused fiber optic network that connects 15 community sites to local public access, educational and government channels.
Jen Gilomen, Director of Public Media Strategies for BAVC, explains that the network is basically an incredibly fast Internet connection, capable of live streaming and high resolution file transfer from any connected site.
"What we want to add to that fiber optics infrastructure is the suite of web tools we've been developing that basically takes everything that's been submitted for TV, including several of the new shows that already run, and making those available on TV, streaming and on a community archive online," she said.
Essentially, BAVC plans to create a miniature information network for local news, the content of which is produced by members of each community.
"Since we already have a city contract and we're required to do a certain number of trainings per year, once the curriculum is developed, we have the mechanism for doing on-going training at these sites and centralizing all of the content online and distributing it through a local news channel," Gilomen said. "Our curriculum will be designed as an entry point for anyone to participate in news design and production."
"To support more journalism locally, we need to do basic training sessions for many of these producers who are already producing news shows, information shows, opinion shows or personal storytelling," she said. "Many of them already have the technology skills; what they're lacking is the journalism skills. This program is an opportunity to train these producers, from young people to senior citizens, to the disabled folks in our community to do their own investigative inquiries and to really work with various nonprofit organizations."
The organization received a $20,000 Media Greenhouse grant from the Renaissance Journalism Center to develop three pilot sites for the project. BAVC also will hold low-cost workshops to help community members to learn the journalistic and technical skills needed to produce a news show.
"They can do live news and information shows directly form those community sites," said Gilomen.
One inspiration for the project was a BAVC program called the Digital Storytelling Institute which was conducted in partnership with ZeroDivide.
"We went to nonprofit sites and trained some of their staff and constituency so that they learned digital storytelling tools together,” said Gilomen. “Those sites were then able to manage the process of uploading media and technology themselves without a lot of support from us. One of the outcomes was a set of curricula we could use to train the trainers."
The project would begin in March and would primarily focus on planning, curriculum and partnership development with the community sites. Beginning in July, mini studios will be installed at three pilot sites, and the first workshops will be scheduled in late summer or early fall, with the goal of conducting trainings and producing live programs beginning as early as October.