Page 3 of 5
At City Hall meetings this year, a few of the old producers angry with Blaney presented the Board of Supervisors with a mixed message: Save public access for the little guy, but get rid of the guy in charge. Now they're realizing the deal they had under Blaney maybe wasn't that bad after all.
BAVC's Mission District headquarters stretches through a former Best Foods mayonnaise factory converted into a sleek suite of Mac computer labs and editing rooms. Hip young employees teach media workshops and put the final touches on such programming as the PBS series Independent Lens or the widely released documentary Girls Rock! Along with offering postproduction work to filmmakers around the country, the 30-year-old nonprofit with a $5 million annual budget already offers a kind of public access in free programs in media production to 1,000 inner-city youth a week, supporting it all by grants, commissions, and pricey workshops for professionals and the public.
With the tiny operating budget, BAVC directors hope to replace the work formerly done by human employees at Access SF with the help of a Web site.
"You're talking about going from almost a million dollars a year to $170,000," says executive director Ken Ikeda, a urbane man with hipster eyewear who has been answering his share of anxious phone calls from existing producers. "It has to be a different model. That's what we're trying to communicate."
The basic idea is this: Any resident, community group, or nonprofit will post their finished shows onto a Web site tentatively named San Francisco Commons, and schedule them to air once, on one channel. Viewers can stream the videos online any time, comment on them, or recommend them to other users. (Access SF currently has no archive system.) The second channel could be the moneymaker: Nonprofits could pay for BAVC memberships to curate a block of programming about a certain subject, such as the environment, the arts, or politics. The shows themselves could be underwritten ("This segment was brought to you by ..."). Any scheduling holes could be filled by videos that have received the most online votes.
The voting system indicates a shift in traditional public-access programming where any and all shows must be allowed to air at least once, no matter what the public thinks. While it's still uncertain how much programming would be determined by voting, the system would allow the public a bigger say in what they want to watch.
BAVC has committed to checking out the existing equipment and to keeping open the one-man "flash" studio at the Market Street facility — so named for the ability of one producer to host, film, and edit a show in one stop — until the end of the year. (The larger production studio has been closed since late May, when much of the funding expired.) The plans are shaky after the new year, when the current lease is up. BAVC has indicated it will try to move the flash studio into its headquarters, but would also like to pair with nonprofits to check out equipment or use small studio spaces to offer more access points around the city.
Some worry the new system is limiting access to the tech-savvy. Jen Gilomen, the BAVC staffer in charge of public access, says the nonprofit won't be able to provide "full hand-holding service" at a large walk-in studio of the kind many of the producers are accustomed to. It seems that in the near future, people must be able to produce and edit Web-ready videos they must then upload online on their personal computers or at BAVC.
That may not seem like a big deal to many in this wired city, and indeed, the station reports that the use of editing equipment and the main studio has been declining since 2002, even while the demand for checking out cameras and the one-person "flash" studio has been on the rise. But your average public-access producer isn't a SOMA techie. Many of the station's producers skew toward the graying set, for whom technology wasn't a birthright.
Take the GodFather of Skating, 53-year-old David Miles. When he started producing Skatin' Place in the 1990s, he was intimidated by the equipment, but gradually picked up skills from studio staff and now films and edits his shows entirely at home. He fears that will no longer be possible under BAVC's plan. "I think the focus should be the average Joe who doesn't have access to electronic media," he said. "Now it seems like it's so hard to do, then why bother?"
There is a precedent. BAVC hopes to base its system on what is becoming the national model of how to run public access on a tiny budget: Denver Open Media. While Ikeda seems to see it as a model built on skimping, the executive director of that station says BAVC is overdramatizing its budget woes; if BAVC is creative with the capital money, it will have a lot more money at its disposal than Denver ever has had.
In 2005, Denver's city council eliminated the public-access station's operating budget, but asked if anyone wanted to step forward to run it anyway. A small media nonprofit called Deproduction, run by a young idealist named Tony Shawcross, took on the task of providing public access with only capital funds. The solution was that the community would essentially have to run itself — the Wikipedia of public-access television. Four years later, Shawcross has been lauded in the Denver press as saving public television, and the city's system is being piloted by public-access channels in seven cities, including Davis, California. BAVC hopes to install the Denver Open Media system by next spring.
