Being the Media-YOUR LOCAL COMMUNITY

[liveoaktx]

Anyone with an interest and a digital camera and/or tape recorder has the ability to share what he/she sees and hears with others. There are town hall meetings, school board meetings, utility meetings, court meetings going on right now in your local community-who covers them? Where do they play? If you go to hear, say, your state rep come to town to talk about something, do you take a camera or tape recorder? You can. And should.

In my town, we don't have cable and are too far out for broadcast. In the town over, they have cable and broadcast the city council meetings on cable, streaming. But they don't save them to show again, so you have to be watching at that point in time. What about the person who misses the meeting and wants to see it again? Or what about the meetings that aren't covered at any time?

Broadcast television's agreement in order to be able to use the airwaves... free.. is that they must provide X amount of community service programming. But the community service programming may be on late at night, early in the morning, and frankly, if it's for a big city where you don't live, it may not even be relevant. Cable also usually has agreements with local commmunities to provide a local channel for things such as council meetings, etc.

If it doesn't, and even if it does, if you already have an interest, take it one step farther and BE your local community media via taking advantage of Open Meetings acts to record what goes on and then share on the internet.

[texpatriot2004]

1. Be the media. n.t