Re: New noncommercial community broadcast television channels for metropolitan Chicago. Are you interested in being part of a group exploring the best ways to launch new TV channels? If you are, try to get to the small initial caucus meeting planned for April 27th, 7pm, at Columbia College’s Library, 624 S. Michigan Ave. PLEASE REPLY if you plan to be at that meeting, mailto:bgf@aaahawk.com, so we can be in touch in case of a meeting change. WHETHER OR NOT YOU CAN make that first meeting: Please reply that you want to be kept informed. And maybe offer a quotable sentence or two with your reaction to the idea. And forward this message to anybody you think might be especially interested. At the meeting, we will talk about channel opportunities and known content resources. And we will caucus about how to focus strategies for spurring aggressive well-organized support. An early statement of the need and opportunity for new channels follows below. Meanwhile, try some research. Ask organization leaders and other friends: “How would your organizations use their own monthly half-hours of TV time?” – Bob Gallie ------------- The Need and Opportunity for New Channels. Chicago’s big commercial broadcast companies have never significantly served the noncommercial community interests of the metropolitan area. The companies are more often a problem than a wonderful resource. Young people, old people, minority groups, community organizations, labor, activist groups, educational organizations, and artists, …, are slighted. The people and organizations without big media budgets, and outside of certain prized advertising demographics, are usually ignored at best. Broadcast television channels, even though arguably diminishing in importance every day, will for a long time continue to reach audiences many times greater than bulletin boards, flyers, newsletters, public access cable channels, internet broadcasting techniques, or other independent media efforts. The very same companies already using free exclusive U.S. TV channel licenses (entrusted to them to serve the public interest, convenience, and necessity) were also given completely free the $50 billion+ worth of new broadcast television channels made possible when digital TV was made the law in 1996. Local TV licensees are not using most of the new channels (Please see http://www.9898.us/broadcastthese), making the licensees vulnerable to doomsday license challenges. Holding on to many channels and keeping them out of use (or flooding them with lesser infomercials, obscure syndicated series, and paid religion) will prove risky for the companies’ public relations and ultimately for their legal credibility. If we can organize well, we can negotiate with one or more license holders for multiple channels, studios and remote facilities, good staffing, all technical support, and generous financial support for some honestly noncommercial community channels. Those groups who already know their interests and resources for supplying the best noncommercial content for such channels are many, and growing in number. These groups advocating together and backing each other are a sizeable force to negotiate for and fill entire channels. Limitless new programming concepts, existing archives, and ample reshowings will make a large rich schedule possible from the outset. Startup growth may have been slow for the area’s original TV channels and public access and C-Span and the like (weather measurements, test patterns, and blank screens). But startup growth will not be slow for our groups now, given today’s radically transformed media creation environment.