together you know as as i'm thinking about will i while we're gathered here today i think a lot about some of the ideas that are really at the core of our work ideas that really everybody there in the room is devoted to and i think if you think about the core things that drive you in your work on a day to day basis i think one of the key things for all of us regardless of what form of work we do in community media is this that all people need meaning and a sense of belonging in their lives is when the fundamental issues for most all of us in our work on a daily basis when you're doing place based media what happens as places and communities evolve and change is one of the questions i think a lot of us are asking ourselves as we're doing oh we're going to did it basis what happens as traditions grow as the stories in our lives become more complex as our communities become more complex what happens as technology and key institutions change more rapidly than our democracy can how do we maintain that sense of meaning that sense of belonging it's a democratic engagement in times of change in times of crisis those are just some of the questions that we're asking ourselves here as we gather together to celebrate our town in boston this year we took our inspiration this year not from that famous play by thornton wilder of the same name so you're clear about this who wasn't was in the dramaturg in me that really took inspiration although you know there's plenty in that work that we could have taken as their inspiration because it really details the life of us of a small community and the individuals in that small community know the theme that we take a riff on is the now famous moment from one of boston's key icons big papi david ortiz a man who will never be known as one of the greatest red sox and one of the worst trades of the minnesota twins ever made he's a man who grew up in the dominican republic he will always be a part of this city for all sorts of reasons for his monumental monumental achievements and accomplishments for his big personality and also for the words of pride that he uttered in the wake of the marathon bombings just three years ago that act of terror that came in the middle of a tradition could have shattered people in the city you probably remember the words that he uttered on the field at fenway park this is our effin city pass but it was a real and genuine expression of defiance and love defiance and love in the face of violence and fear that could have ripped this community apart i want to put it to you that the forces at play in our society could put us against ourselves if we're not mindful and if we don't remember that call to meaning that defined so much of our work and community media and peg across united states we need to look at our work at preserving and building our communities through media as an act of defiance and love here in twenty sixteen why do i say defiance well it's fair to say that we're seeing a media system that deemphasize and destroys local institutions in many cases it deemphasize its place for economies of scale it increases quarterly profits and it doesn't necessarily reflect the reality of people's lives in communities across our country so it's an act of positive defiance to say that communities matter here and to a sixteen that we have a right to be more than just entertained by our media system that we have a need to be informed to be inspired to be challenged to be engaged in meaningful ways in our communities and then our media system needs to reflect the needs of our democracy if we love our communities the places that we all serve and if we love our democracy i think there is actually a sound argument that our organizations need to find ways to build new institutions and new practices that support meaningful civic engagement and actually support what my former colleague and friend josh stearns has called acts of journalism in our towns and cities that's why you'll see an emphasis over the course the next couple of days on innovation in our field and partnerships and practices that build journalism on the local level and  why we've invited our friend john nichols to be our keynote speaker today to kick off our time here in boston john argues that america is in a democratic crisis in no small part because of the death of journalism in towns and communities across the united states the answer to that crisis is a media that's devoted to the needs of people in a reinvigoration of journalism in our town john is the national affairs correspondent with the nation magazine and he's the associate editor of the capital times in my former hometown madison wisconsin i'm a son of stoughton born and still in general he writes regularly on politics and media for in these times in the progressive and appears regularly as a commentator on m s n b c with me nichols co founded free press the national media reform advocacy group which is championed media diversity net neutrality and online privacy in the past decade john is the author of wait we way too many books to mention but his most recent work with at the microphone right because i think we all know that it's production brothers and sisters my name is john nichols and i have come here to clarify this accent debate i come from the rural midwest and we have no accent everyone else has an accent it's why we travel i had a girlfriend once from italy she had a fabulous accent it was beautiful i said one time to her i love your accent and she said i do not have an accent you have an accent and of course that was the end of our relationship but i want to promise you that i will not like marry that circle attempt a boston accent in front of bostonians i want to tell you mike i don't know if he's up for a review or anything like that but i will i will tell you that as somebody who has run and continues to be on the board of a national media organization and it has worked a lot in these areas mike is one of the most respected and cherished figures in our movements to build out diverse community media in this country and i think you are an incredibly lucky organization to have him at the head of your now as i was hanging around here i got to talk to a lot of old friends from movements and from struggles over the years as regards net neutrality community media media concentration a host of other issues  tony tony riddell is here someplace from great all the way back i got to see tony from six hundred thousand subscribers in brooklyn an incredible media outlet there doing great work and i'm so honored to be with him today i also got to talk to new friends and the folks from philly cam ariel and folks ariel it is it's areal right and you're you're you've been working there for eight months is that right as youth coordinator and she already covered a democratic national convention in philadelphia credible work and then she's in the same room with curtis who's been here boston for thirty one years building up one of the most respected community media outlets in not just in the country but in the world i'm so honored to be here with curtis and to be in your city i'm not going to go table by table and introduce everyone but if you will just imagine that that happened i'll say a few things today i i have been in the last two weeks in london and edinburgh and reykjavik iceland and various and sundry other locations working on a big global project on austerity and media and a host and i have to tell you i'm a little bit tired it's been a lot of travel going a lot of places and as soon as i got back i was thrown right into the fun task of trying to explain donald trump today and so it's been busy busy time and there's a you know questioning why when you're doing all these other things would you break out and come to a conference like this made it's cool to go around the world and do all sorts of stuff and it is cool to go on t v and comment on donald trump even though that's all anybody on t v does but broadcast television and cable but i happen to think and i'll explain a little bit in a moment i happen to think that you people are the most important people in american media today and that you are the only prospect we have for a democratic and functional media in this country so i wouldn't want to be anyplace else but right here with you i don't say that casually i believe that old media in this country is dying and i believe that newbie in this country has no sense of direction and i believe that community media in this country rooted in communities like bismarck and boston and philadelphia and new york and communities across this country local community access media is the one institution that has the old dies and the new tries to find its way builds a bridge to something real and something connected with who we are if we don't have you and if you do not expand what you do dramatically in the years to come it will not just be our media system that goes fully dysfunctional it will be our democracy itself that goes fully just on dysfunctional you are that essential to the future of this country and let me back up for a moment and tell you that i understand a little bit only a little bit about the moment we are in and this is an incredible moment beyond media beyond politics itself this is a moment of radical change in this country and in this world and we don't pause often enough to think about how radical that change is but imagine your lives twenty years ago happily there's enough some young people in this room who cannot imagine their lives twenty years ago but for those of you who can imagine how you did things twenty years ago imagine not having an i phone not having your media with you wherever you go not having the ability to communicate information instantaneously imagine stepping back stepping back stepping back to a time in which most of our communications was controlled by a handful of very powerful individuals and institutions and over the last twenty years that has blown apart we have changed everything not merely in our media but in our economics our politics our society we are living in an age of radical transformation that is every bit as extreme as the industrial revolutions of the early nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the dual industrial revolutions and the transformation is jarring it throws people off it makes people uncertain and scared and overwhelmed we are thirty years into an experiment with globalization that is necessary it is real but it has not been well managed and we are in a situation where globalization has transformed our communities without necessarily rewarding them we have suffered and are people not in the room and i can guarantee i know where you're from we have suffered radical and extreme dnd dust realisation of this country that has transformed our urban areas into job free zones literally places where it is very very hard for a working class kid for a poor kid to imagine having permanent stable employment globalization  d'un dust realisation radical changes and then overlaying that a digital revolution which literally has transformed every bit of how we communicate not just in a media standpoint but how we communicate with our friends and family and literally how our children relate to the world how many of you have actually seen your child's face directly in recent months as opposed to looking down like this you know we this is changing us it's changing how we live and who we are and then on top of that digital revolution we have a revolution in robot afic cation of our workplaces and our lives and this is just coming on line but it is radical we are ten years from now going to be all driving around not at the wheel of our cars but sitting there and they will be driving us to driverless car will become an absolute reality in the next ten years and that's ok because if you see me drive you're going to be very very happy that a robot is doing that work however the number one job for man in a number of american states is driving and so if we are going to have driverless cars driverless trucks driverless buses driverless backhoes driverless tractors what are people going to do and similarly one of the number one jobs for women banking working in banks what do we do when banking is entirely automated when it's when there just aren't bank branches anymore when you literally do it all off your phone these are the changes that are coming in the next ten to fifteen years radical transformations of our work life in our society you put that all together and you ask yourself why is anyone surprised that the two thousand sixteen presidential election is the most vocal a tile and unsettling and weird political moment in our lives why would we be surprised all this is coming at people and they are seeking to respond to it it's normal it's rational to seek explanations and ways out of that which is overwhelming you unfortunately we don't always get good leaders of the way out and i'm not talking about any particular candidate here what i'm suggesting to you is our politics hasn't caught up with our change our politics hasn't caught up with what's happening to us we're not discussing in our campaigning the reality of our changing lives and that's making people a little bit crazy at times now historically the bridge between our changing lives in our politics has been media but unfortunately the changes that are taking place are transforming our media so radically that by and large traditional media is incapable of dealing with the moment we're living in and if you don't believe me then you go up stairs after i finish talking and you turn the television set on and if you're not watching curtis's local network here with their incredible two it's a twenty five year old a thirty year old nightly half hour nightly news show where they actually have an anchor and reporters who go out and cover this town intensively at the local level if you're not watching that if you're watching one of the national cable networks i guarantee you  you're going to hear about you don't hear about an olympic athlete who made up a gas station incident you're going to i'm not kidding it's going to be intense they'll have like people analyzing that and discussing it and then you're going to hear about donald trump and you going to hear about it wall to wall and why are you going to only get that why are you going to get so little out of these networks that have so much in the way of resources that are so big that are so powerful it is because they have been reduced to dumb beasts a dumb beast needs to be fed and responds to that which feeds it and the dumb beast of major media in this country lives for ratings and advertising dollars and if a donald trump puts food out every morning for that dumb beast it will come and eat every single day and it will not stop it will it will eat itself to death that is the simple reality that is not a criticism of donald trump although if you like me to criticize him i could give you a conversation but that is that is it we have dumbed our national media down to such an extent that it doesn't function it doesn't give us anywhere near the information we need and i wish that that was the crisis but it isn't the real crisis is that the local level because what has happened is the degeneration of national commercial media in this country has now filtered down to the local level we have seen with the concentration of media ownership the death of local journalism in countries across this country communities across this country now i'm going to back up for one second and try to explain this i how many  major media in order to write about concentration of ownership commercialization of journalism and frankly the crisis that would extend from it he started in the early one nine hundred eighty say in fifty individuals fifty companies controlled most of our media by the time he finished writing he is down to six companies controlling our major media in this country the story of media monopoly and media concentration is an important one but when big dickey and died a while back i went back and read through the new introductions to each of his books and in one thousand nine hundred ninety seven he wrote a new introduction to the media monopoly in which he talked about for the first time what would happen as the internet rose in an era of media consolidation and what he said was that as a few companies became the dominant sources of information at the national level they would so over emphasize presidential politics and national stories and then as local media became consolidated and concentrated it would begin to mirror that overemphasis on presidential politics and the national and slowly but surely we would lose baseline coverage of our city councils our school boards our communities so that we would get to a point where the average person did not know who their city council member was did not know who their school board member was and that people would no longer participate in local elections even though that is where most power exists they decay and predicted that in one thousand nine hundred seven today survey research shows us that most americans struggle to name their city council members their school board members and even their state legislators and members of congress we know from election results that elections for local races now draw as little as twenty percent even ten percent even five percent turnout we know from people who struggle to maintain civic life in communities across this country that often it is a challenge to figure out how to draw people in to all the activities of our communities this is not it's not news to you that that is a reality but here's the here's why that is a reality as we've concentrated ownership of  daily newspapers have diminished and declined sometimes closing in cities such as seattle and albuquerque and tucson and kansas city kansas and our michigan communities across this country have literally lost daily papers but where they haven't been lost it's almost as bad because i ask you is there anybody in this room who's picked up a daily newspaper in their community and said wow this is too heavy to lift up it's too full of information it's too overwhelming in their coverage of our community it used to be that way you used to be able to get a daily newspaper where we used to harm children by making them deliver daily newspapers because they were so heavy today when they deliver a daily newspaper it's like tissue if they delivered at all the fact of the matter is our daily newspapers have diminished they become so much less and our radio stations across this country the horrific telecommunications act of nine hundred ninety six which allowed for consolidation of ownership of radio stations has led to a situation where thousands and thousands of local radio personalities are off the air and they have been replaced by syndication of communication so you can go anywhere in this country and find out what rush limbaugh thinks but you cannot find out what the local school board is doing that is a crisis of communications and it is reflected most in our television our local t v news i don't i'm not going to make any of you watch it but if you did what you would find is seven to eight minutes of weather seven to eight minutes of sports and then a calf an e a little references to crime and you would be hard pressed to find a coherent report on a school board meeting a coherent report on a city council meeting we have literally culled out news from our local t v stations and these are good people that work there i'm not criticizing the reporters they would love to do more but often they are sent out to cover the most absurd stories about how to exercise because some consultants told them that's what news is and if they do cover politics they cover presidential politics what do you think about what trump just said rather than going deep into the local we are losing local conversation in this country and that's where you come in because brothers and sisters if you see somebody calling in to say i'm correct and i appreciate that but brothers and sisters if you are waiting for commercial media to fill the void in our democracy it is not going to happen if you put off the responsibility to fill that void then you not not some c e o not some r ailes someplace you will be responsible for the diminishment of our democracy because you are our last hope you are by and large noncommercial you are by and large very local and i have met enough of you to know that you really care about the communities that you live in you take seriously the concept of our town and brothers and sisters it is time im sick of the term alternative media you are not the alternative anymore major media in this country has failed you are the necessary central media of this country and you must step up void in our democratic discussions in the communities where you live you need yes you can apply yourselves not me you need to organize the debates this fall we're going to have a huge discussion about the commission on presidential debates and the debate between trump and clinton which by the way i hope also includes joel stein of the greens and gary johnson of the libertarian party that's right but the fact of the matter is that national level debate is not the debate that we need we need you organize in debates in your communities between candidates for the legislature between candidates for congress between candidates for prosecutors positions and for city council positions you need to bring it down home and you need to treat it very seriously go out and find the league of women voters the people that the commission on presidential debates pushed aside and you say hey they don't want you are going to as a presidential debates we will work with you to organize local debates in this community and we will do a better job than the commission on presidential debates is going to do this fall and i i know some of you are already doing it because i watch it across this country but it has to become more and more and more and you need to do more you know when curtis is broadcast in this half hour news show every night i know it's hard i know the resources are limited i talk to some of these people for these big stations they say oh we've got eight nine production people we've got you know on air talent and stuff like that i know other folks who come from communities where it's all volunteer or virtually all volunteer i understand the dynamics and the challenges for brothers and sisters we are in a moment of democratic crisis small the democratic crisis in this country and so it is time to step up not merely as employees of community access stations but literally as citizens to begin to fill that void we need to produce our own new shows they need to be on every station we need to produce our own community affairs programs that are serious and constant not one day a week but every day of the week brothers and sisters community access stations can and must fill the void and then community access stations can and must go to foundations and civic groups and say it is your you called your conference our town and i was disappointed in mike when he said it wasn't based off the play because thornton wilder was born in my hometown of madison wisconsin he grew up in the neighboring town in a little cottage in maple bluff there and while there was a good wisconsinite and so like all good wisconsinites suffering from an inferiority complex he didn't cover wisconsin he wrote about new england because of course wisconsinites think they're experts in every place else and so our town is based in a little new england town called going to make sure i check grover's corners now grover's corners was a very small town didn't have enough people to have a big community access station with you know tons of staff and stuff like that but i like to believe that there's a grover's corner new in corner new england out there someplace with a community access station and i like to believe that it's largely volunteer maybe some horribly underpaid executive director something there and i like to believe that there's somebody in that little town up in new hampshire where they elect four hundred members of their state legislature covering grover's corners state led state representative race as intensely as any national network would cover the presidential race and i like to believe that that's how we're going to rebuild american democracy community access stations taking very very seriously their role not merely in giving everybody a voice which is a wonderful concept an unnecessary concept but in giving democracy itself a voice because major media in this country is no longer giving democracy of voice especially at the local level and our politicians too frequently are willing to fill the void by raising money and putting campaign ads on and so where are we going to get the basic information the basic debates the basic dialogue it isn't going to come from the commercial sector it isn't going to come from the politicians it is going to come from each and every one of you and as you build this new network of small the democracy institutions across this country i will stand with you and celebrate you and tell the world that you are the essential force for rebuilding america democracy and i will challenge every foundation and every funder to give their resources to the end state to sions that believe in democracy itself not those who are trying to profit  and by mother tells me when you get the a good applause line that's the time in which to say thank you let's take some questions from the audience i should have brought my i phone up here and taken a picture of you because you look so great now we got to market funds out right mikes the boss of this stuff yeah come in asked some tough questions or some were trying to speak in different accents hey brother aloha a law from hawaii where i know why i'm not in hawaii now but that's ok molly we can go there and i'll show you around mobs and i just wonder if you could talk a little bit about that dynamic of the relationship and in our work and there's that's a great question and thank you look one of the things that we had to learn when we went into media reform bombing chosen i started writing about these issues about it literally twenty years ago and if you can imagine the first time we went to the nation magazine and said we want to write about media reform we want to write about media as an issue and we want to write about people getting engaged in trying to affect media and change media in this country is an issue they said we wrote a four thousand word manifesto and my editor cut it down to eight hundred words because there was a sense that not that long ago even with the great writing of chomsky and ed herman and others ben begg nicotine's great writing that media was something organic that it was natural that it wasn't an issue and we tended to talk about it in a very vapid way and the  way we talked about it was commercial media and then n p r and public t v so that was sort of the reality and too frequently in that discussion community media got left out or got pushed to the side or it was seen as some sort of secondary institution one of the things that we've learned josh turner you mentioned is a tremendous figure in helping to to guide us in this way as many of you have been is that we no longer talk about public broadcasting or public media we talk about public and community media as a whole that our federal government and our state and local governments should recognize their responsibility to fund and this is a big deal i know people are often uncomfortable with the idea of government funding media and that's a legitimate concern but the fact of the matter is government has always funded media in every country around the world and in the freest countries in the world in countries in countries that the economist magazine's democracy index rate it says the prius countries in the world they have very well funded community media to the extent that in norway they often f competing institutions and communities so you can have different voices different political attitudes and stuff like that it's it's common around the world we have a crisis in the united states we stop our public broadcasting and then people are people going to debate about the quality of public broadcasting they say oh i don't like this i don't like how they cover the middle east or i don't like how they cover this or that and without recognizing that it's been starved down to a level where it barely gets by and then we don't fund community media and except at the most minimal level around this country and so we don't begin to understand how strong and great well funded community media can be and so when i talk about this democracy deficit that we have in this country this crisis that we have in this country as regards coverage of local democracy one of the things that i say to my friend who has gone and sat down is and one of th we say in the media reform movement is that community access stations managers staffers volunteers need to get very very good at advocating for themselves as stewards of democracy as literally the vehicle by which democracy itself can be made to function because we have we are quite yeah you can applaud yourselves on th but we have a great big crisis in this country you know democratic legitimacy small the democratic legitimacy if you have a local government elected in an election that draws five percent turnout if nineteen out of every twenty people don't participate in a local election is that local government really representative of the community or is it representative of a tiny sector of engaged people the role that you have is to spread that out to get more people engaged to get more people excited about local politics about local governance and i don't mean politics just like an election i mean issues i mean the drama of our debates the fact of the matter is i can't think of any institution better than community access media when it comes to covering the issues raised by the black lives matter movement i can't think of anyone better because these are institutions at your best who say come on and produce a show show us how to cover this instead of simply saying oh we're going to drop into your community and we're going to spend a few minutes paying attention to you you as an institution say come on in and show us how to do it that's what curtis was talking about when he talked about the haitian community come in and that's an incredible story that is a beautiful story and the fact of the matter is we have fundamental issues in this country that are not being addressed and they're only going to be addressed if you folks take charge of them i'm not talking about continuing to do what you're doing i'm talking about looking at community media as something much bigger and much more important and much more vital than even some of you may imagine it to be and then making your communities and frankly making your federal government more conscious of the need to fund community media more questions just the guy from hawaii i hope i see someone step into the microphone there not that i not that there's anything wrong with just the guy from hawaii so most of the community media in this room is funded by a formula which is which has a very uncertain future the franchise fees what do you think is the likelihood of creating a policy that would allow a digital dividend that would be devoted to the public interest for fostering things like community media in the future media landscape and how would you advocate going about kind of creating that dividend where you're right on target you're exactly on target you know i was just literally just in great britain where they still have the their fee based on your television you buy a television and you know you you pay a fee for the television they don't care what you watch but some of that money is going to go to the b b c and here's in it ironic that when you have a steady stream of funding absolutely guaranteed structurally guaranteed that you get what a lot of people think of as the best media system in the world this is not hard stuff you can't deal link funding from quality it doesn't mean that what volunteers are doing across this country for free isn't great i have seen volunteer produce programming that is so dramatically better than everything on a certain cable network that it's not even comparable to i know we can do things for free but to get to turn the lights on to get the door open to hire somebody to coordinate to begin to promote what you do and that's a huge part of this by the way i want community access stations to have substantial amounts of money to promote the coverage that they're doing so that people know they can turn to it it's you know every other network done right every other network says come and watch us right but community access you're supposed to be out there and hope that somebody comes home drunk at four a is to develop a national standard don't do it bit and piece it may be hard you may have to fight you may have to debate but develop a national standard and then you go to the people who understand media our congress and you make them introduce it as a bill so that you can actually fight for something now i know some legislation has been introduced i realize or not we're recreating the wheel but the fact of the matter is that you need bernie sanders who will return to the united states senate and senator markey from massachusetts and i can name you a half dozen people in the house who really wake up in the morning and think about media issues you need them to introduce legislation on your behalf and then you need to go to jason chaffetz and people from utah and some other places who have taken seriously the disconnect on local media and the disconnect very conservative folks and you need to get them on your legislation and make it real because you can't pass something you can't make something happen if there's not a reality that you can say we want you to back a b fifty seven forty your h r twenty one sixty it's got to be real so that's my core answer to that question but it can be done every other country in the world does it and by the way i just before i take the next question there and i know we're probably running short on time but i want to tell you one quick story about that four am thing right when they come home drunk i'm wisconsinite so i have come home at four am i swear i'm not making this up there's a community access station in madison wisconsin it's been on forever mike knows about it one night and watch literally like really late at night and they had they had a show they had a guy they'd candidates got to come in and sit at a table and then they had a phone that they could pick up and when they picked it up the voice was went out and they callers call in and the candidate would sit there and talk to the person on the phone which i thought was fabulous you know it's i would not change a thing about it but so it's like two in the morning the independent candidate for result was sitting there answering the phone and some guy called in and he was clearly had been to the bars that night and he said look my girlfriend left me i lost my job i don't see any point this is a serious story it's i don't see any point going on i you know i got a bottle of pills here or something i just i really i just said to life it's a horrible thing and i mean this guy it sounded suicidal masel the candidate for sheriff who unfortunately did not win penn goes hey man we've all been there you had a little extra to drink that's ok thought sorts of crazy thoughts are going through your head i want you to sit back on the couch if you've got some substance that calms you down that's ok but don't do anything rash tonight because you know some time in a couple hours from now the sun is going to go up you know look out there and it's going to be a beautiful morning and you're going to look at this world you're going to say i have a place in it in the somehow the rainbow of humanity has found me and i'm going to shine and i was like this crazy hippy thing and the guy goes thanks you help me a lot i don't want community access media to be reduced quite to that moment but i will tell you that's organic human media that connects with people who are in trouble and who are challenged and if we go to that basic level and then build from that and recognize that we have communities that have troubles and challenges and if we connect with them in that way and we hear their pain and we speak back to them encouraging and human and decent ways community access media has the ability to save lives not just at the individual level but in broader communal levels this is a big deal what you do numbers of people but that's tend to be all on the individual basis can you say something about the relationship between can be accessed when it is asians and individual speakers on the internet it's a very good what a great question and you're such a brilliant group here  and good looking too i might add but but you know that's such an important question because people will tell you you know we don't really need community access stations anymore because we've got all this internet right it's it's the digital revolution you guys with your camera and your microphones that's so twentieth century twenty or early twenty first century it's it's the past now it's all we can all do it on our cell phone here's the problem you know that major media institutions across this country are closing down the comment sections of the washington post just did it today they're closing down the comments sections on their articles not because they don't want to be criticised but because it is such a festering horrid zone of humanity's worst instincts literally we have been we are we are learning how awful we are and it's really bad you know i mean i'm not you know i don't mind criticism i actually enjoy it but i'm i'm like perverse but i'll tell you you know this poor woman from i hope i get the country or was it the bahamas or the woman  dove across the line at the olympics right where was he from bamma it's ok so she dives across the line at the olympics right did you see i don't know if you saw what was said about her on twitter and like  unbelievably horrific now if she had been a blonde white woman from the us i hate to tell you but i think what we put up and said is wow look at that determination look at that that spirit but instead she's not she's somebody who people felt completely free to diminish her trying to win a race and we see that in our politics we see that in our culture in our music in so many places and so there is something potentially healing about an institutional voice a community access station that invites people in to speak that lets people say their view th lets people be strong maybe even extreme at times but then it's done in public your face is there your name is there you're real and we have we have a real challenge with the internet and that is that the anonymous nature of it frees people to become incredibly base and at times incredibly destructive in our conversations and so i don't i love the internet i use it constantly and i celebrate i fought for net neutrality and i want people to be able to say and do what they want to do on the internet i'm not trying to limit it in any way but i am suggesting at this point that it is not capable of fostering the full and resonant conversations that we need to have a functional democracy maybe it will develop into that but it's not there yet and so what i would suggest is that the difference with community access stations is you foster a conversation where we see the faces of the people that are involved and where we have some connection to the humanity and i think maybe maybe just somebody has got to get up out of their chair and walk to an office or walk to a station and sit down and open up that conversation that just that act of it causes us even if we're angry even if we're impassioned even if we have deep frustrations it causes us to think a little bit about how we say things and maybe about how to say things in a way that instead of driving people away from the process of making people feel sullied or harmed by engaging in a discussion making them feel renewed and engaged and perhaps validated john i come i'm in a quandary i come from a city that is the capital of new york state albany new york and i don't know if any of you have the same issue but the mayor of the city of albany has taken our franchise fee hostage and uses it to club help close an eighteen million dollar budget gap and we're supposed to get one point two million instead we were given forty thousand dollars a year to four capital costs and we have no very little money or no money actually for operating costs except what we get to pay a part time or and we they expect us to run everything only out with a volunteer and i don't know if this is happening in every know access place but the finances here are for my community access channel is deplorable and i don't know how to fix it and i don't know what advice you might have but we need to talk about that a sec i'm going to hold your keep your idea when i answer your question we take this quick woman behind you quickly and let her ask her question and then i'll pull it all together and we will get you out to whatever cocktails are in the hollywood you don't know how questions are how do you to pull together i know well i have great faith that humanity i have faith in humanity or i'll just answer each of them together i promise you will answer it's a very good question yes i'm not sure it's a question i wanted to ask if there was anyone else in the room who was also a member of the legal women voters league of women voters raise your hands probably the most radical organization america thank you thank you thank you thank you i spent some years on the state board in connecticut during which time we did senatorial debates and governor's debates until the year that we had the green candidate for governor debate and after that year by year the the partnering organizations a b c etc said that's all right we'll take care of it and we no longer do it at the state level it's hard to push back as people think of us as a bunch of old ladies and kind of disappearing and not being relevant and being accused of partisanship a lot of the time so please if you do partner with your league of women voters offer them protection on that level and that yes we're political but we're not stupid very good was certainly not disconnected our friend from albany asked about bonding and about politicians holding funding what you're suggesting is holding it hostage basically or using it for diverting it away two things i will suggest you and they do relate first off you need to find allies and comrades in the struggle and so i would say that in every community across this country many of you are already working with the league of women voters that ought to be a cemented relationship you ought to put a lot more into building out those relationships you need allies and partners that will rise up when you have a struggle over funding because you can't just do it on your own it community access has to be community so you've got to have people involved and engaged on that so build your coalitions don't build them merely in a time of crisis build them in times of strength as well with the idea of having a strong enough coalition to make demands but also to push back when your the sanctity of your institutions violent now secondly what you have to do is put pressure on your local officials if they're playing these games you've got to put pressure on from the community itself but also from outside because often local officials are more conscious of what's being said about them from beyond than from what's going on locally so i want you to e mail me the details of your struggle pressure now a common counsels fifteen members all democrats you know there's no there's no pressure there to be put on this mayor or the previous mayors and we had a mayor one mayor for forty three years in the city of albany so i'm trying to explain why this is not the solution i know it's not easy but building the coalitions is still vital and what i say to you in the second part of that is probably even more important you need to email me the details of your struggle so i can write about it right so that we can make certain i can use you so that i can use you as an example of a problem that exists across this country and the problem isn't a local politician and it isn't even the bakery's of local politics the problem is political and community leaders who do not understand that community access media is the absolute essential ingredient for making not just democracy which some of them may not even be that excited about but for making a functional community the fact of the matter is all media is dying new media is not prepared to fill the void community access media is the essential tool all to build out our democracy and to build up our communities in the twenty first century i don't come to you i don't come to you because i like you i don't come to you because by caste i don't come here to hear mary do or imitations of bostonians although it's very good i come to you because i'm desperate and scared i believe american democracy faces fundamental challenges and those challenges are not going to be answered from the top down they're going to be answered from the bottom up from our communities across this country our towns are the solution to our problems and you are the voices of our towns and in honor to be on with you both because this is exactly what we need we need a community programming like this in every town across this country to fill the void that is being created the fact of the matter is that we have a lot of national media that will cover presidential politics that will cover major issues at the national international level unfortunately too much of our local media that which still exists the commercial media tries to imitate the national media just covers the same stor maybe with a little bit of localization but not really going deep into the community daily newspapers are closing or are dramatically reducing their staff radio station since the telecommunications act of one thousand nine hundred six have literally culled out their local programming their local hosts t v stations commercial t v stations increasingly are cutting minutes off their newscasts unable to in order to put more ads in an election time and frankly a lot of those local newscasts done by people i respect really sincere people are trying but they're in a situation where they're pressured by consultants to do exercise tips or immense amounts of crime coverage even when there isn't that much crime or you know whether whether weather and then a little sports so the fact of the matter is we've got a gap in our communications in this country it is harming us we have lower and lower turnout for local elections in many parts of the country we have community groups struggling to get attention to tell their story and when problems blow up when a community has a crisis then media commercial media pays attention but i will argue that if we cover the stories from the start if we're deeper in at the beginning we have a much better chance of addressing the crisis before it explodes and also getting our politics to function and so i think that in the twenty first century community media is going to have to step up and fill the void and i believe that funders donors and others have to understand this that in order for us to have a functional democracy and have functional communities we need to provide dramatically more funding for community access stations across the country so i went on a little bit about you co founded free press can you talk a little bit about that and you know when is it in town sure free press is the nation's media reform network we call it a network because there are many many groups working on media reform in this country doing media justice doing media production doing literal you know like policy initiatives also to wonderful groups going on we founded free press in the hopes of creating an organization that could amplify all this activism and hopefully pull some of that together it was started in two thousand to two thousand and three we've had a series of national media reform conferences that have drawn three four five thousand people and i guess to the cut that we've had success it's down in you know getting people focused on particular struggles and winning some of them we beat back the bush administration's attempt to dramatically diminish laws preventing to poli media more recently we were a part of the wonderful coalitions that were developed to fight to maintain net neutrality and now we are working on a host of issues as regards funding a public media and community media as well as you know all the old struggles because the fact is on media shoes painfully they never go away media is a way that that large corporations can make a lot of money if they structure it right that they get the rules on their side that's fine i don't mind people making money but what i do mind is when the rules are structured against community media public media media that that citizens have a much greater stake in and so our struggle is to make sure that we have a media in this country that is diverse not just diverse in who's on air well that's important but also diverse in its ownership diverse in its inputs who has a way of suggesting what it might cover what might be done and also i think really importantly that is competitive that there's a lot of we we don't want to have consolidated simplistic media we want to have complex and engaging a so that's a fantastic question because i like the immediacy of it you're you're asking what can we do now there's a lot of things longer term that we need to do but now what community access stations can do is affiliate with the league of women voters and other groups that have a tradition of organizing debates but that have often been pushed aside by commercial media certainly we've seen at the presidential level say to them we want you to do this we want to work with you some say she's already doing it it's not we're not reinventing the wheel but saying we that for that debate to organize those debates and then also do something else which community access stations don't do enough of find funding to promote the fact that you're airing this debate and that's a big deal commercial stations constantly promote what they're doing they advertise it with billboards they advertise in the news they're wherever they can spread the word that they're showing this program it's usually like you know lost on a desert island without food or whatever it is this week right but you're doing something that's really important community promote it let people know that it's there don't just expect people to find it on those channels those are steps that could be taken right now and then there's one of the thing too we have this presidential race it's a credibly intense there's no doubt of that people are covering it at the national level but one way to bring it down home is to have a debate where you have local folks debating a presidential race like i was get the local chair of each party and have a debate and let him do that but let him do it at home and instead of instead of having them just debate at the national level let people from the community ask them questions about things that matter to the community you could cover presidential politics i don't mind that but do it in a way that's connected to your place so i you know they mention and you had mentioned that you're a journalist or a writer and you your most recent book what do you first saw was the title of your most recent people get ready to fight against a jobless economy in a unless democracy and it to be about the rapid digital and automation revolution is taking place going to change everything about our lives it already has changed a lot where literally live streaming which is something that would've been a radical idea not that long ago right somebody and you know reykjavik iceland could be watching us at this very moment and and so we know that a lot is changing many of these changes are jarring they're they're they're going to be challenging a lot of jobs that exist now are going to exist twenty years from now what we need to do is fighting is to start thinking about you know how we're going to organize a functional society with a lot of different work and maybe even a lot less work maybe we need to work less baby we need a guaranteed income there's all sorts of issues that we should be addressing that by and large are not being addressed currently in our politics or our media and so one of the things the community media can do is take up these big issues that generously think community media's love right and it sometimes thinks of itself as you know hyper local and that's good that's what it should be but that doesn't mean that community media can address the biggest issues going on because there are sometimes where commercial media fails and community media may be our only way to have to face about autumn and automation the digital revolution and how it's changing our lives  speak very eloquently by the way i just want to make the topic kind of go to you by the way thank you and you too thank you joe i don't know if you've ever been to have you been to the conference before that i've been to state conferences around the country i've never been to the national conference year mike who is the i hope i get the title right executive director is somebody we've known for media reform over the years he invited me to come this year and i'm very honored to be here because i as i said at the close of my remarks i am not here just because i like what you do although i do i'm here because i'm desperate i believe that our existing media system is failing democracy and i think the community access stations genuinely have an ability to step up and fill the void and we need you to do more but those of us who are not engaged not doing community access programs we need to step up and support you we need to find ways to get funding we need to find ways to build out the station because frankly that's essential t great sidle breakthroughs come it's when groups of people get together and keep bouncing ideas off each other bringing their new ideas then the big challenge that you really solve problems and so a conference like this is a place where yes you could solve the technical problems individual problems but hopefully late at night when all the you know small scale challenges are pressed people will think big and think about what i national network of community access stations might be able