One measure of success is community awards; especially, from peers. Another is to enable enough community engagement for ‘community produced’ television to happen regularly.
We strive daily for a moment of time from residents, civic leaders and those interested in advocacy, performance and connection. We hope that in brief moments of connection, either intentional or accidental, people find a ripple that leads to more. It could be more TV viewing, or even better, conversations with us and neighbors. As our penguin ambassador shares: WPAA-TV wants to be the feather that tickles you to service, tells you a best-kept secret, supports your voice being heard, and encourages your informed participation in democracy. Our viewers are as important to us as those who explore the “make TV” experience. We can be excellent at content creation, but if no one is watching, we miss out on the community reward of connection.
We presented our year to the judges in a video annual report. #wpaatv cablecasts hundreds of hours of local programming each year. Representing the entire year in 20 minutes is a challenge. In addition to having an overall awareness of the year’s shows, it takes at least 40 hours of production time to prepare the video. We prefer to show and not tell.
Our community project Fire Escape Sessions was judged based on this clip . It was a peek into how we brought CT musicians into our community in true concert style. We shared musician and viewer feedback with the judges as evidence of impact on this page. Thanks again to all who shared their music, that watched, that designed the space and recorded the audio and video. Congrats on being a 2nd place finalist.
Congrats to the other finalist for what you do in service to small communities: Marblehead Community Access & Media and Athol Orange Community TV. And to large station division finalists Watertown Cable Access Corp, Nashua ETV and QPTV.
We participate in the festival as a judging location. We were assigned the Community Impact category for large stations. The theme for most submissions was either coverage of protests or human interest coverage of covid related stories. The standouts were ‘Unity Breakfast 20th Anniversary’, ‘Make It Labs – Fighting COVID One Face Shield at a Time’ (an impressive story), and ‘Civil Unrest in US _Call For Action’. The Call to Action aspect of QPTV is what made it rise above the many others with similar themes as regard ‘impact’.
This category, Community Impact, unlike the other which focus on production quality, requires evidence of community connection.