Anyone Can Do YouTube,but Not Everyone Can Do Public Access: Urban Politics,Production Tools,and a Communications Infrastructure to Call Home

Introduction

It is a short walk from the shelter to Market St. where William catches the #27 bus to the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) in the Northeast Mission. “I try to separate myself from all the stuff going on at the shelter,” he confides. His trips to SF Commons at BAVC, home to San Francisco’s public access television station, are part of getting back to the life he had before incarceration and homelessness. “I look at it like this is my channel,” he explained about SF Commons. William’s VZ up TV features his hip-hop music videos and performances as other artists. Through SF Commons, he is connecting with other access producers to eventually create a regular TV show. “Anyone can upload to YouTube,” William explained, “they got phones with apps that you can just shoot something and put up. But not everyone can make it work on cable.” His trips to SF Commons have become are part of a broader civic infrastructure he uses to help him get back on his feet. One part of this infrastructure he is forced to traverse—the probation office, the shelter, the employment and housing offices—all space he enters into as a black, homeless ex-con that historically reproduce a coordination of attrition that cyclically moves black bodies through the institutional system. SF Commons speaks to another infrastructure, one he engages on his own terms and that for William, YouTube cannot replicate.

The SF Commons William knows now is a lot different than public access TV in the past. BAVC, a non-profit multimedia production and high-tech workforce-training outfit, took control of the operation in 2009 after budget cuts gutted its funding. Relying on their experience in high tech, BAVC wanted to reinvent the “who, how, and what is produced” of public access television in the city (BAVC 2009, 6). This meant transforming public access TV from a traditionally large and labor-intensive television studio into a “transmedia community center for the future delivering a suite of integrated services and platforms . . . ” (BAVC 2009, 5). To do this, BAVC moved public access into their facility in the Mission District and drastically scaled down the labor, technology, and spaces that access TV practices traditionally consumed. The transition, however, was not as smooth as BAVC hoped.

In protest of the proposed changes, access producers, many who began creating community programming in the 1980s, marched in front of their soon-to-be dismantled access station on 1720 Market St. and Valencia and urged the city to reconsider their commitment to community television. “Instead of protecting community access by keeping this facility open until another facility is built,” one access producer protested, “the city with BAVC is now involved in privatizing San Francisco community access television” (Coalition to Defend Free Speech [CDFS] 2009). Despite BAVC’s forty years of experience cultivating the “independent producer” and training tech workers for the Bay Area’s freelance multimedia economy, many access producers argued that BAVC’s changes would destroy the access community entirely. Many access producers quit, and BAVC has struggled over the last ten years to retain an active producer community that once defined access television in San Francisco.

Why were many producers in San Francisco so adamantly against a high-tech makeover by renowned Bay Area media production professionals? Alternatively, why does William find BAVC’s SF Commons more satisfying than YouTube? What connects these two dispositions and how do they reimagine the importance of local access TV in a global mediascape? By drawing upon the history of people, places, and practices that formed public access television in San Francisco, this article makes an argument for the importance of socio-spatial elements in the organization of community media projects like public access television. With this lens, the coordination of the city residents, the municipal government, and global corporations into an accessible and proximate political arena, the influence of histories of place in a city on the accessibility of resources by residents, and the types of production practice and spaces afforded by different production practices all become factors in the organization of community media. In the end, it is these socio-spatial and political dimensions, rather than social media technologies like YouTube, that continue to make community media projects like public access TV an important framework for political agency.

Method

This research is largely ethnographic, consisting of site visits over a three-year period (2013–2016) and interviews with both pre-BAVC access producers (veterans) and post-BAVC producers (“new” or “recent”), current and past staff members of BAVC, staff from the Market St. studio, and city officials. Along with general background information, access producers answered questions about their experiences working in public access TV both before BAVC and/or at BAVC (if applicable), why they participated in public access television, and their thoughts about its future in San Francisco. Over time, updated contact information for many veteran producers was neither updated nor available. As an alternative, relevant producer-created blogs, comments, and YouTube videos created during the BAVC transition were used to identify attitudes and opinions toward BAVC, BAVC’s transformation, and their ideas about public access TV’s future. For insight into the administration and strategies of managing public access television, I conducted interviews with the staff, both past and present, from BAVC and the now defunct San Francisco Community Television Corporation as well as officials from the San Francisco Department of Technology. Archival data from Board of Supervisor meeting minutes, popular newspapers, weeklies, and community newsletters and numerous boxes of organizational and municipal documents concerning public access television curated by Zane Blaney, former executive director of the San Francisco Community Television Corporation, were also used. Together, this article compiles a broad historical look at the organization of people, policies, and places in an attempt to unravel the different strands of materials and relationships that came together in San Francisco to create public access television and what its transformation can reveal about the future of community media practices.

Theoretical Framework

Public access TV is a cable TV channel provided by an arrangement between cable TV providers and municipal governments that cablecasts programming created by local residents. A cable TV franchise agreement between a city and the cable TV company provides funds for public access TV operations by charging cable operators for use of public space and utilities. Until state franchising rules become the norm in 2006, these fees paid for production equipment, spaces, and the administration of public access TV. The cable franchise agreement has also built relationships between global corporations, municipal governments, and the public that are historically unique. As part of the cable franchise agreement, public access TV has become a platform to negotiate the legal and bureaucratic structures of municipal government and coordinate local competencies to run and train people to use the production equipment (Larkin 2013). This means that along with intersecting important material infrastructures in modern cities like electrical grids, telephone poles, buried conduit under city streets, public access television is also an infrastructure of affect; part of the way people and cities imagine and understand their social and spatial relationships with each other (Parks 2014).

Thinking about public access television as more than simply a local TV outlet is also not a new approach. Its ties to practices of community advocacy extend historically to Canada’s Challenge for Change projects in the late 1960s and their use of video and training as a “public platform for the people” to address issues like labor and poverty (Marchessault 1995, 135). Thomas Streeter (1996) describes the creation of cable access TV as a complex, multifaceted strategy that served a number of diverse interests besides programming. For cable operators, access garnered goodwill among the cities they were trying to expand into and the federal government saw access and cable expansion as a way to spur the development of a nationwide/global telecommunications infrastructure and temper the power of network television’s control over programming. Video artists and activists also looked to cable access as a way to provide local, alternative, non-commercial information and programming (Boyle 1997; Engelman 1996; Streeter 1987, 1996, 1997).

Ball-Rokeach et al. (2001) connect community media, advocacy, and place by theorizing “storytelling neighborhoods” as important links between different levels of interpersonal, neighborhood, and local news media or political organizations. Through these links, community members achieve a sense of belonging (Ball-Rokeach et al. 2001, 402). Through case studies of “street papers” and community radio and television projects, Howley (2005) demonstrates how community media projects move beyond simply programming to become physical spaces for organizing local social movements. As Ali (2017) argues, the historical importance of this type of “localism” in practice or in content is a product of larger discourses about nation building and globalization. This article builds on this scholarship to look at the way in which both telecommunication and urban development policies affect the practices of public access TV historically in San Francisco. Therefore, beyond looking at how people use public access TV to create a sense of place, this discussion also looks at how broader factors of policy, geography, and technology that construct places, in turn enable and/or constrain the practices and actors of public access TV. It is this place-based relationship that differentiates public access TV from new technologies like YouTube.

The argument that web-based technologies like YouTube can replace public access television is one made largely by telecommunications companies who claim that ubiquitous access to the Internet provides for more opportunities for user-generated content than free cable channels (Behrens 2019; Rhinesmith 2016; Rosen-Molina 2008). As early as 2005, AT&T pushed elected officials in California to pass the Digital Infrastructure and Video Competition Act (DIVCA) which eliminated operating funds for public access TV services and eventually shuttered twelve stations in Los Angeles alone (McDonald 2008). Simultaneously, media scholars also praised new Web 2.0 technologies like YouTube for their potential to increase democratic participation, eliminate knowledge gaps between rich and poor, and the formation of more diverse forms of community engagement (Benkler 2007; Jenkins 2008). Yet over the years, YouTube has increasingly monetized user content facilitating the creation of multichannel networks and promoting content from large media corporations that now dominate the platform (Vonderau 2016). “Despite its community rhetoric,” Burgess and Green (2009, 65) argue, “YouTube’s architecture and design invite individual participation . . . opportunities for collaboration have to be created by the YouTube community itself or by invitation from the company.” While communities form through YouTube, they are increasingly monetized as part of their participation. The practice of public access television in contrast coordinates corporate, municipal, and local agents to create a platform for non-commercial, local programming.

This coordination speaks to the ability of local agents to use media production to access broader scales of political power. Scholars concerned with the coordination of factors like geography, transportation, telecommunications, and other issues of accessibility have used the concept of “extensibility” to understand social and political affordances of communication technologies at different spatial and temporal scales (Adams 1995; L. D. Burns 1980; Hägerstrand 1970; Palm and Pred 1978). Extensibility “measures the ability of a person (or group) to overcome the friction of distance” (Adams 1995) and implies an “expansion of opportunities for human interaction” (Janelle 1973). In this article, “political extensibility” is used to highlight the coordination of community residents, city officials, and corporate cable operators into an accessible, local arena for political engagement by a broad range of civic actors. It is this capability for local political engagement through the cable TV infrastructure that makes public access television a political practice that is not replicated through YouTube and other online media.

Public Access in San Francisco, 1972–2009: Race, Class, and Organizing to Battle for Resources

Access to cable TV in 1972 emerged during dramatic changes in both race relations and urban geography in the city. The rapid rise in the city’s minority population during the post–World War II (WWII) economic boom had already made the distribution of public resources across the city a prominent point of struggle (Ferreira 2011). Johnson v. San Francisco Unified School District, 339 F. Supp. 1315 (N.D. Cal. 1971) forced the busing of children throughout the city, and the removal of Native American protestors off Alcatraz Island by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) the same year (Kotlowski 2003) reinforced an already racially codified geography. The completion of both the TransAmerica Pyramid and the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART) in 1972 symbolized the city’s transformation from blue-collar warehouses to white-collar high-rises and displacement of the neighborhoods and communities of the multi-ethnic poor (Wirt 1974). BART stations were built in the more affluent neighborhoods in the Bay Area while not a single station was built in the mostly black neighborhoods like Hunter’s Point and Bayview (Hartman 2002, 7). It was in this context of broad urban transformation that video activists, artists, and a few politicians looked to the civic potential of cable access TV as a way to counter the unequal distribution of public resources that the shifting relationship between people and places entailed.

Shortly after the Federal Communications Commission released new cable rules requiring access channels, ¹ newly elected Board of Supervisor, Robert Gonzales, called for a citywide moratorium on all cable TV construction until Viacom, the city’s cable operator, agreed to stop redlining the poorer neighborhoods and provide resources for cable access channels (J. Burns 1973a, 1973b). With deep roots in labor and redevelopment activism in the Mission District, Gonzales’s moratorium spoke to concerns shared by all marginalized communities in the city over the distribution of the social and economic benefits cable TV technology proposed to bring. The moratorium was ultimately vetoed, but the wide public support he garnered encouraged the Board to create the city’s first committee to investigate the development of cable TV. By 1975, the Cable Task Force, made up of educators, activists, and community members, had organized San Francisco’s first public access facility in a small, ill-equipped loft space at a Viacom sales office on the lower east side of the Inner Mission (Engel 1975).

Over time, the expansion of cable TV technology made it necessary to broaden the Cable Tasks Force’s watchdog function. Groups like Public Advocates, Inc., San Francisco Neighborhood Legal Assistance Foundation, the Human Rights Commission, the Parent Teachers Association, the Labor Council, the San Francisco Planning and Urban Renewal Association, Blacks in the Media for Affirmative Action, Mission Mediarts, and the Chinese Media Committee, all lobbied for task force positions (Cone 1973). Rather than simply developing cable access policy, the task force was increasingly called upon to monitor cable TV built-out, the wiring of public institutions, and Viacom’s compliance to the cable franchise agreement. The Cable Task Force soon became the Citizen’s Telecommunications Policy Committee and eventually evolved into the Telecommunications Commission in 1997 with responsibilities to oversee all telecommunications development in the city. According to Bonnie Engel, video artist/advocate and longtime Telecommunications Commission member, the commission meeting provided educators and activists a public platform to testify about disparities in education and technology access in the city (Bonnie Engel, personal communication, September 13, 2016).

A salient example of political extensibility afforded to access advocacy groups through the organization of cable TV centered on negotiations over cable service rates and expansion. As private firms in San Francisco began to experiment with bundling voice, data, and video using satellite technology in the early 1980s, they saw cable’s wire infrastructure as viable and less expensive inter-city communications network for bi- coastal and international business (Caroll 1980). During the rate renegotiations in 1980, Viacom asked the city to extend their franchise agreement for twenty more years. Prompted by the citizen advocacy groups, the Board requested Viacom to upgrade their channel capacity to fifty-two channels, wire an additional 120,000 homes, and invest another sixty million dollars in upgrading the cable infrastructure to take advantage of new opportunities in integrated communications and data services (Journal of Proceeding 1980; Kilduff 1980; “Supervisor’s Extend Cable TV Pact” 1980).

Another significant example was the creation of the Market St. public access TV studio. In 1998, AT&T, which had recently acquired the franchise, agreed to provide approximately five million dollars for cable access channels rather than face a litany of lawsuits stemming from years of franchise non-compliance (Arnold 2011; Brian Roberts, City of San Francisco, personal communication, September 12, 2016). These funds built a state of the art studio on Market St. and provided professional equipment, training, and staff (Management Resources 1997). AT&T also agreed to wire public schools and public administration buildings along with closing gaps in the wired infrastructure throughout the city. ² For advocates and producers, the Market St. studio symbolized a public victory over a large conglomerate media company.

The last real cable franchise fight was actually lost. In 2009, after the BAVC assumed control, they closed the Market St. studio. The closure was in part a result of the passing of California’s state cable franchising bill in the 2006, the DIVCA. ³ The bill eliminated municipal authority over cable franchises in favor of broader state control by the California Public Utilities Commission. This meant the city could no longer negotiate with cable operators to solve local accessibility issues as they had in the past. Because the bill also no longer required cable operators to pay operating funds for the administration of public access facilities, almost 80 percent of the public access TV budget in San Francisco was eliminated. In addition to DIVCA, then mayor Gavin Newsom had already presciently disbanded the city’s Telecommunications Commission in 2004 (Ordinance No. 203-04 2004). Without a city commission, a public forum, or municipal authority, the ability of residents to participate in the kind of check and balance processes that built San Francisco’s telecommunications infrastructure suddenly disappeared.

Historically then, the significance we can draw from this history is in how the organization of public access TV, the citizen committees, and the political extensibility it occasioned, entangled local residents, the municipal government, and a global media conglomerate into an accessible political arena. It played a key role in building and extending the political interests of local residents beyond TV programming into the political arena of city hall itself and directly affected telecommunications policies in San Francisco. The next section of this discussion will focus more specifically on the transition from Market St. to BAVC and its affect on political extensibility.

Geographic Memory in Public Access TV Places

More than a nexus of media practices and physical spaces, the Market St. studio and BAVC’s facilities embodied differing social imaginations, what geographer Rob Shields (1991) called “place-images”—characterizations of the people who inhabit, traverse, or avoid a particular space, and the social practices constructed and reproduced there. In urban landscapes, the place-images of a neighborhood mark place-based social practices with colloquial meanings that residents understand and remember. As a result, place-images often make neighborhoods vehemently contested spaces. BAVC’s relocation was more than simply a conflict in access philosophies. The move revealed an historical tension between place-images, between the public-service image of Market St., and the image of BAVC’s north mission location rooted in gentrification and displacement in the 1990s.

The Market St. studio was the first facility specifically built for the public access community. It involved years of planning committees and public hearings. The site was chosen because of its proximity to the SF’s Civic Center, and public transportation made it seem like it was right in the “thick of it.” (figure 1) Tracy Rosenburg, a former access TV producer and executive director of Media Alliance in the Bay Area and who worked with the location search committee, suggested that one of the main concerns for the committee was accessibility for low-income residents (Tracy Rosenberg, personal communication, January 13, 2015).

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Figure 1.

Location of access studio on Market and Valencia.

In the 1950s, the construction of the Central Highway US 101 split the surrounding neighborhood into two, dissolving any coherent sense of community in the area. By the 1980s, the neighborhood was considered a blighted refuge for drug dealers and prostitutes (King 2004, 1). When the Loma Prieta earthquake destroyed most of the freeway in 1989, residents and housing activists convinced the city to tear it down and create new affordable housing (Asato 2015). During the station’s tenure on Market St. (2002–2009), city planners considered the area surrounding the intersection of Market and Valencia a “gateway to Hays Valley and the Civic Center” (San Francisco Planning Department 2007). However, the Market St. studio itself was a gateway to the broader public-service geography in the city.

From 1720 Market St., it was approximately a ten- to twelve-minute walk to City Hall and the SF Main Public Library in the Civic Center. Public services like the Department of Technology, the Human Services Agency, Public and Community Behavioral Health Services, Children and Families Commission, Municipal Transportation Authority, and the LGBT Community Center were all similarly located within this walkable timeframe. There were also three Mercy Housing projects for LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) seniors, and low-income and homeless families. As an extension of this public-service geography, the publicly funded access station became a node in a broader civic network of services for the poor, alternatively able, retired, homeless, and unemployed residents of the city.

This public-service orientation is also evident in the organization’s focus on outreach and programming that addressed issues like redevelopment and neighborhoods important to low-income residents. “There were lots of angry and bewildered people, especially among those who were active members” (Tracy Rosenberg, personal communication, January 13, 2015). In the years between 2003 and 2007, more than half of the producers of public access TV were people of color that made less than $45,000/year and lived in neighborhoods that, according to Berkeley’s Urban Displacement Project, were heavily gentrifying or gentrified (Zuk and Chapple 2015). This focus was prompted by large-scale gentrification in the late 1990s by new high-tech new industries. In particular, producers and staff collaborated with the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services to produce a live call-in show about issues such as redevelopment and eviction. Emmy nominated, Newsroom, also produced programming that addressed gentrification and evictions at the neighborhood level. The Western Access Video Excellence (WAVE) award-winning program, The San Franciscans, focused on populations and neighborhoods not traditionally represented on SF public access television like the Asian community, youth, and the alternatively abled through issues like community health, violence, media and technology use, and multi-lingualism (Blaney et al. 2007; Blaney et al. 2005; Blaney et al. 2002).

When DIVCA eliminated administrative funds for public access television in 2006, the new budget could no longer cover salaries, insurance, or any of the outreach programs developed over the years (Zane Blaney, personal communication, July 10, 2016). This prompted a citywide bidding process for the public access contract that was eventually awarded to BAVC. Citing budget concerns, BAVC swiftly closed the Market St. station and moved the operation to 2727 Mariposa in the northeast Mission District. This move prompted protests by many of the access producers who saw BAVC as antithetical to the spirit of public access TV.

Amid tensions between the space-hungry tech-boomers in the 1990s and the limits on office space imposed by the Downtown Plan and Proposition M in the mid 1980s (Macris and Williams, 1999), the old Best Foods warehouses on the corner of Mariposa and Bryant in the North Mission became one of the first epicenters of redevelopment. After a New York investment group outbid the New College of California for the buildings in 1994, the local New Mission News speculated that “(T)his may have been the first shot fired in a Mission District real estate speculation war” (Miller 1993, 1; Robertson 1994, 12).

When BAVC moved into one of the Best Foods buildings in 1997, it joined award-winning public broadcast station, KQED, across the street; MSNBC’s computer-oriented cable channel, ZDTV, two blocks east; and numerous web design firms occupying the area’s overflow of live-work spaces. Together, the neighborhood formed a second-tier “media gulch” nestled right next to South of Market (Evenson 1997, 28; Levy 1998, 1). Since the 1980s, the Inner Mission, Potrero Hill, Dogpatch, and South of Market neighborhoods have been extremely attractive to high-tech start-ups because they housed the highest rates of live-work spaces in the city, some of the highest percentages of residents employed in the tech/creative sector, and have since then become predominantly white (Florida and Johnson 2013; Olsen 2004).

By 2016, BAVC’s neighborhood was overwhelmingly dominated by the production, design, and consumption of boutique cultural goods like Kaimade custom wood furniture, Heath Ceramics, Charles Chocolates, custom printing by Aesthetic Union, and software companies like Ondeego, DriveMotors, and Automatic Labs. In another redeveloped Best Foods Building across the street from BAVC, the 1890 Bryant Street Studios houses production and gallery space for designers, musicians, jewelers, vintners, and other cultural entrepreneurs and craftsman. The Panorama bakery sits right behind BAVC on Florida St. wafting the smells of boutique bread that have replaced the burnt and rancid fumes of vegetable oil waste from the Best Foods factories that engulfed the Northeast Mission forty years ago (Moskowitz 1976, 1) (figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Looking toward BAVC and the surrounding cultural production from the corner of Mariposa and Florida.

The tension between the public-service place-image that the Market St. location represented and the gentrification and cultural entrepreneurialism at Mariposa and Bryant is embodied in the lived experiences of many veteran access producers at the time of the relocation. In stark contrast to access producers at Market St., the residents near BAVC are predominantly white, and have more education and higher incomes (Zuk and Chapple 2015). For veteran producers, the place-image of Mariposa and Bryant represented the continuing disproportionate removal and relocation of people of color in San Francisco and a loss of control over the distribution community TV resources won through years of struggle against cable corporations and the city.

Production Practices Make Homes

Relocation was one part of BAVC’s broader plan to reinvent the “who, how, and what is produced” through public access television (BAVC 2009). However, eliminating the large studio space proved devastating to the producer community. Its replacement collapsed the labor, equipment, time, and space of the traditional studio into a small but technologically agile room. The single operator studio (SOS) eliminated the need to set up lights, to dress a set, and to organize or train volunteers, camera people, audio people, or directors that traditional studio TV production require. BAVC created “ . . . this robotic thing,” remarked access producer Ken Johnson who had been producing public access TV since the 1970s, “ . . . when you do it like that you lose something” (Arnold 2011).

BAVC’s SOS employs a NewTek TriCaster 455 video switcher—it is a box that connects three remote controlled cameras, an audio board, and any number of different media players together in a single system. A connected Mac Mini displays web pages, YouTube videos, or Skype, and the system is equipped with a phone line for live call-in shows. Producers can create and upload their own graphics and video clips to use during their program. There is an elaborate keyboard, or “pro bus,” built into the desk in front of the producer/host enabling them to switch between cameras and other connected feeds while they host their show (figure 3, 4 and 5).

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Figure 3.

Host point of view of BAVC’s SOS with a view of the TriCaster’s interface.

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Figure 4.

BAVC’s SOS from the door to the studio space.

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Figure 5.

Market St. studio. In contrast to BAVC’s SOS, the traditional studio at Market St. required the coordination of volunteers to produce programming.

From an economic perspective, the SOS made perfect sense. It reduced the amount of space, equipment, and labor needed to produce a program. The individualized practice blended well with the DIY mantra of YouTube (“Broadcast Yourself”) and with BAVC’s history cultivating independent, freelance media workers. Former executive director, Ken Ikeda, suggested that BAVC envisioned public access as an “integrated” program working alongside other BAVC programs like SFTech, a high-tech workforce-training program that provided millions of dollars in federal and state funding and partnerships with large legacy granters and tech companies throughout the Bay Area (Chapple 2005). The integrated approach was meant to provide opportunities for access producers to learn basic computing skills, web design, data management, and coding, along with producing local television (Ken Ikeda, personal communication, February 2, 2017). By moving public access in-house, BAVC proposed to transform the traditional public access television “participant” from a community television producer to a more contemporary and organizationally familiar multimedia freelance practitioner.

Yet beyond new technology, there is a broad range of skills and practices embedded in traditional television studio production that are not present in the SOS. Because one producer can run the SOS, it limits the participation of volunteers who may simply be interested in working behind a camera or with an audio board. By limiting the production spaces and the volunteer opportunities, BAVC has been less able to cultivate an active producer community in the same way other incarnations did in the past. Learning how to use a studio camera and to set lights broadens a technical understanding of the production process and is an important part of learning critical media literacy skills (Kellner and Share 2007). However, the more significant skill set is not technical.

R. L. ⁴ produced a program at Market St. called, Newsroom, that relied on a rather large group of access producers and enthusiasts who volunteered to crew, edit, produce, and provide on-air talent. The program’s format fluidly transformed from a talk show, to a public forum, to a newscast by using the large production space and volunteers. Newsroom addressed locally relevant issues like homelessness and renter’s rights with commentary from activists like Mumia Abu-Jamal and Angela Davis; it won a number of cable access TV awards and was nominated for an Emmy (Arnold 2011). But Newsroom was more than just a television show:

. . . the community that made it all worthwhile. Sometimes when we’d be setting up to tape a show, the staff and other producers who were in the building at the time would be very excited because they liked the show so much and other producers would want to hang around just to see how we did it, so that was very satisfying. (R.L., personal communication, September 19, 2016)

R. L. never really considered doing Newsroom at BAVC because they eliminated the large three-camera studio space. “With a show like ours, we needed a real studio and other resources” (R.L., personal communication, September 19, 2016). For R. L., the camaraderie that the large studio production practice afforded was just as important as the actual program. The production of Newsroom became a symbolic practice of community, something more than what he could do himself (Howley 2005).

Fifteen-year veteran, Idell Wilson, also produced a program at Market St. and now uses BAVC’s SOS for her live call-in show, Black Diva Media. She started producing access television because she believed mainstream media was not an amicable place for African American women. “I’ve watched television all my life and African-American women are not liked” (Idell Wilson, personal communication, September 4, 2015). Wilson said she always wanted to do something in television and could not do it without public access TV.

While Wilson prefers the large TV studio to BAVC’s SOS, she is more concerned about having a space to call “home.” At Market St., “[W]e had our own TV station. Love BAVC to death, don’t get me wrong, but we’re two different entities. Public access is public access, it has to have its own home” (Idell Wilson, personal communication, September 4, 2015, emphasis added). Wilson’s use of “home” is a salient metaphor for the tension between Market St. and BAVC. It mashes together the type of home bell hooks (1990, 42) recounts as a site of resistance and humanization, with the intersecting discourses of race, class, and the history of displacement of black communities’ neighborhoods in San Francisco. Historically, the black population of San Francisco has been disproportionately displaced by changes in employment and redevelopment (Fuller 2016). From 1970 to 2010, half the black population of San Francisco left or were forced to leave the city—just over 47,000 people (Bay Area Census 2019). In 2015, reported evictions in the city rose by 54 percent since 2010 alone, targeting mostly the poor, minority, and older residents (San Francisco Anti-displacement Coalition 2015). In this sense, BAVC’s subsumption of public access TV is a story that echoes the histories and geographies of displacement in San Francisco. For Wilson, Market St. was home because, “you can go in there, you can sit, you can have lunch, have a crew . . . it’s different here [at BAVC]. It’s not home” (Idell Wilson, personal communication, September 4, 2015).

In the end, BAVC misunderstood the character and needs of the access community it was inheriting. They were not teenagers looking for internships or underemployed high-tech workers hoping to network. But neither were they grumpy old luddites set in their analog TV production ways. Although economically and technologically efficient, the SOS has been unable to reproduce the type of collective production practices and spaces that sustained the once active SF access TV producer community.

Public Access TV Does Things YouTube Cannot

Although BAVC’s transformation ultimately discouraged the participation of many veteran access producers, William had another reason for wanting to be on public access TV. He started doing public access TV years after BAVC took it over and the mass exodus of veteran producers. Although YouTube’s distribution is global, William knew from experience that there was one community YouTube could not incorporate. The inmates he served time with would ritually watch the California Music Channel (CMC) on KFTL-CD channel 28, one of the Bay Area’s Class A, low-powered television station, and from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m. the channel featured music videos from mainly local artist.

No matter what was on . . . at 4 o’clock it was the CMC and my show is going to be on at 5:30 pm on Fridays now so when the CMC is over and all there is is news on, my show comes on. (William, personal communication, August 21, 2015)

Here, William understands something about public access TV that many do not. The limited access to the Internet and the communal TV viewing practices of those who are incarcerated make public access television a strategic programming tool—one William wants to use to “show some love” to friends he left there (William, personal communication, August 21, 2015). Much like his music (and hip-hop in general) which is laced with references to physical geography—to places that are sacred and those that cannot be trespassed—William experienced public access television as a geographically proximate experience, one that speaks to a far more material understanding of why public access television remains an important civic infrastructure for embodying political extensibility and cultural agency.

Much of this discussion involves place-based circumstances that YouTube and other online video distribution technologies do not intrinsically share. Although the global distribution of YouTube and other online media distribution platforms are far greater than public access TV, only those who “understand the way the system works” and contribute in “ways that make sense to the system” can benefit from it (Burgess and Green 2009, 69). Despite its technical complexity, YouTube’s systemic logic is expanding profits. William’s use of public access TV as a node in his civic infrastructure and his use of it to “show love” to those incarcerated are not part of the logic of YouTube. Unfortunately, it is difficult to get a clear picture on how successful YouTube is as a local storytelling neighborhood as well as an understanding of the cultural effects of our storytelling practices through YouTube that are increasingly displaced from the place-based traditions we inherit as part of a geographic community (Munger and Phillips 2019, 27). The discussion here has demonstrated how local and place-based political struggle is embedded in the organization of community media projects like public access television—that the terms and condition in which public access television operates or is eliminated altogether can reveal the conditions and terms of political agency in the places we live.

If access to technology and distribution is how we continue to define the importance of local media projects like public access TV, then today there is really no reason to keep them at all. However, as Jen Schradie’s (2019) recent work on the relationship between activism and social media reminds us, technologies are not social levelers—social capital in the form of expertise, professionalism, and institutional knowledge play a larger role in our ability to take advantage of social media, like YouTube, than simply access to them does. Public access television’s early coordination of communities, city governments, and global corporations, its relationship to the geographic memory of a city, and the types of sociality inherent in decisions about production practices and spaces all point to rethinking public access TV in terms of a broader place-based communication infrastructure. In this light, future technologies, telecommunications policies, and production practices that propose to constrain or eliminate public access TV organizations must be reinterpreted as policies that further frustrate access to public resources by community residents and as anti-participatory rationalities that attempt to dissolve already established community practices.