Preserving community media outlets like Community Access TV is an important part of our media justice movement.  These centers are unique spaces where community members can come together to build, to connect, to become media literate and create stories on their own terms.  Localism is one fundamental principle of PEG,  tens of thousands of hours of local content are being produced by stations on a weekly basis. 

"If community radio geeks could have a holiday, it would certainly be celebrated with a barnraising."

Community media work has always been hard to fund, and it’s only getting tougher with today’s economy. Meanwhile, universities are looking for creative ways to reach out to the communities that surround them and have the resources to do it. As a media artist/educator living in a university town, it occurred to me that I could design the kind of participatory, social change oriented media projects I’m passionate about in a way that meets the university’s needs. So I put these puzzle pieces together and over the past two years developed the Art of Regional Change (ARC) at the University of California Davis, 15 miles west of Sacramento.

The time is now. If we don't fully own the absolute necessity to change how we've all been working, we won't be working -- and we won't have the illuminating, inspiring, transforming films that we now enjoy. It's your choice, but action is required.

There is the capacity for many more of us to create and prosper from creative media work. This capacity can also close up and vanish along with our audiences. The canaries are now the size of Big Birds and we somehow are able to ignore them (but that is a subject for a different posts).