February 11, 2019

There is an excellent article in the Colorado Sun today on the potential impacts of the FCC's rule-making on franchise fees on local cable channels, and the effects on governmental transparency could be devastating in some communities.

Take a look especially on trends in cable franchise dollars before we talk about the impact of the rule-making.   The Sun does a nice job showing the trends in several communities, and they are mostly down.
If this isn't evidence that we all need to diversify revenue and strengthen mission as fast as possible, I am not sure what is.   We are fighting the rule-making (more on that below) - but regardless of that struggle, we all should look at ways to broaden our base of support. 

The battle with the FCC has moved to Congress and they have regulatory oversight over the Commission.   We are asking all our members to directly contact their members of Congress to ask them to tell the FCC they disapprove of the agency's actions in the rule-making.

If you want to share that message with your viewers and volunteers, we've created a tool you can use to contact members of Congress in your community.

Visit this link to send that message.   Please share on your social networks and with your members to encourage Congress to act!

One of the outcomes of the ACM Western States Region Conference in Long Beach this past month has been a discussion of content sharing for news and public affairs production between ACM members.  About 30 people at the conference said they were interested in being part of an experiment to increase content sharing to deepen, enhance and inspire local stories on each of our channels.

We are setting up an e-mail list on the ACM Listserv to support that group.  If you want to join the group to share content, please email me at mwassenaar@allcommunitymedia.org and I'll send you instructions to sign up.

We're counting down the days to deadline for the Hometown Media Awards. Apply for our national media competition by March 1 online and be sure to promote the award competition to producers at your facilities!

Good luck!

I hope to see folks at our ACM/ACM NE roadshow next week.  You can still sign up on our website.

- Mike Wassenaar, ACM CEO & President