GILROY
– After its first year of broadcasting, local public access
television continues to add new shows and viewers could be seeing
much more local programming in the year to come.
GILROY – After its first year of broadcasting, local public access television continues to add new shows and viewers could be seeing much more local programming in the year to come.
Suzanne St. John-Crane, executive director of Community Media Access Partnership, or CMAP, which serves Gilroy, Hollister and San Juan Bautista with four public channels, praised the center’s expansion over the course of 2003.
“It’s certainly come a long way in a year,” she said. “With our whopping one-person staff in the programming office, we’ve been able to fill 24 hours of programming, 7 days a week.”
This is the “year of educational programming” for CMAP, so the center will focus on filling Channel 19 with local education broadcasts, she said. The channel currently airs educational content, mostly from The Annenberg Foundation and Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
But the channel also airs 17 locally produced shows, such as a program called “HIV: Be in the Know.”
St. John-Crane wants to include more tapes of school performances and has met with officials from Gilroy High School and Anzar High School in San Juan Bautista to discuss airing sports events.
Between all four channels, which include Channel 17 Hollister, Channel 18 Gav-TV and Channel 20 public access, CMAP airs between 13 and 15 meetings a month, up from 2 per month at its launch.
Gav-TV is quickly filling up with local content, including “The Gavilan Hour”, an art program and a show hosted by the campus nurse.
“Being in community television for 13 years, a lot of centers wait for videos to walk in the door, and I’m glad we’ve taken, and Gav-TV has taken, the approach of, ‘We’re going to go out and get them,’ ” St. John-Crane said.
Being associated with Gavilan College has helped give CMAP “a boost” during its fledgling year, she said.
“In particular, for a center to be located on a campus and for a channel to be dedicated to a college, is very unique,” she said.
