 achievement of our technical staff. In this episode we're going to review some of the changes that community media in Davis had to make because of the COVID-19 shelter in place and to tell us a lot more about these changes is I have here with me who is the programming and training manager at Davis Media Access. Thank you so much Alex for being here. Tell us. Thank you for having me. Very nice to see you remotely. We generally see each other face to face but this is great and I see that you are giving the good example wearing your mask. Yeah. Changes that you had to make really quickly to adjust to the pandemic and the shelter in place. Can you tell us about it? It was quite a feat actually. Sure. Well there were a couple things. So obviously before the pandemic started and the shelter in place orders came down we used to have a lot of volunteers. It would come down to the station to make media. They would make television shows. They would edit their videos using our edit suites. We had an entire slate of DJs that came in that would do their radio shows on our low power FM radio station KBRT 95.7 which serves the community of Davis here in California and we were also gearing up for our summer workshops in which the kids come in and they learn hands-on how to use the equipment to make television and learn all about the process of what it means to make media and edit. Further it was also getting ready for a huge event for the big day of giving with dozens of other non-profits which was a big in-person event. So all of a sudden we had to close the building essentially and figure out how are we going to do all of these things and get word out about the various community announcements. So the yellow counties, the restrictions and shelter in place we need to get that information out because we have a radio station and we manage two television channels here. So we were a source of information in addition to of course the internet. So I think like everyone we struggle to get our hands on masks, sanitation things, wipes, all kinds of things that were going to be needed to allow anyone into the building at all and then on top of that even though a lot of research had been done and we were actually in the process of remodeling our facilities to accommodate more remote productions and things like that that process had was still in the planning stages so we had to push everything forward from acquiring iPads that people could check out with things on them and remotely managing them laptops and decide what to do about the children's workshops during the summer which unfortunately we had to cancel because there's there's just no way to have kids together hands on you know and not be transferring germs around and things like that. So it was quite a challenge. It's a huge adjustment and you know a lot of technology exists out there for the streaming and the meetings and the zoom and everybody had to get used to like okay now everyone's on camera and the webcams are not really great quality we're used to using HD studio equipment here but nobody has that at home people's home internet connections aren't that great so even what we really started with was getting the radio people back on the air because music you know people have their collections of music at home and they can learn to put together a radio show from home but it's still for people to come in and spin vinyl or put a CD in and hit a button and talk on a microphone that's one kind of knowledge they need but then to suddenly have to learn how to edit things digitally when maybe they you know that's not part of their skill set. That's very difficult so we had a lot of sort of zoom online technical sessions to advise people like this is how you can put together your show as a sort of a pre-recorded thing and then submit it online and then we get it into our system and our automation system plays it back so and then gradually we've been reintroducing DJs to come in and we had to redo the entire programming schedule to accommodate spacing between everyone so that no one was overlapping that there was time to sanitize and clean everything in between everyone and we've been doing that in phases and now we have DJs back on the air broadcasting live and and this is something they think oh well people can listen but there's a connection that people have with the radio and hearing other people's voices live and not just pre-recorded material and now on the television side we're facing that same challenge but it's even greater because video is more complicated than radio and you know people have to edit their productions they have to learn how to shoot their productions and while they were cleaning that with video cameras now it's with phones so yes it's and a lot of people don't feel comfortable with all these new technology and one program also that is a great service to the community is the lending free of charge of all your equipment and and that was something that was difficult too because so we check out video recording equipment and uh at first it was like well we can just wipe everything down and it'll come in and out but that's just way too complicated these are not like just flat surfaces that you wipe down I mean a video camera's got zillions of little buttons and all these other things and and just the fact that you'd have to like what take the equipment out to the curb to check it in and out so right now we're not checking any equipment in and out other than things like iPads and flat things that are very easy to sanitize in between um yes but we're working towards uh offering more equipment for checkout and services that will allow people to edit and so forth using various online platforms so we've expanded the number of online services we use before of course we add everything here but we don't have the infrastructure of course to support uh you know lots of online youtube streaming and stuff so we have a youtube channel um that we put our programming on but getting things on to the cable channel so people are now submitting files digitally I do have a television show that are being produced every month that are people are sending me through uh you know Dropbox Google Drive all these different methods people are mailing uh USP drives into me and and we get that that programming out and then of course there was the whole learning curve about online meetings how do you record these uh sessions and presentations and and get them and turn it around quickly enough to get it on the channel while it's still relevant because of course our community has a lot of announcements you know yes well it's um it it makes my head spin really uh about what all the things that you've been doing but I wanted to ask you Alex about the remodeling and the expansion that you mentioned just a few minutes ago is that still going on or will so are you thinking of it again because yeah it sounds it sounds wonderful what you your community media is planning to to become really yeah well one of the things that we were in the process of was this remodel uh to rearrange the building we we do own the building that we're in uh here on Fifth Street in Davis and as part of sort of the long-term planning we needed to reorganize the interior to make more efficient use of the space move the radio booth over because we have a lot of bands that come in to perform live and uh and we wanted to expand the ability to handle that right now the radio booth is very small um so you can imagine if you have 12 cellos you can't fit them all into the the radio booth but of course with any construction project it takes a long time there's the design there's permitting uh there's getting bids from contractors and so that process is actually still slowly been moving forward and it's it's still on track because we were at the stage to hear that yes the plans were a big plan was what about funding Alex well the the the biggest challenge we face is really sort of more of a larger structural issue and that people are no longer subscribing to cable television and fees from those subscriptions are make up a big part of the budget for all the community media centers around the country that is so interesting i didn't realize that yeah yeah they have to pay for the public uh rights of way to run their cables because it's cable television so they're actually fiber optic cables these days it used to be copper but now it's fiber optic and so they pay into a state fund to use those rights away and uh and we receive part of that money through the city of davis and various contracts and of course we also fundraise and as i said uh in the early stages of covet everyone was very generous uh surprisingly so uh around the country i think the big day of giving even though the in-person events got canceled i think they set some records for the online giving but now as we see this dragging on longer and longer um people have other things that they need to take care of like feeding their families and a lot of people are out of work and so uh there are some like our fundraising is you know there's a shortfall and we're gonna have to figure out how we cope with something like that so we're not in any kind of a dire dire straits of closing you know we're we're moving forward and trying to offer as many services as we can um alex i wanted to tell you can you i wanted to get a little bit of a human a human angle from you so can you describe uh what you do i mean apart from telling me uh knowing you know so much about uh uh davis media what do you do generally and what do you enjoy doing the most there there's a couple things is one uh there's always new things to work on here so everything is a very much project based so volunteers come in all the time asking for help and sometimes that help is with i want to create a tv show i want to create a talk show but sometimes it's like i want to make a short movie i want to make a short film and so there's always a lot of creative variety that people ask me to participate in you know what's your advice on this and that and i really enjoy that aspect of the work i love uh even though i'm not really involved on the radio side of things i love the djs that come in and every one of them has a passion about a certain kind of genre and music um that they're sharing with the community and with the world in fact because we stream online and many of our djs have shows that are listened to all around the world because they're unique um we have hawaiian music jug band music all kinds of stuff here that i probably would never have gotten a chance to really listen to or pay attention to if i hadn't met the people that are behind them um so the human interaction is really important and then of course the other thing that i enjoy is teaching the kids uh because uh having grown up at a time where uh people just always think of the top jobs like director writer producer or do be a lawyer make money or be a banker and people are not necessarily encouraged to do creative things you know they always say oh the starving artist but there's so many opportunities and different career paths out there that um kids and teens can aspire to and make a living at and i really think sometimes that society discourages you know kids way too much um and they should be encouraging these creative endeavors because that's what enriches everybody's life so it's great to work with kids and show them that hey you can do this even though it's technical or you know or somebody's telling you can't know you can actually learn how to do this and that you don't have to necessarily be the director or the producer or you know there's a few top jobs but there's there's a pyramid you know they're in iceberg there's so much underneath it that you can control and alex sir one while i was listening to you i thought about the interns that you have um that uh you uh tutor and generally uh high school students or very young people who want to learn about uh televisions and uh tv editing and audio editing tell us about some of these interns i mean there's a whole spectrum of people whenever we have workshops uh summer workshops for little kids is what you know that was uh a lot and the reason behind that was that um they don't really have any other opportunities uh the younger kids to get involved with media and that way television and stuff and then we have the high school internships and that's really important because you know by the time they're in high school they're thinking what am i going to go to college what am i going to do for a living um how can i express myself personally and be different from everyone else of course teen identity is you know a huge component of growing up so we have uh the opportunity where kids can be on camera or behind camera they can learn to edit and what happens is that they participate in covering a lot of the high school productions and community productions around town and they work with my co-worker Jeff who's the uh production manager and they go out into the community and they learn how to cover these events and some of them have to learn new skills because they have to learn how to talk to people and how to overcome some of their shyness maybe about appearing on camera they have to learn how to interview people and then of course you know there's all the technical skills that go with it and the really gratifying thing is that a lot of them decide hey i really like this and then they choose a college where they can further expand their skills and as i always point out you know you can take media skills to other fields and industries uh communication the ability to communicate is valued by everyone so yeah elix um we're just about out of time we have just a few minutes and what i wanted to ask you is perhaps a question that you cannot answer but uh maybe you can uh namely what are the lessons that you have learned for the future uh from having to adjust and from having to experience COVID-19 in terms of communications obviously remote communication zoom uh programming and other things but personally what what have you learned let's say on how because it's true that our future is uh going to be different well as someone who's followed technology all along from the beginning i've always uh been interested in it um i find that the consolidation that occurred and has occurred in the media industry you know we used to have thousands of independent radio stations and dozens of uh if not hundreds of independent television stations and maybe they were affiliated with a network but they were independent and it's really dwindled and everyone assumes that oh well you get your information online but as we've seen uh there's not a lot of editorial going on and so there's just tons of bad information and it's really easy for even adults not to mention kids who don't know how to discriminate between uh what's fake news or real news um and that has a i think a major effect on society is where do you get good reliable uh true information and and that goes right down to the community level so where can people in their town um if the newspapers are closing up and everything's closing where can they find out things that are relevant to their lives in their town and to place the burden on the consumer i call i'd say call them the consumer that they have to go out and filter all that themselves and take the time for that who's got the time um that was the function the editorial served and all these uh you know uh uh larger organizations in the past media organizations i want to say for profit as well um yes very interesting observations alex very very interesting observations and alex i'm sorry but we're really out of time so thank you very much for coming uh and explaining all of this to us and uh thank you to all of you for watching um from all of us here at community media thank you and see you next time