 Portland has a rich and vibrant art scene, and CTN has a new series called Spotlight, which focuses on those organizations that enrich our town's cultural community. Arthur Nichols talked with series producer Tom Handell about the new edition of Spotlight. Hi, Tom. Hi, Arthur. Good. Thank you for having me here. Sure. So we're here to talk about the Spotlight show. Yes. Yes. And what is the Spotlight show? Spotlight show is a television series that we started with a grant from the Quimby Foundation to highlight what's going on in the local arts. OK, and it's a half hour show? Yeah, it's a half hour show. It's a magazine format. This is the second show in the series, the first show we did in the fall. And it spotlighted the Portland Ballet, the Portland Conservatory of Music, the Portland Museum of Art, specifically their Winslow Homer engraving exhibit, and Portland Playback Theater. And it was only spotlighting four segments on those particular organizations. The second show that's coming up this month, it's going to be airing this month, highlights two organizations, the Maine Academy of Modern Music and Peregrine Press, and all the artists there who are printers. But what it also does is give a rundown of arts activities that are happening in coming up this summer. So we've kind of reformatted. And we're kind of evolving with what we think is the need for more publicity about the arts in the greater Portland area. So the first show had a lot of content around big institutions, big well-established cultural institutions here in Portland. And it's changing a little bit. The focus is changing somewhat. Yes, we sat down with a few of the larger arts organizations like the Portland Ballet and the Portland Museum of Art to assess what their needs were. But as we got into the project, we could see that there was a lot of smaller arts organizations that really make up a lot of the art culture, the rich art culture in this area that don't get as much airtime and publicity as some of the other larger organizations. So what we want to do is try to incorporate as many organizations we can in a show by talking about what's coming up. And we are looking forward to a longer, bigger series next year. We've been invited, again, to apply for the Quimby Foundation grant. And we're also going to be applying for other foundation money to make it a series that really showcases several different organizations, tells what's going on in those areas, gives behind scenes does a lot more for local arts. So over the years, CTN has put focus on the arts time again. And this is a new project. How is it different from earlier shows? Well, this show specifically gets at a lot of different arts organizations. And we're dividing up into four areas where we really want to have some concentration on dance, some concentration on music, some concentration on the visual arts, and some concentration on theater. And we also want to supplement it with our website and have a page or a section of pages in our website, the CTN website that gives the different segments of the show and also goes over some of the events, links to other, to the arts organizations that we're talking about, and really goes more in depth on the arts scene in the greater Portland area. OK, great. So that's interesting that the focus of our TV station is not the focus, but there's a lot of emphasis on web content. Oh, yeah. We see that a lot of people are using the website. And our site is becoming rich with a lot of short videos and giving information about the local area. And we think we could be really helpful to arts organizations in this area by giving them some transparency on our station, being able to see who's involved in the arts, not just what's going on, but who are the artists what are they doing and getting people more interested in the process that goes on behind being an artist. So they could watch it on Channel 5 of the cable system here in Portland and in Cumberland County or watch it on our website. Yeah, and right now we actually have started sort of the idea or the concept of the page that we're talking about. If you go to ctn5.org and go up to the tab that says Community, you'll see topic highlights. And if you click on that, you'll see a series of different topic highlights. And one of them will be spotlight. So you could watch any of the segments in the spotlight that we've already produced. And that page will get bigger and longer and more filled with different kinds of content as we go along. So as far as the TV listing, do you have a time slot for it? Yes, we will have a time slot for it. It hasn't been set yet, but we hope to next year when we expand the series to have the same exact time slot every single week. Great, terrific. Well, thanks very much. Sounds like a great project. Yeah, I look forward to finding out more about the local arts.