About This Interview Blog



In the intricately networked web world, the role of a brick & mortar, public access media center is a work-in-progress. What are the key ingredients to be a relevant and sustainable community resource?

This is a series of podcasts sharing best practices and advice for community media center advocates, managers, staff, producers, and volunteers. It features interviews with leaders in the field who share their expertise and perspectives.

You can visit the page for each person and either listen to the full interview or to particular clips.

This series was made possible by support from:

The Surdna Foundation

Media and Democracy Fund

Media Justice Fund


For related content about community media go to:
The Alliance for Community Media


Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Tony Shawcross


Tony Shawcross is the Executive Director of the PEG facility in Denver, CO. He developed and launched the visionary - and provocative model for community media that has evolved into the Open Media Foundation. The Open Media Foundation replaced the previous PEG nonprofit and receives a much smaller funding package from the city. Before founding Deproduction and Denver Open Media, Tony worked with Little Voice Productions, the Colorado State House of Representatives, the Pan African Arts Society and FreeSpeech TV, among others.

In this interview, Tony talks about innovative ways to empower access users and eliminate some of the gates that are still in place with our traditional operations. He describes the work OMF (previously Denver Open Media) has done to build a Drupal web site in collaboration with other media centers that feature modules unique to PEG operations. The project is funded by the Knight Foundation. In Denver it has allowed the PEG operation to do more with less city funding.

Listen to the interview here. The interview log is listed just below.
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Share with others by mailing this link:
http://www.archive.org/details/TonyShawcrossInterview

Interview Log
:0:00 - 4:45
Keep reducing the "gatekeeper" role on citizen generated media. Look at the "Wikipedia" model.

4:45 - 9:55
Overview of seven drupal modules that automate PEG operations including scheduling; also voting on shows for additional cable showings

9:55 - 11:55
Video on Demand (VOD) and an example of one series and how to search

11:55 - 14:30
Membership; Beta test of drupal functions and eventual online program exchange.

14:30 - 18:00
Internet literacy and "digital divide"

18:00 - 29:00
Details on the Knight grant to create drupal web site template for any PEG media center; more about the specific modules.

29:00 - 34:15
The advantages of having come out of a computer technology center (CTC) background; facing the challenges of PEG operations with decreased funding.

34:15 - 35:15
Advantages of open source; competitive advantages of nonprofit community media.

35:15 - 36:20
When will we know we succeeded?
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