By Greg Maynard
Massachusetts is home to more than 250 local cable access stations. Bay Staters know them as the folks who videotape and broadcast local government meetings, high school sports and community public affairs shows.
But trouble is looming. For the better part of a decade, the revenue these stations depend on has been declining, and less money has led to layoffs and reduced hours for staff, mergers between operations at neighboring communities, and some closing altogether. Joe Lynch, who has been the board chair of the Somerville Media Center for 15 years, tells me: “Every we week we lose somebody.”
What is behind the decline in revenue? Cord-cutting. The drop in subscription revenue from set-top cable boxes means revenue for the stations is shrinking too. Prospects for the cable industry are bleak. As a recent analysis from the trade publication PWC says about the future of for-profit cable channels, “Operations to support the linear business will be significantly downsized, with no new investments made.” (Local access stations are also referred to as community media centers, or CMCs, and as PEG stations, for public, governmental and educational.)
The downturn in cable’s fortunes is dangerous for Massachusetts, where the threat to CMCs comes amid a worsening local news crisis. Over the past 20 years, many of the state’s small daily and weekly newspapers have either closed or shrunk significantly. Although some of them have been replaced by nonprofit startups, mostly in affluent suburbs, local cable is now the only source of information in many places about community life, including video of government meetings, the results of town elections and coverage of school sports. Unless action is taken, Massachusetts risks losing this important resource.
From his perch in Somerville, Lynch has been watching, and thinking about, what declining revenue means. As Netflix and the other internet-only streamers grew in popularity in the 2010s, Lynch says it became increasingly apparent to him and his board that major changes were coming. For Lynch, the question was, “How do I survive in that world?”
Tapping the streamers
One possible answer is legislation on Beacon Hill designed to collect revenue from internet-only video operations. The bill, first proposed in 2019, has become more important than ever. That’s because local access took on massively increased roles and responsibilities during the COVID pandemic. The CMCs’ familiarity with live-streaming, video technology and general tech know-how helped local governments and communities stay informed and connected when the world suddenly shifted to Zoom calls.
“It is an ironic problem to have this technology be embraced while funding dries up,” says state Rep. Joan Meschino, who has a long history with cable access stations. A fifth-term Democrat from Hull who represents a suburban district south of Boston, she described reading the local newspaper when she was a Hull select board member and “you’d see the opinion piece driving traffic to watch the meeting on television.”
So when Meschino spoke to community media leaders about their legislation to modernize funding, she jumped at the opportunity to champion it, telling me, “I understood immediately the core was transparency and accountability.”
The legislation would fix a loophole in the existing law. While services like Netflix, Hulu and YouTube TV look increasingly like a cable package, they aren’t subject to the provisions of the law that require cable access fees to be collected. The bill would change that.
“Conversations had been happening for a long time,” says David Gauthier, the president of Massachusetts Community Media, or MassAccess, the statewide association of CMCs. The bill, he explains, grew out of brainstorming over how to find new sources of revenue for local access. Ultimately, updating the fee paid by cable companies was determined to be the best course of action.
Gauthier and Meschino are both hopeful about the bill’s prospects. In the 2023-24 term it was voted out of committee for the first time, a major milestone. Last term it was again voted out of committee.
Meschino says that more than 7,000 bills are filed every term on Beacon Hill, so they are “competing for attention and time.” With hundreds of CMCs across Massachusetts this legislation stands out in that crowd.
“It caught the attention of a lot of my colleagues,” Meschino said, and that has led to “lots of people pick up the phone.”
Exactly how many CMCs are there in Massachusetts? Gauthier told me that the commonwealth is home to more than any other state: more than 250 stations, or 13% of all such operations in the country. To put those numbers is perspective, just three states have more than 100 cable access stations. The other two are California, which has 40 million people, and Texas, which as 31 million people. Compare those population figures to Massachusetts, with just 7 million people, and the density of cable access stations becomes clear.
According to Gauthier, the reason Massachusetts has so many stations is “local franchising.” This model was only used by a few states, Gauthier said, but it was ideal for Massachusetts’ independent-minded 351 cities and towns. That is because under this model the cable companies were not allowed to strike just one statewide deal to pay the fee to support cable access. Instead, Gauthier says that “every town has to negotiate separately,” which allowed cities and towns to “tailor to what they needed.”
While the governance structure differs from community to community, cable access stations fall into two broad categories: nonprofits and government agencies. Joe Lynch’s Somerville Media Center is a good example of a nonprofit: SMC is an independent outlet that gets a share of Somerville’s cable access fee and works closely with the city. Gauthier offers an example of the government agency route. Being president of MassAccess is a volunteer role, and his day job is as an employee of the town of Winchester, where he serves as the executive director of the town-owned WinCAM, Winchester Community Access and Media.
A pandemic lifeline
When the COVID pandemic began in early 2020, CMCs across the state were part of the response. All of the people interviewed for this piece talked about how the role and profile of local access grew during the pandemic. The best example was offered by Elizabeth Dionne, a Belmont resident and select board member, who said Belmont Media Center (BMC) kept their town government operating during the pandemic.
For example, Belmont’s town meeting comprises 280 elected members, making it the largest such body in the state. Because of the pandemic, town meeting in 2020, ’21 and ’22 was held remotely, a feat carried out by a partnership between Belmont Media Center and the town’s technology staff.
Even after COVID-era health restrictions ended, there was continued demand for a hybrid option, and, at the November 2023 town meeting, 25% of the representatives attended remotely, 30% on the second night and 34% on the third night. Under this hybrid option, all town meeting representatives vote by phone, even if they’re in the meeting room.
“We could do not do this without Belmont Media Center,” Dionne says.
Dionne testified in support of the bill, saying of BMC, “I had very little contact before the pandemic,” but now “they are an integral part of the government structure.”
While COVID-era efforts to keep local government functioning was certainly a part of why state legislators support the bill, Glenn Williams, the general manager of Boston’s cable access stations, points to a different reason: local access is usually the first chance for elected officials, and would-be elected officials, to be on television.
In addition to videotaped government meetings, where both those who testify and elected officials are captured on camera, many local access outlets also host local public affairs shows. Williams has an entire news department plus a number of pre-taped shows that feature interviews and a live interview program on Thursday evenings. That makes his studios the first place that many of Boston’s local elected officials ever answer questions on camera.
Williams says those relationships are what makes him so confident about the long-term prospect of the bill and the future of CMCs: “When you ask elected officials, ‘Where did you start your political career?’ the answer usually is ‘At the local PEG access station.’”
But if Beacon Hill fails to act, it isn’t clear how much longer that will be true.
Greg Maynard is the founder and executive director of the nonprofit Boston Policy Institute and a student in the Master of Public Administration program at Northeastern University.
