New York
According to Engelman, public access in New York was conceived in 1968 by Fred Friendly, a television advisor to the Ford Foundation and chairman of Mayor John Lindsay's Advisory Task Force on CATV and Telecommunications. He wrote a report recommending that cable companies set aside two channels the public could lease for a minor fee (ibid, 32).
Controversy peaked on July 23, 1970, just prior to the signing of a cable television franchise agreement, when actor Ossie Davis and Cliff Frazer, director of a community film workshop, criticized the agreement for not providing "sufficient participation by minorities." Others opposed the fee requirements, which were eventually dropped (ibid, 32-33).
Two cable companies signed the franchise agreement with the New York City government in July 1970 to supply cable service to Manhattan (Gillespie, 36; Engelman, 32). The agreement required that Sterling Information Services and the Teleprompter Corporation make four channels available for lease - two by the city government and two by the public. Public access programming began a year later in July 1971, with a potential audience of 80,000 - the number of cable subscribers in Manhattan (Engelman, 33). Eventually, the two public access channels were cablecasting about 200 hours of programming each week (ibid, 34).
1971 was also the year WGBH foundation in Boston began a nightly half-hour show called "Catch 44," on which they allowed any local group "to air its views free-of-charge." WGBH also encouraged participants to experiment with half-inch video equipment to produce segments for the show (ibid, 3-4).
Back in Manhattan, once the access channels were operational, programming was needed. Theadora Sklover established Open Channel to produce programs and to promote access use by others in the community. The Markle Foundation and the Stern Fund awarded grants to Open Channel to provide production facilities and to hire personnel who would help groups produce shows.
Sklover had previously lobbied the New York State Legislature to pass a bill that would create public access. "At the time she established Open Channel," she wrote that if public access "fails, if these channels are not used, or if they carry programming that no one cares about..., or if they are utilized for the entertainment of the esoteric few, then we probably will have provided the necessary fuel for those who are fighting against the opening of this medium."
Once she began facing the reality of promoting access channel use, Sklover said, "our biggest problem lies in informing the public that they can go on television.... People are used to thinking of TV as something someone else does, not as something they do." (ibid, 33).
Sklover identified constituencies, organized local cable committees and trained citizens to use video equipment. She brought in over 200 professional TV and film producers, directors, writers, camera operators, audio specialists, and lighting technicians to volunteer their expertise for public access programming. Open Channel arranged air-time for groups "ranging from the Boy Scouts to black militants, from the Museum of Modern Art to church choirs." In 1972, Sklover articulated the free speech mission of community television: "We're not here to editorialize or make decisions about what people can say over the air" (Newsweek, Engelman, 34).
Open Channel was one of five groups that facilitated public access productions (Engelman, 34). The others were John Reilley's Global Village, which became a leading supplier of documentaries; Raindance Corporation; People's Video Theater, which "captured untraditional forms of reportage and agitprop on videotape;" and the Alternative Media Center, which received $10,000 in equipment from Sterling Information Services for access producers (Engelman, 34; Gillespie, 37).
George Stoney, an American who had been "guest executive producer of Challenge for Change from 1968 to 1970," co-founded the Alternative Media Center (AMC) at New York University in 1971 with Red Burns, a Canadian filmmaker trained at the NFB. The purpose of AMC was to ensure "that new communication technologies serve the public interest" (Engelman, 18). George Stoney's experience at Challenge for Change may have been instrumental in AMC's use of video to resolve citizens' conflicts with local authorities. AMC's documentary of a neighborhood's need for a street light, for example, bears a resemblance to the Fogo Island fish-processing plant campaign mentioned earlier (ibid, 9-10; 34).
Many consider Stoney, who is today the Paulette Goddard Professor in Film at New York University (New York University), the "father of public access television in the United States" (Engelman, 19). AMC was not only instrumental in production, but also in policy-making. AMC founded the National Federation of Local Cable Programmers, which remains an important public access advocacy organization; it's "interns helped establish access centers throughout the nation;" and Stoney and Red Burns worked with FCC commissioner Nicholas Johnson to create the FCC cable access requirements in 1972 (ibid, 19).