A three-part blog series on public, government and educational access. Each post is a way into the collection, built around videos worth watching.
Status, 2026-09-25 (later the same day): decided and written. The three posts are drafted in
peg-series-1-public,peg-series-2-educationalandpeg-series-3-government, in P-E-G order, so Learning Out Loud is now Part 2 and The Town Explains Itself is Part 3. The sample openings below are superseded by the posts. One was wrong: Walt’s Polka Party is not a TV episode. The item is an episode of BCTV’s Polish American Connection in which Walt Kazmierczak talks about his radio show of that name. The record and captions caught the error, which is what rule 7 is for.
“258 Years of Tuesday Night” is the overview: how big the Community Media Archive is, how it came to exist, what it takes to keep. This series is the next step for a reader who finished that post and wants to start watching. Each post opens one of the three channels that the cable franchise bargain created. Public, government and educational (PEG) access are three different jobs done by three different kinds of people, and each deserves its own way in.
Each post is meant to work as a portal. A reader should come away with a dozen or so specific videos they want to watch, a sense of the range on that kind of channel, and one link that opens all of it.
The overview post finds its energy in what’s surprising about community media. That works for an overview, but repeated across three posts it would make the people in the archive into curiosities. These posts take the view of the people who made the programs and the neighbors they made them for.
Phrases from the current draft that this series will not echo, and why:
| current draft | why it’s retired here |
|---|---|
| “The other three-quarters is where it gets strange.” | Frames the programming as odd rather than chosen. |
| “what Americans do when handed a camera and no editor” | Community producers did have editors: themselves, and the station staff who trained them. |
| “Individually these are a slow Thursday at the local channel” | Plays down the very work we’re asking readers to watch. |
| “everyone in it is a little too pleased with themselves” | The joke is at the subjects’ expense. |
| “a question I am confident nobody else on the planet was investigating” | Same. Someone in Somerville cared who Elmer Bumpus was, and that is the point. |
| “rooms with bad acoustics” / “no particular expectation of an audience” | The audience was the town, and it was a real audience. |
The rules the three posts will follow:
The idea. Public access is the channel anyone could use. Its programs were not commissioned. Each one exists because someone walked into a station, learned the equipment and made the show they wished their town had. The post shows the range of that: craft, music, faith, language, memory and play. It treats every one of those producers as someone serving an audience they knew personally.
Sample opening, to show the tone:
The archive holds a July 2018 episode of Walt’s Polka Party 27 min from Berks Community Television in Reading, Pennsylvania. From that spring it also holds Somali Media Live 59 min, made in Minneapolis, and from that year a Vermont songwriter’s show that gave a half hour to Vietnamese music and culture 31 min. Nobody assigned any of these shows. Someone in each of those towns decided their neighbors should see this, then learned how to make it happen.
Sections and examples:
Hands at work. Craft and cooking taught by people who do it. - Hawaiian Wood Carving: Episode 7; Ho’ike Kauai Community Television, HI 34 min - North By Northeast (Piney Creek Pottery); Gillette Public Access, WY 12 min - Fearless Cooking with Alexis: Chile Relleno Bites; FC Public Media, CO 24 min - Beekeeping 101 at the Cary Library; LexMedia, MA 55 min
The music of a place. Polka, bluegrass, handbells and gospel, recorded where they’re played. - Academy of the Air: “Why the Midwest Loves to Polka”; Waupaca, WI 1 hr 20 min - Buffalo Mountain Bluegrass; Berks Community Television, PA 53 min - Northern Bronze Handbell Choir at the Round Church; Mount Mansfield Community TV, VT 1 hr 13 min - Full Gospel Deliverance #375; Access Vision, MI 1 hr 18 min - Depth, not breadth: Attleboro’s Accordion Cool 29 min ran for 330 episodes.
Many languages, one channel. Communities making programs in their own voices. - Cape Verdean Festival, Part 2; The Brockton Channels, MA 1 hr 26 min - Wampanoag Dance; Wareham Community Television, MA 1 hr 20 min - Griot’s Storytelling Circle: Family Tree; Laurel TV, MD 22 min - (plus Somali Media Live and the Vietnamese music show from the opening)
Keeping memory. Oral history recorded by neighbors, and programs that are history themselves now. - Roaring Fork Veterans History Project: Jack de Pagter, Dutch Underground (1940–45); Grassroots Community Network, CO 1 hr 26 min - Growing Up Dutch with Lee S. Heffner, a Pennsylvania German oral history; Berks Community Television 54 min - Archival anchors: Magic with Morty, shows 1–3 (1985); Winchester, MA 1 hr 15 min; Basic Baking: Cheesecake (1988); Norfolk Community Television, MA 33 min
Play. Sport, stage and celebration. - Quad City Rollers vs. Naptown Rollergirls; PATV, Iowa City 51 min - Cafe Improv, April 2016; Princeton Community TV, NJ 1 hr 26 min - 2017 McMinnville UFO Festival Parade; McMinnville Community Media, OR 39 min - 7th Annual Kauai Pride Parade; Ho’ike, HI 50 min - Yellow Springs Senior Center Flash Mob; Community Access Yellow Springs, OH 6 min
Alternates: Tammy’s Window on Calaveras #48 (a long-running host show, CA 30 min); All Things LGBTQ: Scott Bane (ORCA Media, VT 55 min); Inner Ear Poetry Slam (CA 29 min); Shawsheen School Puppet Show, 1997 (Wilmington, MA 46 min); Colorado College Bluegrass Showcase (CO 1 hr 26 min); Toni G: Psychic Medium #515 (WSCS Sheboygan, WI 59 min).
Keep going: every public access station in the archive (528 collections) · Berks Community Television · Ho’ike Kauai Community Television
The numbers, and what they count: channels tagged Public Access Television hold 997,483 items and at least 719,911 hours, about 82 years of playback. That’s a floor, because not every item reports a runtime. The figures come from the full archive.db population as of the 2026-09-02 sync, not from a sample.
The idea. A government channel is how a town shows its work: the decisions, and also the people who carry them out and the occasions that make a place a community. Meetings are the backbone of this post, presented as democracy on the record, not as something to get past. Around them the post shows the rest of what these channels make: water plants explained to kids, new citizens sworn in, hurricane preparation, tree lightings, library poetry and adoptable pets.
Sample opening:
In 2017, the town of Dover, Massachusetts met to govern itself the New England way: every registered voter who showed up in the room had a vote. Dover Sherborn Cable recorded the whole Annual Town Meeting 4 hr 44 min. Nearly five hours of neighbors arguing over budgets and bylaws is not light viewing. It is also exactly what a town meeting is, kept whole so that anyone who couldn’t be there can see how the decision was made.
Sections and examples:
Democracy on the record. - 2017 Dover Annual Town Meeting 4 hr 44 min and 2014 Northfield Annual Town Meeting; Bernardston-Northfield Community TV, MA 1 hr 47 min - League of Women Voters School Referendum Forum; City of Stevens Point, WI 1 hr 16 min - Archival anchor: Sacramento Metropolitan Cable Television Commission, February 4, 1988 1 hr 6 min. This is the public body that oversaw cable, and so the access channels, recording its own meeting 38 years ago.
How the town actually works. - Science Isn’t Scary: Waste Water Treatment; Connersville TV3, IN 7 min - Bellingham Water School: a virtual treatment-plant tour; City of Bellingham, WA 8 min - A Day in the Life of a Firefighter; City of DeKalb, IL 1 hr 16 min - Behind the Badge: K9s; Scottsdale Video Network, AZ 28 min - 3-Week Time-Lapse of the Hampton Archaeological Dig; City of Hampton, VA 7 min - Archival anchor: Metro Cable Throwback: A Tour of the Sacramento County Jail, 1989 7 min
When it matters most. - A hurricane is looming, so the City activates. But what exactly does that mean?; Port St. Lucie, FL 33 min - Fort Collins Flood of 1997; City of Fort Collins, CO 10 min - 2024 Homeless Persons’ Memorial Vigil; Clackamas County, OR 46 min
Welcoming, marking, celebrating. - Howard County Welcomes 50 New Citizens; MD 48 min - Black History Month Celebration at St. Paul City Hall; MN 51 min - Ho-Chunk Nation: The Relevance of Oral History in the 21st Century; FACTv Fitchburg, WI 1 hr 20 min - Pulso de la Comunidad: Quinceañeras; City of Rialto, CA 22 min - Festival of Lights: Mayor’s Tree Lighting; Springfield, MO 1 hr 25 min
Useful, local, kind. - Poets in the Libraries; One Albuquerque Media, NM 38 min - Pruning Trees and Shrubs, with the OSU Master Gardeners; Clackamas County, OR 43 min - Lake Havasu Adopt-A-Pet Show; AZ 30 min - Midland Community Orchestra: Wee Bit o’ Spring; MCTV, MI 1 hr 2 min
Alternates: Special US Naturalization Ceremony (Arlington, VA 41 min); Oral History: Recollections of the Blagojevich Years (IllinoisChannel 1 hr); Prescott Audubon Society (AZ 35 min); Urban Farming: Chickens 101 (FL 52 min); Groton Senior Center O.A.T.S. hike (CT 13 min).
Keep going: every government access station in the archive (1,193 collections) · Sacramento Metro Cable 14 · Clackamas County
The numbers, and what they count: government-tagged channels hold 1,413,672 items and at least 1,154,402 hours, about 132 years. That makes them the largest of the three. 34.7% of those items trip the archive’s strict meeting detector. The detector is strict, so the true share of meetings is somewhat higher. Even so, a large part of the government channels is something other than a meeting.
One caveat for the writer. Both town-meeting examples come from channels tagged public access. In New England the local public access station often covers town meeting. The access-type tag belongs to the channel, not the program, so government programming shows up on every kind of channel. That is worth one sentence in the post.
The idea. School and college channels do two jobs at once. They keep the record of a community’s young people: concerts, plays, commencements, the spelling bee. They are also where many of those young people first learned to make television. This post honors both: the students on camera and the students behind it. It also shows the classes and lectures that reached far beyond the classroom.
Sample opening:
In 1984, Glenbrook South High School in Illinois had its own television station, and that year the station got an interview with Tony Bennett 12 min. The same collection holds the school’s 1985 variety show 59 min and a run of video yearbooks such as 1987’s 55 min. Forty years later, the people in those tapes can find their teenage selves, and anyone can see what a suburban high school looked like in the Reagan years.
Sections and examples:
Student newsrooms. - CitrusTV: News Live at 6; CitrusTV, NY 29 min - NewsLink Indiana, April 3, 2018 30 min - Ethio Youth Media TV; Seattle Colleges Cable Television, WA 58 min - Main Street Middle School Construction: A Student Documentary; Monterey Office of Education, CA 30 min
On stage and in the band. - Suitland High School: Little Shop of Horrors; Prince George’s County Public Schools, MD 1 hr 25 min - Taylor Elementary: The Lion King; Arlington Educational TV, VA 1 hr 19 min - Salmen High School presents The Evolution of Jazz; St. Tammany Parish, LA 1 hr 21 min - Lopez E.C.H.S. Marching Band Celebration; Brownsville ISD, TX 29 min - Calhoun 2021 Vocal Recital; Calhoun Community College, AL 1 hr 22 min
The classroom, opened up. - Anthropogenic Climate Change (ESSC 102); Southeastern Louisiana University 55 min - The Night Sky: Observing Meteor Showers; UA Little Rock, AR 12 min - Pre-Electrical Apprenticeship; Howard Community College, MD 28 min - Cooking With Class: Salads; Mobile County Public Schools, AL 11 min - Poet Laureate of Louisiana Julie Kane; Northwestern State University 50 min
Milestones, and the whole community. - Adult Education Commencement 2014; St. Tammany Parish, LA 1 hr 14 min - Returning Graduates Commencement, Classes of 2020 and 2021; Washington State University 1 hr 15 min - Tuskegee’s Martin Luther King Jr. Birthday Celebration; AL 1 hr 15 min - Native American Day Parade 2022; Sioux Falls School District, SD 1 hr 16 min - Brownsville ISD Special Olympics; TX 29 min - The Gift of Language (Vietnamese); Worcester Public Schools, MA 9 min - Archival anchor: Atkinson Academy Spelling Bee, February 1991; Timberlane Regional School District, NH 48 min
Alternates: Paul Laurent Wins State Speech Championship (1991) 8 min; VEX IQ Robotics Competition (KY 25 min); Seattle Colleges’ 34th MLK Celebration 1 hr 26 min; Latino Music at Merritt College (CA 59 min); Florida Highwaymen Art Exhibit (FL 36 min); Ross Gay visits WKCTC (KY 58 min); Auburn SGA Candidate Debate (AL 1 hr 19 min); Day of the Dead Chocolate Sculpture (VT 52 min); 2022 MCPSS Film Festival (AL 1 hr 11 min); Lubbock ISD: ProStart Invitational (TX 28 min); P-SPAN: Poet Regina Davis at Laney College (CA 57 min).
Keep going: every educational access station in the archive (345 collections) · Glenbrook South Television · Peralta TV
The numbers, and what they count: educational-tagged channels hold 352,206 items and at least 157,449 hours, about 18 years. It’s the smallest of the three and also the least meeting-heavy: only 6.6% of items trip the meeting detector, against 34.7% on government channels and 22.8% on public ones.
archive.db sync, through the 10.12-cma-story-miner corpus. No sampling. The candidate pool came from that miner’s 119 editorial themes, filtered to title matches only. That filter excludes description-only matches, which were found to be noisier.archive.org/metadata/<id>. All resolve as movies, and the shortest runs 5 min 45 s. For every item, the live runtime agrees with the archive.db duration to within 90 seconds. One candidate was dark on archive.org (Gaston County Schools, Marching Band Fanfare; Episode 1) even though the 09-02 sync listed it. It was dropped and replaced. The links should be checked again just before each post goes out.advancedsearch.php) returns 528 public, 1,193 government and 345 educational station collections for them. Those counts come from the API, and the search-page URLs in this document were not opened in a browser.The full candidate pool, with each item’s station, state, year and live runtime, is in peg_series_candidates.psv next to this file.
If the three-minute rule also applies to “258 Years of Tuesday Night,” five of its links need attention (checked live 2026-09-25):
| link | what the check found |
|---|---|
| Osseo woodworker replicates city landmarks | 2 min 6 s |
| Who was Elmer W. Bumpus Anyway? (1984) | 1 min 56 s |
| Gary Sredzienski, “accordion playing master and merman” | 2 min 58 s |
| WARA On The Air (1975) | not a video: the item’s mediatype is texts |
| Toni G, episode 001 | no runtime recorded anywhere, so unverifiable. Episode 515 59 min is a verified substitute. |
The overview’s French-language paragraph also still carries the pasted-URL error (“[UK councilhttps://…”). The UK link text got fused with the search URL.
Decided 2026-09-25: (1) the working titles stand; (2) first person, like the overview; (3) P-E-G order; (4) both the IA blog and the Access Humboldt wiki; (5) fix the overview’s links. The overview fix is done: five short, unmeasured or non-video links were replaced with verified videos, and the broken UK link was repaired. The original list is kept below for the record.