Help Tell Others About The Summit

The Texas Community Media Summit grew out of conversations among folks in Texas involved with public access or community television from channelaustin (aka Public Access Community Television), Dallas iMedia Network, and Houston Media Source.

Leadership from the three stations have met three times, first in Austin in November, then in Houston in December, and most recently in January in Dallas. When in Houston we had a tour of KPFT Pacifica Radio and met with the General Manager there. Similarly, when in Dallas we had a tour of KNON and also met with the General Manager.

We've also had a meeting with faculty at the University of Texas at Austin in the RTF Department and in the LBJ School of Public Affairs who are helping us in an advisory role develop the summit.

Besides that we've had separate meetings and / or conversations with Charles Benton of the Benton Foundation and with Gene Crick of the TeleCommunity Resource Center. And we've had meetings in San Marcos and Austin with people from the Texas Media Empowerment Project.

Together all of these people have helped to shape the summit. Although driven by public access / community television, we want the summit to encompass all community media: art, theater, print, radio, film, tv and internet.

Our strongest and most immediate allies are in radio. We also are beginning to establish more contacts for people involved in Internet media. For example, Michael Verdi, who helped launch the phenomena of video blogs, will be joining the summit to speak about that subject as well as podcasting.

We have a small budget for this project and will not be using regular mail. All our publicity will be through email and through people re-posting information about the summit on their web sites, or mentioning the summit on air or in broadcast, or in print.

One of the biggest lessons we've learned so far is that we involved in community media in Texas know so little about what everyone else is doing. We are without any sort of directory or database of media organizations and groups. So the mere step of pulling this all together and trying to aggregate as much information about community media in Texas is important.

So please take a moment, or many moments, to help publicize the summit by clicking on the Spread The Word link on the upper left and sending emails to your personal and organizational contacts. Thanks.