A2 lacks television news now and is losing the daily newspaper.

Could CTN take on the task of being a local television news station that has a reporting staff and daily news programs?

The morning 8:00 AM and evening 7:00 PM News?

I get the city’s emailings. But I have a friend who doesn’t use the internet. She has always used the Sunday paper as the major source of information about agendas, etc. It has been failing her anyway since so many rapid changes take place before the meeting and after copy goes to the newspaper. She needs a low-tech way to get this information. I doubt that the new “paper” will get much printed circulation and don’t know whether she would bother with it. The idea of AADL coordinating with CTN on this is intriguing. Of course, the council agenda could be added to scrolling announcements on cable too.

My concern is that cable TV is no longer the best mechanism for distributing the content CTN has. It’s an inherently limited resource, don’t want to work my schedule around to see some important but boring city meeting.

Instead of operating four such channels (most of which are filled with repeats, for several reasons), I hope that CTN will redirect their energy to more current fields: understanding how people get their information about the city, and then producing fewer but more targeted programs to fill this need.

There’s a lot more that can be done beyond broadcasting meetings. If content restrictions become lighter (that is, if the city releases the videos under, say, a Creative Commons license), citizens can make some of these things happen. Other pieces will need to come from CTN or (more likely) the AADL. Some possibilities: link2 or link3

1) Creating a full-featured video distribution system that lets us download the videos of our City Council meetings for reuse and redistribution. Among many other uses, this would let groups like the Chronicle store clips in their meeting reports. (“want more detail? click play to hear the full dialog”)

2) Consulting with City officials, staff, and local experts to develop a long-range plan to direct CTN’s actions online and offline. Currently, no such plan exists.

3) Creating a citizen’s advisory board that provides the City as a whole with expert advice on all matters relating to information technology and digital government.

It’s not our intent that you must sign up for Twitter. You can view the stream without having an account. And the idea is that we’ll take that Twittered description of the meeting and clean it up for publication — turned around relatively quickly.

Tonight’s effort: FAIL. Twitter has a limit, which I exceeded. We may have to rethink that, or else give a coarser-grained description than what I did tonight.