Community-based Digital Television
Corsham TV and Community Media
by Martin Head
October 2019
Community cohesion has never been more important than it is now, and over the past 5 years Corsham Institute, a research and learning charity based in Wiltshire have developed many initiatives locally in Wiltshire that have laid a marker down of how communities can engage with themselves using digital technology and creative content to become stronger and more inclusive.
Digital platforms and technology can sometimes drive people apart making them more isolated and reinforcing existing views, prejudices and stereotypes in newsfeed ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’ and Corsham Institute, through its Digital Corsham programme [link opens video], has worked to reverse this trend, using timely and relevant digital content to bring people together and we’ve been building important bridges to explore how the huge impact that the data-driven 4th Industrial Revolution is having on everyone’s lives can be used to make our lives more inclusive and bring our communities together.
My first project with Corsham Institute was to bring digital, community hyper-local television to the market town of Corsham in Wiltshire. Corsham TV, set out with the purpose of demonstrating how digital video stories can open up different elements of the community to themselves, shining light into different groups and segments of the population, and by opening up the democratic process strengthen the civic society in which we live. [Link opens video with selection of clips.]
The development of the digital platform followed my previous work leading a number of local tv licence applications to Ofcom, primarily in Birmingham and Luton, and from 2011 building a digital community platform most notably in Stratford upon Avon. There was also a digital channel in Coventry, run in partnership with the media and journalism students at Coventry University.
The community media platforms echoed the vision in 2011 of the then Secretary of State for the future of local and community media:
“In the longer term, IPTV [Internet-based digital tv] offers vast potential for the distribution of local television services. So, any local TV solution will need to offer a smooth glide path to that IPTV future…. offering a new voice for local communities, with local perspectives that are directly relevant to them.”
Speech by the then Secretary of State at DCMS, Jeremy Hunt MP, Oxford Media Convention
The platform was developed to find new ways of making community media sustainable and it reflected the optimism of Ofcom’s 2014 Public Service Broadcasting Review;
“Our research also shows that online media services can fulfil the public service objectives in ways that traditional broadcast media cannot. Instant feedback, interactivity, on-demand content and a personalised experience are features of online media services that are not easily replicable in one-to-many broadcast media like television and radio.”
The channel played a role in the debate nationally about hyper-local content and what public service broadcasting means in the 21st Century and when it was launched in January 2015 it offered a model that attracted national and academic interest in its impact.
I spoke about Corsham Institute’s work with Corsham TV at both a Westminster Media Forum to an audience that included representatives from Ofcom, the BBC and other media groups, as well as at conference at Coventry University with academics looking at the future for hyper-local news and community media. I also developed partnerships and used the channel as a live test-bed and case study with courses at local universities, Wiltshire College and with a group of the BBC’s media apprentices.
However it is at the community level that the real impact can be seen and where the potential for other communities to develop similar digital engagement models can be found. Over 250 videos were produced during the project’s lifetime, resulting in over 60,000 engagements from local residents. [Link opens a video of clips supporting the community.]
Corsham TV also enabled local employment as we instigated a rolling programme of Creative Digital Media Apprentices, trained to deliver local stories with local people.
Connections were made with local councils, schools, the local Chamber of Commerce and local businesses, and a myriad of community organisations and charities. By attracting people to the Corsham TV platform for one particular story or video about a local event, they were encouraged to view another about an area of community life they might not necessarily be normally aware of, whether the closure of a children’s centre, a campaign to reopen the Town’s railway station, a festival of engineering or a local charity campaign or arts festival. [Link opens a video of clips supporting local business.]
The civic society was also supported in a number of ways. Regular interviews were conducted with both of the areas MPs to bring a new way for them to communicate with their constituents. These included sessions where resident’s questions were put directly on camera to the MP concerned. Local council meetings were filmed and regular interviews about local and national matters conducted, as well as interviews with the Police and Crime Commissioner and leaders of the local Councils. This content, edited into accessible videos, served its own immediate communications purpose, but on a wider level the engagement by politicians and public officials with Corsham TV, and their willingness to be interviewed also shows the important place and potential for these local channels in the wider media landscape. [Link opens a video of clips supporting the Civic Society.]
With the almost complete withdrawal of some local newspaper’s resources to cover local events in person, the channel filled an important role in supporting local democracy.
Overnight election counts were covered for both council and general elections and interviews with winning candidates, including the local MP were done and streamed before coverage was included on national or regional channels, as well as through social media.
The initial coverage of the election in 2015 provided some anecdotal, yet fascinating levels of impact for local media that could be replicated and tested on a wider scale. Some 150 people attended the local hustings event to hear from all candidates, and normally that would have been the extent of the local engagement. However, after Corsham TV filmed and edited short clips of the candidate’s answers to a range of questions over 1,500 people viewed the local debate. This ten times the amount of physical engagement for our digital platform showed beyond doubt the power of this type of local information and news service and the appetite for more local information when it is presented in the right way.
There was also recognition from the BBC for the quality and independence of our work. In the run up to the EU referendum in 2016 we originated and then collaborated on a joint local debate with BBC Radio Wiltshire, hosted by Elinor Goodman, the former political editor of C4 News, coordinating transmission and co-producing pre-filmed content, including interviews with both of the local MPs who were on opposite sides of the referendum debate. The BBC transmitted the audio of the debate in a special programme, and we launched video clips of the event simultaneously online.
This was one of few other examples of the BBC working collaboratively, yet professionally, with community media groups and was a testament to the professional standards of Corsham TV and our productions. It provided a quality benchmark going forward for our community TV platform and was a great example for other communities thinking of engaging with digital community media.
Following the debate the Head of English Regions for the BBC commented; “we are delighted with the results our end. We have joined up with other news organisations for a number of these kind of debates but this is definitely a good example.” We also produced a video alongside the debate, talking about the partnership and collaborative working and we had nearly 900 views of all the various clips and interviews of the EU Referendum debate.
The digital channel led to other partnerships and became a focal point for community engagement. In a long standing tie up with a local community radio station, who we supported with the space to have a permanent studio, we live streamed Council meetings to open up the democratic process and produced a weekly hour long radio magazine programme of interviews about local affairs, called ‘Corsham Talking’, that was streamed live. This was then edited into various shorter podcasts and distributed across social channels increasing their reach and impact.
The work also placed us as one of the key stakeholders within the local Council’s Area Board and we reported on progress and community digital initiatives with many other community organisations. It led to comprehensive work with local schools, notably a survey of over 3,000 local pupils who were asked questions on their internet access and use as part of the national Safer Internet Day initiative.
Corsham TV became a catalyst for projects on the ways digital platforms could help with community volunteers, mapping local services and the identifying gaps that needed to be filled and also led to a partnership with the local arts organisation to produce and film a number of TEDx talks. It was an instantly approachable and understandable brand and a concept that people across the community wanted to engage with.
Stemming from the success of Corsham TV and the positive reputation it built, we also instigated projects within the community, for instance, online safety initiatives within Schools, a community vlogging project with young people, a digital book club initiative with the Town’s independent book shop, new ways to tell the story of the Town’s heritage and history by linking old stone mining artefacts with modern quarrying methods, supporting the areas’s World War One commemorations, finding archive footage of the town 50 years earlier and tracking down the same residents to reunite them, and bringing to a wide audience a local knitting group’s work to send handmade toys to refugee camps in Syria.
In the run up to Christmas 2015, at the end of our first year of operation, a series of linked videos ‘The 12 Days of a Corsham Christmas’ attracted record audiences and featured messages to the wider community from many groups and local businesses, including the children of Corsham Primary School singing festive songs, with excerpts from their Nativity Plays.
As well as the local impact we created, Corsham TV also contributed to the wider debate about how such hyper-local channels can be self sustaining and how the community themselves, whether as individuals or organisations, can be trained to produce video content and how it can be curated into one central place to the benefit of the whole community.
The community as a whole needs to feel they have ownership of the platform, that they can access it if they want to, and that it empowers people through the content and the stories it delivers. Coupled with the community engagement there needs to be a strong editorial policy, technical knowledge to create well produced video packages, and above all the story-telling skills to bring people across the community together. If a broad consortium of groups can be engaged and motivated to co-create such channels then they can truly reflect the communities they are based in and not ever represent silos of interest or any one section of society.
External reaction and comments to the project were always positive and the channel’s reputation locally enabled it to have real impact, which in turn created more opportunities. The Chair of the Town Council reflected that Corsham TV,
“has given the residents of Corsham the opportunity to find out what is actually going on in the town, has shown Corsham off to its best advantage, is a great showpiece for all that is good in the town, has given the opportunity for local people to have their say, makes people feel good about the town they live in and it turned negative publicity into positive”.
The project was a model for digital engagement that other communities could follow with its ambition to boost cohesion and increase engagement through the power of story-telling and the provision of timely, relevant, and accessible community content.
On a national policy level, there is still much work to do to fulfil Ofcom’s 2014 vision for new media services that digital technology and platforms have made possible and in this era of fake news and extremism on social media to redefine public service broadcasting into relevant and trustworthy models of news, information, and engagement for communities in the 21st century.
The vision for community digital media services offering a ‘new voice for local communities, with local perspectives that are directly relevant to them’, is still an ambition that needs to be further developed and ways found to make them sustainable into the future.