KREX Rising

Congratulations to KREX on resuming their regular newscasts. According to my son Evan, who attends WCCC basically across the hall from the new location, it's a pretty interesting setup.
From one viewing it looks like they're getting the hang of the new equipment, and making the best of the limited space they have. The only glaring omission that I've noticed is the lack of closed captioning. Hopefully they'll get that resolved fairly quickly.

As I've said before, the KREX fire brought about some cooperation between members of the media, and may go a long way toward leveraging new media technologies in ways not before seen or perhaps even envisioned in Grand Junction. This evening there's going to be a discussion that could perhaps take this concept of new and alternative media a bit further down the road.

The quarterly membership meeting of Grand Valley Peace and Justice is tonight at 7:00 PM at the St. Joseph Church offices at 3rd and White, across the street from the church. The group's meeting announcement indicated a discussion on alternative media will be part of the agenda.

This will hopefully include the development of a working group with certain benchmarks to achieve, and one of those will hopefully be persuading the City of Grand Junction to request the activation of their PEG Access Channel on the basic cable tier, which is part of the City's current franchise agreement with Bresnan.

The recent developments surrounding the partial resurrection of KREX, through cooperation between media outlets, the sharing of equipment and space, and the rapid deployment of alternative programming sources, displays very well the level of expertise and goal-oriented thinking present in our local media and educational institutions.

What's to stop the development of a coalition of these groups and outlets to provide for the space, equipment, organization, and administration of a community public access channel in Grand Junction? The answer to this and many other questions may make themselves better known starting this evening. Such a resource is long overdue in our community, as there are successfully-run examples of such stations in smaller cities and towns across the Western Slope.

Still looking for other examples of possibilities in the community? Hope to see you there.

Have a great month ahead.