BRATTLEBORO-Cor Trowbridge was among the dozens of area producers, creators, and fans gathered to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Brattleboro Community Television (BCTV) at Stone Church Nov. 14.
In a recent conversation with The Commons, Trowbridge, the executive director of the station from 2006 to 2024, looked back on her 18-year tenure, which coincided with rapid changes in broadcast and video technology that also has disrupted the fragile business model of public access stations like BCTV. She also led the organization through a global pandemic.
Trowbridge is now the special projects manager at Brattleboro's Winston Prouty Center, where she is working on the Village at Winston Prouty housing development project, which aims to eventually complete 300 new housing units on the property.
"It's a huge challenge, much like BCTV was," she said. "So I'm just trying to put my shoulder to a different wheel."
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Annie Landenberger: What had you done prior to starting work at BCTV?
Cor Trowbridge: I worked in the town planning office as grants manager and assistant town manager. So, of course, I was familiar with BCTV. When this job came open, somebody said, "you should really apply," so I just walked across the hall from my old office. [The station operates from the Brattleboro Municipal Center.]
A.L.: Had you had any video production background?
C.T.: My background was administrative. I have personal interest and enthusiasm for photo and video, but I think [the BCTV board] thought that having a strong administrator and then being able to hire the technical expertise would be another way to [organize].
BCTV was in a big mess when I took it on, so I knew that whatever we did, it was going to be better. So that made it OK.
A.L.: You're praised for raising awareness of the value of what BCTV offers and getting [the organization] some remuneration for those services. And also for figuring out how to counter the impact of dwindling cable subscribership. What kind of financial situation did you inherit?
C.T.: Well, just as I walked in the door, Comcast purchased Adelphia and had to negotiate a CPG (Certificate of Public Good) with the state as cable operators are required to do. Comcast was a bigger business.
And so, the Vermont Access Network of 24 stations throughout Vermont negotiated a CPG that was better. Consequently, our basic funding level, which at that time was based only on subscribers in Brattleboro, Guilford, and Vernon, became more stable than it had been before.
Then we went through a strategic planning process.
Our goal was to make BCTV a valued community resource. At the time, people would just say, "Hey, can you send a camera here? Can you send a camera there?" When I came, we covered only Brattleboro Selectboard meetings live. We covered Vernon Selectboard meetings when a connection worked, but there was no staff there.
So the strategic plan to expand made what we did more consistent for towns.
Technically at the time we had just switched over from analog to digital everything. And cameras had evolved. We began using mini-DV tapes instead of these big VHS tapes and -
A.L.: Those cameras were beasts!
C.T.: - that was making it more accessible for people to use our equipment. So membership grew from that.
So then BCTV was designated not only for Brattleboro, Vernon, and Guilford, but also for Putney, Dummerston, Newfane, Townshend, and Jamaica, This meant revenues from the cable subscribers, a small percentage, now came to BCTV.
That expanded our territory in an official way. Then we went to all these towns and selectboards and said, "Hey, we're going to be covering your meetings now, every single one. And this is how it's going to work." As you can imagine, there were some growing pains, but eventually everybody got used to it.
We also started to say, "You know, these are the services that you're getting - your major community events are being covered. And we're going to charge a certain amount for that. So we started to negotiate an annual fee on top of the small amount received from cable subscribers. We had a contract with each town and everything became much more straightforward.
All these things converged at the time I walked in the door.
A.L.: What about staff? Some paid, some volunteer...
C.T.: So by charging what it costs to do the work, we could expand our field staff to be able to cover multiple meetings at the same time on the same night and cover events that required multiple staff. It just expanded our capacity.
A.L.: Wonderful. What challenges did you face?
C.T.: There've been many threats over the years to the existence of public access television. Cable companies kept going to the Federal Communications Commission, the federal authority that regulates cable, saying, "Hey, it's not fair that we have to pay these fees to support public access but satellite providers don't. And Internet providers don't." It's gone back and forth, but any threat to that fee structure is an existential threat to public access the way it's funded right now.
A.L.: What impact did Covid have?
C.T.: I really didn't know what was going to happen because nobody could meet anymore. So [when the country went into a public health emergency lockdown] we went home that day and got on Slack and on Zoom, and we were wondering, "Is BCTV going to survive this? Because what we cover is people doing things in the community, right? And now no one's doing anything."
Then we realized these towns needed technical assistance to get themselves doing their meetings online. So we started working on that with each town administrator, who was, like, "How do I work this? How can we get people who are at home in the room? How can we get the audio to sound better? How can we show when a vote is being voted on?"
So it actually showed BCTV to be more relevant than ever.
A.L.: I remember.
C.T.: We had to figure out how to do a hybrid meeting, how to do everything that we take for granted now - we were just figuring that out on the fly.
It was a huge technical challenge, and the staff just absolutely pulled it out of the hat; they were some of the first people to go out in public and be, like, "Yep, I'm going to cover this meeting. I'm going to wear a mask. I'm going to stand at a distance. I'm going to have my camera."
A.L.: They really were local heroes.
C.T.: That was one of those moments in BCTV history that was, like, "This could be the end." But it actually propelled us into the spotlight as the people making it possible for people to meet and for the public to know what was going on.
A.L.: Otherwise it'd have been the dark ages of our towns.
C.T.: That's right. And now you can see from our meeting coverage that we have people attending remotely. And when somebody is talking on screen, you see that video pop up, you see the name. It was brilliant in terms of moving technology forward.
A.L.: And there was creative programming - music and the Rock River Players' Solo series. BCTV camera people as artists kicked in and did beautiful work. It got people in the performing arts engaged; it gave some entertainment in a time when everything was dry.
C.T.: You're absolutely right. Yes. People looked to BCTV as a tool that could help solve some of the pain of isolation.
A.L.: Johnny Gifford, the current executive director, says you are 100% responsible for BCTV being a leader in its field now. And Nolan Edgar, production manager, has said one of the many positive aspects of working with you is that you could really see potential in people and you would just nudge them toward that.
So what would you say is your legacy?
C.T.: I was really like a lot of executive directors: When you come on, you try to say "yes" until you have to say "no."
I didn't have a technical background, and that could have been looked at as a negative. But in a way, it was a positive, because I couldn't micromanage that aspect of the station.
And I said "yes" to a lot of things because I didn't know any better. You know, I just had to trust people.
A.L.: You remind me of the "yes, and..." rule in improv.
C.T.: Plenty of times I said "yes," and it didn't work. But that's the nature of work with technology. Then you say, "Next time we're going to try it this way."
And that's why the ethos of the staff was that we never did anything the same exact way twice. It's always to be improved. There's always a debrief. There's always a way we can make it a little bit better.
A.L.: Trust was essential.
C.T.: I had this 17-year-old employee, Roland Boyden, and I said: "Well, we're going to get this digital server. We're going to use this proprietary service that goes with the server to put the videos online, right?" And Roland said, "Why don't we just put them on YouTube? That's where everybody's watching videos."
But this server company had been trying to sell me a big package. So that's a moment where I had to say, "Do I trust this adult trying to sell me this product? Or do I trust this 17-year-old? He's saying, 'Let's make a YouTube channel.'" And I was looking at what all the other stations and they were using this proprietary software.
But I [told Roland], "Well, OK, let's try it."
A.L.: Wow. Bold.
C.T.: And so I feel that was my strength - being open to other people's genius/crazy ideas and talents and being willing to fail. Being open to others' suggestions and open to constant change.
With technology changing as much as it was, we would figure out how to use something, and the next year we would abandon it for something else. Everything just kept changing and improving so quickly, and we just kept trying to stay a step ahead.
We'd see technology that was going to help our community and move our work forward, so we just dove in and tried it until something better came along.
I feel like that was a good match for BCTV. My skills and my strengths were administrative, but my personality was very much accepting of change as a good thing and as a constant.
A.L.: Anything to add about legacy?
C.T.: At the end of my time there, we had gotten HD channels. We had gotten on the Comcast channel directory. That was a goal I'd had from the minute I walked in the door. That felt good.
And now to see at the 50th how Johnny is just taking it further with audio services. And he's on camera doing interviews. And his being involved in the music scene is really moving that programming forward. And the idea of being part of the emergency network - you know, that's exactly where BCTV is meant to be. Those kinds of partnerships.
I'm very, very excited to see how this is all going.
A.L.: Why does BCTV matter?
C.T.: BCTV and all public access stations allow local voices to be heard and allow people to understand what's happening in their community and to be able to communicate with their neighbors about their views.
Governmental transparency. That's a big factor. And these days, you can't have too much governmental transparency.
Everybody's going to have their views, but being able to watch a video of a meeting, to see what's actually said, the tone in which it's said, the facial expressions - there's no substitute for that other than being at the meeting yourself.
A.L.: And it creates an historical document so that when we come into kerfuffles or contests, it's there. That's to be cherished in this world of fake news.
C.T.: That's absolutely true. BCTV has lived up to that promise to be an essential community service.
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Editor's note: Stories presented as interviews in this format are edited for clarity, readability, and space. Words not spoken by interview subjects appear in brackets.
Annie Landenberger is an arts writer and columnist for The Commons. She also is one half of the musical duo Bard Owl, with partner T. Breeze Verdant.
This News item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.