Ep. 13 - Campbell Media's Closed Captioning Grant Journey

Hello everyone, Michelle Alimoradi here. And I have a quick update for you before we dive into today's episode. Back in April of this year, we recorded this episode about seeking funding to support closed captioning on your cable channels with Brady Wurtz, who is the programming coordinator at Campbell Media in Campbell County, Kentucky. And since then, since we're just now getting to air this episode, we wanted to share an update that we received from Brady recently. Which says that they are thrilled to announce that since Brady was on the podcast, Campbell Media found out that they have been awarded the grant that they applied for and that the grant will actually cover the cost of closed captioning for all Campbell Media channels for an entire year. So Brady and his team are excited to provide this vital service to the residents of Campbell County, ensuring accessibility, For content produced not only by the station, but also all the content produced by the community. So we're very excited to start the episode off with that good news. And we're of course, extending our congratulations to the whole team over there at Campbell media. So without further ado, let's jump into the episode with Brady and figure out what those steps were in the process to them applying for this grant. And ultimately. Winning this grant for closed captioning on their cable channels. Let's get into it. Hi, Brady. Welcome back. Hi. Thanks for having me. We have Brady Wurtz, who is the programming coordinator at Campbell County Media with us back on the Government Video Podcast today. And today we're talking about closed captioning funding. Yes. That's a big topic for a lot of cities and a lot of community media stations as well right now, wouldn't you say? Yeah. Oh, yes, absolutely. and, the conversation really started a few years ago when there was a lot coming out about compliance concerns with the FCC and, you know, whether or not PEG stations and cities were suddenly going to have to come up with what was a significant amount of money at that time, um, to provide closed captioning, uh, not, you know, because they didn't want to have that accessibility with their content, but just because, especially before we had all this automated captioning, it was very expensive, right? Oh, absolutely. It was a challenge to find a way to make that work for a lot of access centers, I'm sure, especially us. Yeah. Before we started this podcast, we had another limited series called the Connected Community Summit, where we had actually interviewed, um, captioning providers and a lawyer about these compliance issues because um, some stations were getting sued, uh, by members of the community that wanted captioning and other stations who hadn't had that happen yet wanted to be prepared in case something like that did happen. Um, so I'm going to go ahead and say, you know, folks really want to dive into the details of all of that part of this topic. They should find the Connected Communities Summit episode that we did on government video concerns, government video compliance, that's on the Cablecast website. But today we're going to talk about how Campbell County Media has taken the first step. You are trying to provide closed captioning. You're looking for funding for it. And we want to talk about how you got there, how you made the decision that this is what you were going to do. And how you're working to fund it and make it happen. Yeah. So with closed captioning, it's something we've always wanted to do, but up until fairly recently, the price for it has just been way beyond something we were capable of doing, especially for an access center that covers so much, so many cities, um, you know, about 11 cities and all of them have multiple different types of meetings we cover. The public channels, the staff produced channels, our religious channel, so we have a lot of content that we make, and broadcast on TV, and we're a very small staff working on a budget from 2005, so we don't have the funds available to kind of, um, be able to sustain closed captioning from a while ago. Nowadays, like you've mentioned, some, a lot more, uh, automated services have been provided from different types of companies, making this ultimately a little more affordable. We currently haven't had anyone reach out to us or the cities reach out to us wanting closed captioning yet. I'm sure it can happen any day now but with the recent trend of kind of subscription services to Closed captioning as a kind of pay as you go month by month service. And with lower prices we've noticed Hey, that's a price we might be able to meet. We might be able to get that. We definitely would like some help. So we started looking out, and there is a grant that we're applying for currently right now that we're confident and hoping that we will get. It's, from the county and it's a mental health and aging population fund, that we applied for where they kind of distribute the money to organizations that serve those populations. And we applied for a grant from them that would cover about a year's worth of closed captioning from us. Now that might be selective a little bit on saying, you know, some content, like, for example, we do some, music events that we might decide to opt out of closed captioning for that. And then maybe a few other select options that we feel like the closed captioning for that amount of hours might not be worth it so that we can get closed captioning for like government meetings or instructional videos or city event kind of coverage. So we're looking at hopefully getting this, grant and that'll fund us for a year and it's a yearly grant so that we can keep applying for it. But it is for the county. So we found that and we thought this is perfect for us. You know, it fits our needs. And it'll help us be able to provide something new to the community that they haven't had before, uh, and again, it's something that we would not have been able to do, you know, 10, 15 years ago, but now with the way technology has been working, it's something that's in our grasp that we are, you know, capable of finding ways of funding that yearly. Yeah. So due to the ubiquity of this automated captioning that's available now as opposed to having to use the standard, you know, actual person transcribing the meetings, It really does make a huge difference Yes, because if, yeah, because if we needed to hire somebody to transcribe all the meetings or if we even had to pay someone to do that for a service to manually type that out, it would, the cost of that was just so expensive that we would have to cut funding on other types of productions that we would do for the community and they might lose out on that. So we really wanted to make sure we waited for the right moment. And with all these new services coming out that are automated, they really fill in the gaps to be able to afford this and be able to get this for the community in a way that works for all of us. It doesn't require too much time from us, so that we can continue working on covering meetings and covering events and editing them for people, not have to worry about hiring more contractors to just transcribe meetings or, do any extra workload on that. And we're still capable of going back in and making corrections on some of these closed captioning, services as well. Words get misspoken or, the automotive service, you know, types in a word that's not quite what the presenter meant to say. We can go in and we can make adjustments like that. And it's fairly easy and simple to where we're not using too much of our resources to be able to provide this for the community. Brady, you mentioned that with the automated captions, you can do things like edit the captions. You can create, you know, maybe a vocabulary or something where, you know, if somebody's names mentioned multiple times, the system can fix it for you. Um, and I think those are important things to note because I think there's a lot of people out there who maybe are, haven't familiarized themselves with the automated captioning of today that is pretty accurate, kind of eerily accurate, I would say, um, compared to some of the automated predecessors. And I think that there's probably some people out there, I don't know if you would agree that just had it in their head that automated captioning really wasn't worth it because there have been, you know, even past iterations of automated captioning on like YouTube that, was distractingly bad, you know, where you would, you just flip the switch and hope that it was getting the job done, but it might actually be more of a detriment than a tool, right? Because this is like vital information that you're sharing and, and the tool that you're using is not, um, really communicating that message accurately, but It sounds like your experience has been that it's been really accurate on its own. Yeah. So our experience with using closed captioning, again, once we saw these prices kind of coming down and making it kind of a, uh, you know, pays you go, you know, buy so many minutes kind of, uh, situation, we trialed it. So we used, you know, some money and we, you know, paid for X amount of hours worth of closed captioning to make sure it's something that we were confident in first before we decided to go out and get the grant. So, I would recommend that to anyone that's considering it. You can buy, you know, only so many hours and just kind of test it out and play with it yourself. I know that we did that and we were able to do that to a couple of our meetings to make sure that we were confident that what we were paying for was going to be worth it for the city. And it was surprisingly, like, very, very accurate. And just like you said, the only big mistakes that we had were maybe the spelling of council members names. That, again, you can go in there and you can say, you know, Hey, This name that you're pronouncing here, this is the correct spelling of it, and it will learn that, and it will adapt to it, um, and that's one of those things that it's really helpful for making that software work for you more instead of just having to deal with the shortcomings of it. It's capable of improving as time goes by. I would definitely recommend anyone that's been on the fence about closed captioning. Look for what service works best for you and definitely, you know, try it out a little bit, put some, a little bit of money and invest into doing so many hours to just experiment with yourself. You don't have to give the public a big heads up that you're doing that yet. You can just do that for a certain select amount of meetings, watch it on TV, see how it presents itself. Really fine tune exactly what you want out of it until you're happy with it, and then proceed finding, you know, funding or ways of paying for it as we have through grants. And you mentioned watching it on TV. Was there a process that you had to go through with the cable providers to ensure that the captioning that you were sending out was actually being sent out to your cable channel. Yeah. We probably should have reached out to him first, but we, I wanted to test and I just wanted to experiment with it. And we actually just, use Cablecast and, we were able to upload the, um, SRT file and it actually plays side card to the file back in our playback system to where it would load that up and without having to even communicate with the cable company I was able to go to our TV set turn on closed captioning watch that program and the closed captioning showed up. Just perfect. So It's very simple. It's you know, there's not a lot of you know, hoops You have to jump through to be able to get that done There may be instances where you might have some hiccups So I always recommend reaching out to the cable provider, But I was happy to find that In our instance that it was very, very easy, very low maintenance, did not require any additional hardware on our end back in our playback system as well to be able to make this work. So that's awesome. And I'm, I'm really glad to hear that it was so smooth for you because I have spoken to other Cablecast customers, you know, that's the people that we're talking to most of the time and they've not had such a smooth process and they have actually had to go back and forth and even get like lawyers involved to get the captioning out on their channels and, and we will do a future episode on that. Um, but, but like you said, it really does vary from city to city. So it's really just about being prepared and really, and knowing, you know, your intention and what you want the final product to be, I think, and then just being, um, ready and resolved to take the steps to make it happen. Absolutely. Hi, Michelle here. We hope you're enjoying this episode of the Government Video Podcast I'm taking a short break from today's discussion to remind you that this podcast is brought to you by Cablecast Community Media. We're a cross platform video solution from Tightrope Media Systems. And despite our name, we help cities, towns, and other local media organizations get their video to viewers on all digital platforms, including cable. If your organization operates a cable channel, um, but we help you reach residents whenever and wherever they watch. Be it on your city's website, on mobile streaming apps, on over the top platforms like Fire TV, Roku, Apple TV, or even on their mobile phone. And we even help you push your content live to social media. We've been helping small non commercial stations launch professional, affordable, and efficient video initiatives for over 25 years. And our customers love us because we have great customer support and we have fierce industry loyalty. So if your organization is in need of cross platform video automation and delivery for local coverage of city council meetings or other local events, reach out to our team and schedule a demo today. And if you do, be sure to mention that you heard about it here on the Government Video Podcast to receive a special discount. That's all for me for right now. Back to the episode. So just to reiterate, so you all applied for grant funding that was from the state for yeah, it was from the county actually So the county had a has a grant that's from the mental health and aging population fund and that's mainly for distributing money from that fund for organizations that serve People in that kind of population of mental health aging population and we were able to write up a proposal for the grant to be able to try to get funding from that and ask for how much money we think you know We put in for being able to cover at least a year's worth of content which we did by kind of going through our data and our playback system and exporting some Excel files to be able to give us kind of a list of how many hours we've had for different unique, programming. We broke it down into how many hours we have for government meetings, how much we have for, city coverage. And then we took our music because we categorize as we produce stuff and Put under our playback system. So I was able to create a reports that told us how many hours of everything we thought we would want closed captioning on. And I did that for the last five or six years. So I could get a good average of what we're looking at to spend probably every year on closed captioning minus the content that we know we're not going to put, you know, closed captioning into. Again, everyone's different. We do a lot of concert series as well here, and some of those concert series go on for about three hours. And we didn't think that we would have as big of a benefit for the community with doing closed captioning for, a local band or kind of a local cover band for like three and a half hours set. As compared to three and a half hours worth of government meetings or, uh, you know, instructional videos or, you know, city event presentations. Makes sense. Yeah. Uh, so we were able to kind of narrow down what we think would be most beneficial and figure out what we need every year on that during, during a, yeah, during a standard year. And work from there to figure out how much we would need to apply for a grant and have a really good idea of what we'd be looking at. And you'll have to reapply for those funds annually? Yes. Yeah, yeah. It would be an annual thing to reapply for that fund. So we would have to, you know, propose it again, but, most of the time if you're capable of getting a grant once, it usually means it's something that they will find, you know, a good use for. So once we get that out to the community that hasn't already been asking for it, I think once we do that, once the community will see such a benefit from that, that proposing a new grant, we would be able to, you know, say, here's, you know, here's what we've been able to do with it. Here's some, you know, testimonies from people that have benefited from this and be able to kind of, you know, Yeah, and be able to help, you know, show what an improvement this has been to be able to continue getting that grant. And what was that like, the application process for that? Was it particularly onerous or, I mean, you mentioned pulling program reports and things like that. Yes, yeah, no, yeah, it was, yeah, it was presenting, you know, the benefit of it. It was showcasing how much content we actually provided the city that currently doesn't have closed captioning and showing, you know, how many people we provide that content to that's not currently getting it, and trying to, you know, give a, give a good guess on, you know, how much of that population is, you know, possibly hearing impaired or just prefers to read a lot of people that I know that have their TV on don't have hearing problems, but prefer to put on closed captioning just because it's easier to read it than hearing it inside a house. I definitely do that. With, you know, the dishwasher going on or kids running around. So it's like, you don't have to have, you know, a disability or any kind of hearing impairment to benefit from closed captioning. So we were able to kind of, yeah, so we were able to kind of showcase that, you know, this is why it's beneficial to everyone. It took a little bit of kind of organizing our thoughts, pulling a lot of data, but pulling the data was extremely simple to do. It just comes down to thinking of what kind of data we wanted to pull and doing the math only took maybe like, you know, less than an hour to kind of pull that information together and get our numbers lined up. And did you all do that with just your regular station staff? You didn't pull in any funding specialists or anything like that to help you with the grant? No, I don't I don't believe we did. I worked with the executive director here and we kind of, you know, wrote it up ourselves. So we didn't have to pull from anyone unique. We'll see what we do, you know, with the next year comes by when we apply for it. But right now is very. Very simple, straightforward. We work together on it. And I think some people can just get intimidated by that part of the process. So that's why I asked that question. Yeah. When you hear, when you hear grant, it's like, and it's a big thing, but it really is, you know, it's something that anybody can try to apply for. So I think it's all about how you present yourself as well, to show the benefit of that and show, you know, how other people are going to benefit from that. I think that's the big draw that you want to kind of make. And I think one other thing that's interesting about this, and I've heard this from other access stations that are finding, you know, city money or state money or county level money, is that you're looking at a pretty broad ranging bucket of funds, right? And I'm not sure how you guys see that. found out about this available funding. But, do you happen to know what other types of programming in your county are funded by this? Like, what made you think, Oh, this is the right route for us to find funding for this project. I know that there might be other services out there, but I know this is the first one that we saw. And we saw that, you know, it was something that we were capable of. If we got this, you know, this was all the funding we needed for one year's worth of closed captioning for everything. This was something the exec, our executive director, Jennifer here was able to find out through communicating with the other, city council members and mayors from other cities and talking to them, talking to fiscal court to find out more about what kind of grants that were needed. Because we knew that a grant would be the number one thing that would help us the easiest way. And so it's just a matter of her reaching out to the county to see if they knew of anything that would be of benefit for us. And someone at the county was able to give us that information of, hey, they've got this, you know, mental health and aging population fund that you could apply for a grant from. That might work with that since you're looking at closed captioning, that could apply for people hearing impaired that have issues, you know, being able to hear their meetings. Um, but I know that there are other options out there, but, um, I feel like the grant, you know, coverage, you know, we're not asking too much and it was able to cover. A whole year's worth of four channels worth of programming. I know that if we cut that down to being just the government meetings, it would even, it would cut that down a lot more on how much money we would even need to make it even easier to be able to afford to pay for that. But we would definitely, we're like, let's start off strong. Let's see if we can get coverage for everything that we provide to be able to, you know, kind of. Blanket that whole area. They can always pitch you a lower number, but it's nice. Yes. Yeah. Yeah No, so I love that and I love hearing that, you know These relationships that you've taken the time to foster with county officials Helps you in this way because I think this is a thing that I hear successful stations doing in terms of funding diversity and adding initiatives like this is that they're really going out there and fostering relationships with people that they want to partner with. And, um, it's like, let, how can we make each other look good? You know, how can we serve the community and also really, um, Help our own departments, you know, and, and yeah, absolutely. And make sure that these resources go, you know, to the best programs possible for residents. And I think it's just, it's really great to see. I'm really happy that you guys are doing that. And I wish you the best of luck in that grant proposal. Thank you very much. Thanks so much, Brady, for being on with us today. No problem. Thank you.