I am not sure if I wrote this out of anger or sorrow. I do know I was not happy when I wrote it. Posting it to Coyote Works does not seem to be in the cards at the moment. My most recent post there was a miscellany.

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Let me propound a not quite straightforward problem. I am not quite sure there is even an answer to this one. Bear in mind that sometimes more complex solutions are not necessarily good solutions either.

Ashtabula County is located on the south shores of Lake Erie and is roughly equidistant between two other Lake Erie port towns. To the west you have Cleveland, Ohio. To the east you have Erie, Pennsylvania. Cleveland is a major media market. Erie is a minor media market. Both have daily newspapers as well as multiple radio and television stations of their own.

Ashtabula County has no television station to call its own as Nielsen places it within Cleveland's Designated Market Area. The Digital Television reception maps tool posted by the Federal Communications Commission shows that the Cleveland-area television stations provide only weak to non-existent signals to the Ashtabula area. The majority of the over the air radio stations do not air locally originated programming and instead act as conduits for programming from outlets such as Moody Radio, K-LOVE, Air1, and Bible Broadcasting Network.

The local daily newspaper puts out print editions every weekday except Tuesday and releases a consolidated weekend edition on Saturday only. The page on Wikipedia is not accurate stating that there are editions for each day of the week. Anybody I have consulted in the wild has yet to find a Tuesday or Sunday paper from them since the change happened.

Taking all of the above into account it could be justifiably be said that there is a problem in terms of getting information out to the public. Outside use of the Integrated Public Alert Warning System many public and private entities in Ashtabula County are relying on Facebook. Ah, yes, Facebook...the same company that the Ohio Attorney General is helping lead massive federal litigation against right now. What could possibly go wrong?

There were technological solutions discussed at one point. A linear streaming video channel utilizing something like OpenBroadcaster was kicked about as an idea. Unfortunately there is not much support publicly for that while the county-wide broadband task force sponsored by the board of county commissioners is trying to determine what people actually want and what broadband access currently exists now. Going it alone was determined to be a bit too much and with the current stay-at-home advisory it is difficult to work with potential collaborators.

There are some limited, scaled back matters but they are simply just too limited. You have many groups across the county scattered across YouTube with next to know way to figure out who wound up where. One of the local secondary schools tried to livestream one of its band concerts and got shut down by Facebook Terms of Service over music rights issues. St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Ashtabula City is livestreaming its services via its security camera system. I am posting church services to YouTube on Sundays as best I can working out of my detached garage at home. The various efforts locally more resemble the early days of US radio broadcasting a century ago than anything ideal.

Now, this is not an area that can necessarily lift itself up by its bootstraps. The Appalachian Regional Commission has identified six parts of the county in the "distressed area" classification. Their map shows their working counties and also explains what a "distressed area" is. For the avoidance of doubt, the Appalachian Regional Commission states: "Accordingly, the Commission designates as 'distressed areas,' those census tracts in at-risk and transitional counties that have a median family income no greater than 67 percent of the U.S. average and a poverty rate 150 percent of the U.S. average or greater." No tech solutions involving purchases of new equipment would be prudent considering all six of those census tracts correspond to population centers of the county.

The Ohio Opportunity Index tells a similar story but a bit more fine-grained.

I know that I will not make any dramatic advances forward with it being the holidays. Local social attitudes are alternately breathtaking and depressing. I know I will need help to try to drive forward any positive movement and that going it alone will likely not lead to success.

The problem I have is that I am ending 2020 stumped on the tech side. Just exactly what would work to meet mass communication needs within the socioeconomic situation? Building something bigger and more complex is not necessarily the answer when people look at me strange when I ask if they've ever heard of a Roku or Apple TV...