ELCAT continues to grow as town's community link

Date: 9/14/2009

By Courtney Llewellyn

Reminder Assistant Editor



EAST LONGMEADOW The launching of the government access channel isn't the only thing Don Maki, director of ELCAT, has been up to.

East Longmeadow Cable Access Television, or ELCAT, is gearing up for an exciting school year. Maki said the fall scheduling on Channel 5 would be high school sports, including all varsity football games and all the home games from boys' and girls' varsity soccer and girls' volleyball.

"The hope is to run four varsity sports per season," Maki commented. He added that regularly covered events will continue on the channel as well. ELCAT is now running a full schedule of meetings on the government access channel, Channel 19.

Maki wants more for the town's own television station, though. He's still looking for community producers to come into the ELCAT studio to make their own programming.

"You can shoot an event or a dog in the backyard," he said, "as long as it's something people will be interested in." Maki noted that ELCAT gets a lot of solicitations from other community-produced programs from around the state, but he declines to take them because he wants to keep East Longmeadow's programming local.

"Ninety percent of the programming on ELCAT is produced in or about East Longmeadow," Maki said. "The average station only does 15 percent local. We are really focused on East Longmeadow."

The town's television studio will soon be producing weekly news segments by a class in the high school. The class revolves around reporting, writing and producing a 30-minute broadcast, and Maki, who will be teaching the course, said the program will become another source for local news.

"It will be a learning experience [for the students]," Maki said. "They'll understand how government works and how media works, and learn about objectivity. It's very ambitious."

As someone who is looking to vamp up the cable access stations, Maki is always looking for more input from residents. The recent ELCAT survey had 63 respondents, half of whom want to see ELCAT become a local news source. He noted that the overall response from the survey was a positive one.

One result of the survey that Maki mentioned specifically: 81 percent of respondents said they would watch ELCAT online. Maki plans on making that a reality over the next month.