Former Bedford TV Executive Katie Duval Reflects on Pandemic Changes: “Making Local Government Accessible to Everyone”
The Covid-19 pandemic has been transformative in so many ways. Occasionally there’s even a positive outcome.
“The ability for more residents to get involved expanded because the town provided an opportunity for people to be present and part of the meeting,” reflected Katie Duval, executive director of Bedford TV through the first two years of the coronavirus environment.
Duval, who took a similar position in Medfield at the beginning of March, outlined the decisions that led to this changed landscape.
When things started shutting down in March 2020, “I had a discussion with my staff, and we said we need to make sure we doing as much as we can, with all the changes that are happening,” Duval said. And she stressed, “We need to make local government accessible to everyone.”
She noted that Bedford TV already was recording the Select Board and the School Committee, so the immediate challenge was to integrate Zoom, the videoconferencing technology that fulfilled the provisions of the modified open meeting law.
“Everyone in our industry was pivoting. We were able to lean on the help of stations across the country to make this new technology easy to understand and accessible to everyone,” she said.
A free software program called ‘Open Broadcaster’ made it happen, Duval said. “Toward the beginning of April, we were recording and live broadcasting all of the government meetings. I feel like what we did to help the town really made us part of the fabric of the community and something residents could depend on to get the information.”
“Providing hybrid models for [board and committee] meetings is something a lot of communities will continue doing,” she predicted.
“The landscape of the media we presented really changed a lot,” Duval continued. “We became a hub of government meetings—no one was really producing any public programming. We helped the schools as well to broadcast virtual ceremonies and navigate new ways of doing graduation.”
Bedford TV also helped grassroots efforts like Operation Feed the Soul and the Bedford food pantry, through video fundraising events in May and December. BTV staff worked to make the virtual Dollars for Scholars awards presentation “as polished as we could make it.”
Duval also acknowledged that “a lot of bad things came out of the pandemic. Our staff was pretty burnt out. We tried to step up and help where we could, but that came at the expense of people’s mental health. We were all working from home, and it was tough not seeing our staff members and volunteers every day.”
Duval said after separation, some volunteers “just stopped being involved. We lost that family connection. I know some producers and some volunteers are looking forward to getting back in the studios.” She added, “When we started coming back into the office we realized how nice it was to talk face to face rather than texting or through Zoom.”
Another feature of the Bedford TV scene, teaching classes to kids, also had to come to a halt. When the coronavirus took over, “we were in the middle of a stop-motion animation class for middle schoolers,” as well as classes for students in the LABBB collaborative. “We had to stop right in the middle and give refunds and hope we would see them again soon.”
During that first summer, Duval said, Bedford TV offered one or two virtual classes, “but it just wasn’t the same.”
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