One of the things that drives me batty in Ashtabula County is the decrepit state of our knowledge ecology. I’m not quite sure if it can be saved. Our local daily broadsheet is down to an average of 12-16 pages. How do you come back from that? I’m at a loss. The weeklies produced by Gazette Newspapers are continuing ever onward but readership isn’t as strong. This is not an area that reads newspapers nearly as much as you might expect.

A look at the state’s most recent report on educational attainment by county shows Ashtabula County lags neighboring counties quite a bit. That would explain in large part why we’re not a community of readers. People quite likely lack the skills to read the bloody things!

Our local daily broadsheet only has a circulation of 7,500. Our four weeklies have a combined circulation of 11,200. The county’s population is 97,574. With no other local news sources we have an extremely disconnected population. The disinformation factory that is Facebook doesn’t work as an adequate substitute for having local media.

I suppose I should be looking at repos on GitHub like this one about how to stream to Twitch without OBS. I want to make a sort of teletext streamer to set and forget. That’ll be an initial step to bringing together a production service of some sort, I think.

These thoughts are incomplete. If I can trigger teletext streaming on my own that looks semi-decent then I can look at some of the broadcast automation tools out there that can be implemented. With those it would be possible to then proceed with rigging up an ersatz online OTT video channel. In the end a proof of concept has to be made to work first.

For now I need to sleep, though…