ORLEANS — Friday, July 18 was the last day of work for five employees at Lower Cape TV: Executive Director Teresa Martin; studio administrator Emma Fillion; production director Rafal Kowalczyk; producer of the arts-focused ArtsLight program Johnny Bergmann; and KidNews producer Leah Belliveau.
Two more staffers — community reporter Anna Westerberg and climate reporter Angela McNerney — are expected to be laid off at the end of August, Martin told the Independent. Both are finishing projects funded by external grants: a collaborative reporting project with the Falmouth Enterprise about the Americans With Disabilities Act and a documentary on climate change called Shifting Tides, to be screened at the Orpheum theater in Chatham on Aug. 21.
That means Martin’s nonprofit video newsroom, Cape Cod News, will no longer have Lower Cape TV as its main source of funding. She had been running Cape Cod News out of Lower Cape TV since 2017.
Martin said the station made fundraising efforts to help pay for the newsroom, but as income from Comcast declined, the LCTV board realized it would need to make cuts. On July 3, the board informed its employees that they could no longer fund the newsroom due to declining cable revenues and were laying off the bulk of the station’s staff, Martin said.
Current members of the board did not responded to the Independent’s requests for comment.
“It’s not like a news station was shut down because of lack of funding,” LCTV’s former board president, Walter Sebastian, told the Independent. “They started doing the news, but there really wasn’t a revenue stream that they generated to cover the cost of doing that.” Sebastian resigned in January.
Bev Hobbs, who was president until she resigned in August 2024, told the Independent she and other board members left over disagreements about how to fund the station’s continued operation.
“I thought everybody had to buckle down and start conserving funds, but others thought you had to spend money to make money,” she said.
Hobbs attributed the station’s financial trouble to the purchase of a $755,000 studio building on Namskaket Road in Orleans in 2021. Before that purchase, the studio had run out of Nauset Regional High School until construction necessitated the move.
“They were really getting a sweet deal at the high school,” Hobbs said. Cape Cod News likely would have been able to continue operating with grant funding and donations, she said, if not for the purchase and renovation of the new building.
Ultimately, Hobbs said, “I don’t think the news stuff they were doing was paying off at all. There was no alternative source of revenue.”
Funding Concerns
Much of the funding for Lower Cape TV comes from the 1984 Cable Act. “In exchange for cable companies using public rights of way, municipalities can ask for a vague thing called access,” Martin said. “Cable companies either provide it to you or give you money to do it yourself.”
“Access” takes the form of a PEG station — a locally run television station dedicated to public (P), educational (E), and government (G) content. Those stations are funded through a portion of a cable provider’s revenues and are regulated by a town’s cable television license agreement.
The money available to PEG stations is based solely on cable bills, not additional income a cable company receives from payments for telephone or internet service. As more customers leave cable television for online streaming services, the money available to PEG stations declines.
Even though Comcast effectively has a monopoly on internet and telephone services on Cape Cod, only its cable television revenue counts toward funding PEG stations.
The five towns served by LCTV have the option of appointing representatives to the station’s board of directors, Martin said, but not all the towns do it. When Sebastian stepped down in January, he was the only Eastham representative on the board.
What’s Next?
Most viewers watched the newsroom’s stories on the program’s website rather than the televised broadcasts, Martin said.
She said Cape Cod News will likely continue outside LCTV, and that she’ll continue to post articles through the summer on the newsroom’s website. “We’re looking at how to spin it off into a new home,” she said. “We have a great team of journalists and editors, and you can’t have enough local news.”
She said that more details would emerge in about two weeks.
“I would love to have all the answers right now, but it takes time to thoughtfully look at all the options,” she said, adding that she was looking into journalism grants to fund the newsroom operation and pay her staff.
“We can’t do it forever pro bono,” Martin said. “But once we find the funding stream, we’ll figure out how we best structure it.”
She declined to estimate the amount of money needed to continue the newsroom operation.
The future is also unclear for KidNews, a weekly program Belliveau offered to students at Nauset Middle School and Eddy Elementary in Brewster. She described KidNews as “a journalism course in a club-like setting,” in which students put together stories about what was happening in the Nauset district’s schools, practicing writing and public speaking as they produced episodes of video news.
Belliveau said she was not sure where future funding would come from. She’s been given space at Orleans Elementary to produce the program next year, and technology teacher Dawn Steber has expressed interest in integrating KidNews into her own curriculum.
