An Apology to All Who Rely on CNL2

From Jeff Noedel & Jeremy Tyler
Co-founders of CNL2

On Tuesday, we had a rare failure in our core technical “value add” to the community. We failed to livestream our interview of John J. Nance. We did, of course, record the interview, and we are processing it for publication this weekend. It was a terrific interview, and you will enjoy it.

I am writing this to you because it drives me nuts when a service we rely on has a glitch or a fail, and doesn’t proactively explain it to its customers or constituents. I expect proactive transparency of utility companies. I expect proactive transparency of transit services. I expect it of important websites. And you should be able to expect it of your livestreaming news media and entrainment source.

What is “proactive transparency?” It is acknowledging a fail in near real time, and following-up with objective findings and lessons learned — all without being asked.

CNL2 aims to support our County and our islands in multiple ways: quality investigative journalism, writing and photography; engaging recorded video productions; and eventually a valuable internet radio service. We also are eager to train volunteers and interns in all aspects of television and radio production. But our #1 value add is meant to be livestreamed community television.

“Live” is in our name. The “L” in CNL2 stands for Live. (County News LIVE 2.0)

“Live” is to television as “live” is to theatre. It’s why people flock to live concerts and live dance and live sports. Humans will always prefer the excitement of seeing things as they are happening, and that includes the potential for mistakes and adlib. There is a place for recordings and layers of editing and sweetening, but there’s no place like live.

We invested three days in talks with our livestream vendor since Tuesday’s fail. After investigation and trials with multiple livestream vendors a year ago, we chose the best vendor. And we still think they are the best. But they stumbled on Tuesday and chose to initially believe CNL2’s Jeremy Tyler was responsible for the failed streaming.

That seemed highly unlikely to me, as Jeremy has steeped himself in the protocols of livestreaming, and he has been in the hot seat for scores of livestreams, including almost 40 weeks in a row of the livestreamed public affairs show with co-host Heather Spaulding, editor of the Journal of the San Juans.

We kept asking questions and checking variables at our end. On Friday afternoon, we received the second of two confirmations that the failure was with our livestreaming service provider. They remained vague, but said the problem was fixed. They said it’s never happened before, and will never happen again. I don’t believe two-thirds of that, but I do appreciate them owning (under pressure from us) that they were responsible for the failure. They put it in writing and verbalized it to us.

We should always learn from our failures, and in this case we learned we need to have a completely redundant, completely separate vendor to switch to in the home stretch before a livestream. So that will happen as soon as we can afford it.

We also will be changing our policy to begin livestreaming earlier before a scheduled live production. Perhaps 30 minutes before a scheduled show. I’m not sure if we will be streaming mic checks and camera adjustments to your phones, tablets, computers and TV sets, but please know we will be streaming 30 minutes before a show starts. And by September 1, I hope, we will have a fully redundant second vendor in place as an instant alternative.

I do not mean to imply we are infallible here in the Friday Harbor CNL2 studio. We make a range of mistakes on a daily basis — like a buffet table of errors and boo-boos. Starting with my own on-camera work. I am quite possibly the worst live host you’ll ever see, and I never intended to be the face of CNL2. I think of myself as a placeholder until some of the much more familiar faces here claim a piece of the bandwidth — a slot on the timeline. Then I will spend more time as a journalist, as well as playing the role of our Walt Disney figure: dreaming up new attractions at CNL2.

In coming months, I expect you will see far less of me and far more of your friends and neighbors. Maybe you, your spouse, or your best friend will feel called to step onto the stage, or into the control room of our new non-profit community livestreaming television?

In tribute to the style of 1950s television that inspired me to create CNL2, the more benign mistakes (aka “bloopers”) make live television even more entertaining. We are not striving for perfection. We are just striving for reliability and authenticity.

This is a good time to thank our tech team: Jeremy Tyler plus Board member and volunteer TV Director Dave Schnuckel.

And we thank John J. Nance for his grace at the moment we canceled the livestream (or, as it turns out, it canceled itself). And we apologize to the multiple of people who told us they were ready to watch the Nance interview live.

Please keep the faith! The tiny staff and growing base of volunteers — along with our fantastic Board of Directors — are all working to will into existence non-profit community television and radio for San Juan County for decades and generations to come.

This was one of many potholes to come, on a long, enjoyable road to one of the nation’s great little community television stations. The AI-generated image below is a roadway into a sunrise, not a sunset… if that needed to be explained!