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Be Right Back Nadav Soroker
Nadav Soroker
NORTH BAY BOHEMIAN | JULY 31–AUGUST 6, 2013 | BOHEMIAN.COM
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Santa Rosa’s Community Media Center may see a second life yet. In March, Santa Rosa’s city council reversed a threat to shut down the community resource, which produces such television programming as Women’s Spaces, Eat the Fish and Galactic Messenger, and gave the center a six-month stay with a stern directive to become more relevant, sustaining and innovative. Enter Daedalus Howell, who as new executive director has rebranded the center as CMedia and introduced drastic changes expected to satisfy the city. “My first mandate was to figure out a way to create revenue,” Howell explains, “so that we could be a little more autonomous from the city and proceed operating with or without them.”
IMPULSE BUY A new initiative encourages stores in low-income areas to stock healthier items on more prominent shelves.
Daily Intake In poorer areas of Santa Rosa, a push for better nutrition choices BY LEILANI CLARK
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taying fit is easy, right? Just eat healthier and exercise more. Yet current research shows that the built environment in which people live heavily influences the choices they make regarding food and physical activity. Place Matters, a multicity, ongoing study by
the Joint Center for Political and Economic Study, has found that the “social, economic, and environmental conditions in low-income and non-white neighborhoods make it more difficult for people in these neighborhoods to live healthy lives.” Danielle Moreno, HEAL Zone coordinator with the Sonoma
County Department of Health, agrees. “A person’s neighborhood can greatly influence their health outcomes,” he says. At the local level, the Healthy Eating, Active Living Community Health Initiative (HEAL), implemented through the Community Activity and Nutrition Coalition of Sonoma County, aims to transform the built environment of Roseland and Kawana ) 10 Springs, two Santa Rosa
To that end, CMedia will solicit sponsorships from local businesses, not unlike sponsorships seen on KQED or KRCB, Howell says. Video content for the businesses will be created in-house and broadcast on one of the four CMedia channels— likely Channel 30, being reimagined as a Sonoma County arts and lifestyle channel. Howell calls it a “Trappist monk” model, referencing the monks who make beer and other goods and sell it to support their spiritual practice: “We’re in our brewing-the-beer phase, creating a more obvious commercial endeavor.” Howell has also reorganized the staff, reached out to area schools and met with the city to check the center’s plans with city staff’s expectations. As for interest from the Sonoma County Museum, KRCB, the Community Foundation and the Sonoma County Arts Council to run the center? “They’ve all retracted,” says Howell. Howell has written for the Sonoma Index-Tribune, Sonoma magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle—and, in the North Bay Bohemian, helmed a column on the changes in digital media. The city council plans to discuss the center’s contract at its Aug. 27 meeting.—Gabe Meline
The Bohemian started as The Paper in 1978.