Building Dayton’s First Public Access Channel
One Room, One Person, One Channel: How Roxie Cole Built Dayton’s Public Voice In 1977, Roxie Cole had an idea and a grant. The idea was that Dayton, Ohio deserved its own place on television.
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Dayton Public Access Television (DATV) is a nonprofit community media center that has served Dayton, Ohio with public access television since 1978, when it launched as Access-30-Dayton - one of the earliest public access operations in the country.
DATV operates on Spectrum Channel 5 in Dayton, Riverside, and Butler Township and related channels in Dayton's northern suburbs, providing training, equipment, and facilities for community members to produce programming. The organization's 400-plus members produce nearly 5,000 original local programs annually, and DATV has won multiple Alliance for Community Media Hometown Awards for Overall Excellence in Public Access Programming over its four-plus decades of operation.
Dayton residents use DATV to produce the religious, cultural, civic, and community programming that reflects one of Ohio's most historically significant industrial cities - a place where community media has served as a "freedom to communicate" forum for a diverse urban community navigating decades of economic change.
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