Saint Paul Neighborhood Network (SPNN) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit community media center created by the City of Saint Paul in 1984 to serve as the cable access provider for Minnesota's capital city, operating four non-commercial channels on the cable system reaching 52,000 households while serving the broader Twin Cities metro area.
SPNN's four channels include two public access channels (14 and 15) for community-produced and sponsored programs, an educational channel (16) for Saint Paul Public Schools and youth content, and a channel (19) for in-house productions covering cultural, civic, and arts programming. The organization provides studio space, equipment, podcast facilities, and media software to community members and nonprofits; runs adult documentary programs and youth cohort-based media education; and operates the Community Technology Empowerment Project (CTEP) AmeriCorps program to close the digital divide in underserved Twin Cities communities.
Saint Paul residents - in a city with significant Hmong, Somali, East African, Latino, and Native American communities alongside its long-established neighborhoods - rely on SPNN for the multilingual community programming, youth media education, and civic storytelling that make Saint Paul's extraordinary cultural diversity visible to itself on television.
3 people
Hubs are remembered through the people who built, staffed, trained, volunteered, and organized within them.
From people connected to this hub
A long-lost piece of community media history now lives in the Community Media Archive: ACM The Campaign for Media Democracy, a set of interviews from the 1998 ACM National Conference in Portland, Oregon about the effort to protect and expand public access television. The footage was created by Chad Johnston when he was at Antioch, studying with the legendary Bob Devine.
Read more →