Alan Bushong

Alan Bushong began his community media career at Austin Community Television in Texas, spending eleven years there and serving the last three as executive director before being hired in 1989 to start Capital Community Television in Salem, Oregon, then the largest state capital in the nation without a local broadcast television station. He built CCTV from the ground up, launching it out of the Salem Public Library and growing it over three decades into an 11,000 square foot multimedia operation on Trade Street with two studios, two production trucks, a radio station, and a joint information center for local government emergency communications. In that time CCTV taught media skills to several thousand people and produced more than 10,000 programs, with its 2017 live total solar eclipse broadcast drawing nearly 60,000 views on YouTube and Facebook.

Alan served 20 years on the ACM national board of directors. While serving as board chair, the Alliance accomplished a rare overturning of a federal law at the Supreme Court, eliminating a provision that would have allowed cable companies to exercise editorial control over community television channels, a victory that protected the open platform on which public access has always depended. He received the 2020 Dirk Koning-George Stoney Award for Humanistic Communication.

His career connects the field's founding generation to its current one: the work of starting a station from nothing, sustaining it through technology shifts, and defending at the national level the legal ground that makes community television possible.