Bob Burrel was a community access pioneer in Stoughton, Wisconsin, where he and Janeen Burrel helped establish WSTO TV before the city had a cable television system, running cables through the city and broadcasting directly to local homes in one of the earliest citizen-built local access television experiments in the country. That work, which public access television history credits as beginning in 1968, predated the FCC rules, the NFLCP, and most of the policy framework that would eventually define PEG access, making Stoughton one of the origin stories of the field.
Bob's effort was practical and local: the belief that a community should be able to broadcast to itself, and the willingness to wire up the neighborhood and make it happen before anyone had written the rules about how.
What he and Janeen built in Stoughton is part of the evidence that community media was not invented by regulators or cable companies, but by people who thought their neighbors deserved a channel of their own.
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Bob and Janeen Burrel were early grassroots pioneers of community television in Stoughton, Wisconsin, where their work helped create what became WSTO TV, one of the country’s earliest community access channels. Their story belongs to the moment before public access had settled into familiar language, funding structures, and station models.
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