Janeen Burrel is a grassroots public access pioneer credited with helping establish WSTO TV in Stoughton, Wisconsin alongside Bob Burrel, running cables through the city and broadcasting directly to local homes before Stoughton had a cable television system. 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.
The Burrel effort in Stoughton was practical and local: the conviction that a community should be able to broadcast to itself, and the willingness to do the physical work of making it happen before anyone had written the rules about how.
Janeen's contribution to that founding effort 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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