Steve Fortriede

Steve Fortriede led the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he built Access Fort Wayne into one of the country's most distinctive public access operations, housed inside the main library building and offering community members free studio space, editing equipment, cameras, and training through the institution's existing civic infrastructure. Access Fort Wayne originates three public access channels from the library, giving the community's producers an institutional home that most access centers lack and connecting the tradition of public access television to the library's own long-standing commitment to open public information and community participation. He received the ACM's Sue Miller Buske Leadership Award in 1998.

His model of embedding community media within a public library demonstrated one answer to the question of how access centers sustain themselves in small and mid-size markets: by becoming genuinely useful to an institution that already has the community's trust.

Steve's work at Allen County showed that a public library and a public access station share the same fundamental purpose, and that sharing a building could mean sharing a constituency as well.