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. In Stoughton, the idea began close to the ground: local people, local wiring, local programs, and a belief that a community could have its own television voice before the systems around it had fully caught up.
Accounts of WSTO’s early history describe Bob and Janeen helping establish the station before Stoughton even had cable television, running cables through the city and broadcasting into local homes. When cable providers later came to Stoughton, Viking Media Corp. and the City of Stoughton negotiated a franchise agreement that allowed the community station to continue, eventually becoming WSTO TV. That early mix of volunteer energy, technical improvisation, city partnership, and public purpose captures the oldest spirit of community media: people making a channel because their town had stories, meetings, music, school events, and civic life worth seeing.
The Burrels’ legacy is not only that they helped start an unusually early local station. It is that they showed what community media could look like before the field had a mature playbook. WSTO’s continued existence gives their work a rare kind of continuity: an early experiment that became a lasting public resource. In the larger history of public access, Bob and Janeen represent the local builders who proved that community television did not have to wait for permission from big systems. A community could begin by deciding it had something to say.
Shared by Community Media Voices — The Record