LAKEWOOD —Lakewood Mayor Bob Murphy has become a minor celebrity to folks who follow his monthly , “Spotlight on Lakewood.”
The show is one of many on Channel 8 and follows Murphy as he finds interesting businesses, historic places and colorful people across Colorado’s fifth-largest city. Over the years, he’s flipped burgers, scaled indoor rock climbing walls and served up more early-morning lattes than he can count.
Murphy said his experience hosting the show — also — has been rewarding, and community feedback has been positive.
“I’m always grateful when I’m stopped in the grocery aisle — and I hear it a lot — when people say they watch, and they do watch … we have a pretty significant viewership,” Murphy said.
As part of an agreement with Comcast, the city of Lakewood is able to broadcast its own programming — ranging from council meetings to news productions — into the homes of nearly 30,000 cable subscribers via Channel 8. Last month, the city paid $109,000 to upgrade to a high-definition signal, said Kit Lammers, Lakewood’s communications manager.
“We had to pull a bunch of new cable in, and we upgraded some of our equipment that’s been running for 14 years nonstop,” Lammers said. “We were finally able to replace a lot of stuff that could have taken us off the air if it broke.”
Now viewers on the high-definition spectrum can tune in Channel 880 while the signal for Channel 8 will be greatly improved.
“Our analog signal with Comcast just wasn’t a great signal,” Lammers said. “Anytime you have a long cable that analog travels through like we did, you have static, you have interference and sometimes the audio isn’t great.”
Knowing eyes can gloss over at the mention of a government TV station, but Lammers said his small team tries to make the programming fun so viewers keep tuning in. Channel 8 also works with other regional government stations for programming around broader issues like light rail or flood mitigation.
The city also posts videos from the dozen or so programming categories on the city website and , said Stacie Oulton, a city public information officer.
“The main benefit and the main reason we do this is it’s helpful for residents,” Oulton said. “We bring democracy right to their front rooms. They can watch council meetings in their living rooms or in front of the computer.”
Channel 8 has come a long way since it got its start in a closet-sized room in 1996 in Lakewood’s former government building. Four years later, the city built new offices and, along with it, a full production studio with separate control rooms.
On a back wall of the studio rest two rows of shelving packed with dozens of awards. Last year, Channel 8 picked up a second-place award from what’s considered the benchmark for government-run TV stations,
“Absolutely, the city of Lakewood — Kit and their team — they set the mark pretty high for government programming,” said Keith Reeves, NATOA board member and a TV station manager for the the city of Austin, Texas. “A lot of cities around the country, including Austin, follow their programs.”
Austin Briggs: 303-954-1729, abriggs@denverpost.com or twitter.com/abriggs
