ICTN Fades to Black

Spring/Summer 2005

Just before 3 in the afternoon in late February Tina Patel and her cameraman, Tim Kiley, arrived on campus cold, but happy to do a story, she said, on a subject other than rain. At the flood control office in San Bernardino, more than 24 inches had fallen since the city’s official opening of the rainy season, October 1. That made it, to that point, the third wettest season in city history since weather trackers had been keeping such records at flood control, and the Inland California Television Network, established and managed by Cal State San Bernardino, had been following storm after storm for weeks.

It felt good to be indoors. Neither she nor Tim had ever been inside the Performing Arts Building Recital Hall at CSUSB. They were there that Wednesday to interview Val Limar-Jansen, who, in a couple of nights, would be doing two benefit performances of “Ethel,” a one-woman role she’d reprised from her original show at the university in 1989. ICTN aired the news story that same night during its usual 10 p.m. broadcast on Channel 3 in San Bernardino and 14 other local cities. It turned out to be Tina’s final story for the station. The next night a key piece of technology for the 15-month-old network went down, and for the first time ICTN was unable to broadcast. On Friday, knowing the system couldn’t be fixed in just a day, Cindi Pringle, ICTN’s executive director, broke sooner than she’d planned the difficult news to the crew that the station officially would cease operations as of that day, Feb. 25, 2005.

Covering an annual operating budget of nearly $1 million with a staff of 20 in news and production, CSUSB had initially seeded this innovation with funds from grants, contracts and corporate sponsorships. “When the university began to incubate ICTN more than three years ago,” said CSUSB President Albert Karnig, “the expectation always was that it would become a self-sustaining operation. Yet the support did not materialize. Because ICTN was based on a public broadcasting model, it wasn’t able to accept commercial advertising, and so, in the end, it couldn’t secure the underwriting revenue it needed to continue.”

Nonetheless, ICTN had made history. “We did,” said Pringle, who had led the development of ICTN since its initial proposal in 2000 and witnessed its first broadcast on Nov. 10, 2003. “I feel good about that.” ICTN had reached about one million viewers on cable alone, giving many parts of the inland region their first-ever local nightly newscast live and five nights a week. And it had done it with the aid of 15 cities in San Bernardino County through city cable access channels, done it through partnerships with The Sun and Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, the city of San Bernardino and KCSB-TV3.

ICTN had filled the void that L.A.TV stations could not, or would not. CSUSB was uniquely positioned to serve as a catalyst for launching the regional cable network, which is the first in the nation to be initiated by a university, said Karnig.

“I am immensely proud of what ICTN was able to achieve with a handful of highly dedicated professionals,” Pringle added. “What takes 10 times as many people to do in the Los Angeles market was executed by nine news professionals aided by the benefit of their years in the industry as well as the state-of-the-art digital equipment.”

Quietly and without getting the chance to say a proper goodnight, the station made its final broadcast to the cities of Big Bear Lake, Chino, Colton, Fontana, Grand Terrace, Highland, Loma Linda, Montclair, Ontario, Rancho Cucamonga, Redlands, Rialto, San Bernardino, Upland and Yucaipa, fully expecting that it would be back the next night with news of a new rainfall record, back more than likely with more rain stories, back certainly with, “Inland and throughout the Empire, you’re watching ICTN,” co-anchor Greg Weissman’s nightly lead in.

“To be sure, it was experimental,” Karnig said, reflecting upon the network’s beginnings, and before stories lamenting ICTN’S close began appearing in newspapers over the next few days. “I believe the effort made a significant contribution to the region.”

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