By Lenny Strauss
Hometown Weekly Correspondent
Medfield TV’s Executive Director, Katie Duval was given the distinct honor of receiving the 2026 Emerging Leader Award from the Alliance for Community Media (ACM). Established in 1976, the ACM is the premier organizational advocate of promoting and preserving the right to media training, production, and civic engagement that supports community voices through Public, Educational and Government Access (PEG) channels and other forms of local media. She will be receiving this award in her attendance of their national conference in Madison, Wisconsin from June 23rd to 25th.
The Emerging Leader Award recognizes community media professionals who demonstrate the value of community centered growth, while also finding ways to innovate to strengthen the impact local programming has on the community at large. As an already award-winning video producer, director and community engagement leader with over 15 years of experience in media production, Duval is no stranger to success. Her taking over the role of Executive Director for Medfield TV in 2022 has increased its scope and reach within town, including significant growth, and an increase in community involvement in local productions.
We at the Hometown Weekly had the opportunity to sit down and speak with Duval at her office in Medfield TV’s headquarters, to hear her perspective on receiving this illustrious award, as well as her plans for the future of local programming and media in town!
LS: “Is there a specific project or initiative you’ve worked on that you feel contributed the most to this ACM recognition?”
KD: “It started with a colleague of mine that had nominated me for the award. She is a close friend of mine, Liz, who works at BevCam in Beverly. I think she was impressed with the work and fundraising we had been doing here. I talked in depth with her about the Scarecrow Spectacular event we created three years ago. We loved doing it, and she was impressed with the magnitude of it, particularly in how much we were able to put together in such a short amount of time. She thought it would be something we could share with other community media centers so they could create similar events to that one. Since then, we’ve moved on to other plans that focus our operations on more of our mission, and a couple of initiatives I’ve focused on include education for students in elementary through high school, and providing production services for businesses and nonprofits in the community.”
LS: “How does Medfield TV collaborate with local groups or organizations to best reflect the makeup of the town?”
KD: “We collaborate with other groups in town very closely, especially the nonprofits in town. I am part of Sustainable Medfield; I go to their quarterly meetings and just see how Medfield TV can help support their sustainability efforts. I'm also a member of MCAP, which is Medfield cares about prevention. One way that we work with them is to offer programming to students outside of school that gives them opportunities to avoid getting involved in substance use and give them other outlets for their creativity and education in a different setting. I have also been involved with MEMO in the past, and being involved in the business organizations in town is really important to me. I feel that the businesses in town, while smaller are deeply ingrained in the makeup of the community. I want to be able to give back and support as many organizations as we can in Medfield.”
LS: “In a media environment so hyper-focused on national streaming platforms, what value does local programming offer to Medfield residents today?”
KD: “I think that local programming is increasingly important. Hyper-local news, hyper-local reporting, it's just becoming kind of rare, so places like the Hometown Weekly, Medfield Insider, Medfield TV, the places where you can get that hyper local information about your town and your community without it being tainted by bias.”
“It's really ground level grassroots information. I think it is so beneficial for the community, and I would be so sad if places like ours started to disappear, so that is a reason why I've gotten so involved in Mass access. We are really trying to be champions for community media centers across Massachusetts. Our state is a really rare case. We have over 250 community media centers in this state; that's a larger concentration of community media centers. than either California or Texas, which are two of the biggest states in the country. So, really supporting local media in Massachusetts is so important, because it is so unique. National media outlets just aren't going to give you the same information that local news outlets will.”
LS: “How do you balance traditional cable channel broadcasting with digital platforms like YouTube and online streaming to reach younger viewers?”
KD: “We try to put our programming on both cable and YouTube. We’re just not going to reach everyone if we only put it on cable, although that is a requirement in the town's contracts with the cable companies, unfortunately we know that cable subscriptions are just rapidly declining. If we're only broadcasting on cable, we're not providing the service that we should be to the community. Therefore, we make sure that all of our programming goes on YouTube as well and is live streamed to YouTube whenever we can so that people can get the information they need right away.”
LS: “The ACM notes that community media is facing major technical and funding disruptions. What are your primary strategies to protect and sustain Medfield TV's funding?”
KD: “Something that I'm really trying to focus on is community outreach and making sure that I meet as many people in the town as I can. I want to ensure that they know how important it is for Medfield TV to exist, because this is their location where they can exercise their First Amendment rights on a platform where people all across the town can see it or hear it. I also want people to just recognize, if Medfield TV didn't exist, what they would be missing out on, it would be so much more difficult for the town to be able to provide accurate information without these services.”
“School committee meetings, school building committee, town and select board meetings are all broadcast on Medfield TV. While we do get some funding from cable, that has been diminishing rapidly for the last 13 years. If the town had to start contracting local producers or production houses to start covering those events, those costs would be quite large. I don't know what would happen, and if they would be able to afford to provide those services, especially at a time when so many towns are hurting for funds as well. It’s just a really hard time for a lot of people. And a lot of municipalities financially, so if we can continue to exist and provide those important services to the town, we're going to do it for as long as we can.”
LS: “As an emerging leader, how do you feel is the best way to mentor the next generation of local creators, how does student engagement with Medfield TV help cultivate that?”
KD: “I really value my ability to be able to work with the younger generations and teach them what I've learned. I want to welcome any student in Medfield to just come to Medfield TV and check it out and see what we have to offer. We have an excellent staff with combined over 30 years of experience in media broadcasting, and we'd love to share our experiences with them to help guide them in this rapidly advancing digital media world to gain critical media literacy and understand what they are consuming on a day-to-day basis on social media or TV. Particularly in realizing that everything they see is not always true, and they need to be able to deduce that for themselves. I also want to be able to give anyone of any age a creative outlet here at Medfield TV, which thankfully I’ve seen grow in the many individuals I’ve interacted with.”
“I’ve had many interns throughout my career, who have gone off to have incredible careers of their own. There are students of mine that are going to Syracuse for television and sports broadcasting. I have former students who now work at NESN, NBC, even CBS. I wonder what they would say about how their experience in a community media center helped shape their career path.”
Readers! Look out for more of Medfield TV on channels 8, 47 and 22 for Xfinity users, and channels 36 and 45 for Fios users; or their Medfield TV YouTube channel, for more of their unique public, educational, and government programming for the town!
