I'd like to thank all of you who took part in our 20th Anniversary Events on April 11th!  The evening was a powerful tribute to the important mission of MTN and the significant role community television plays in Minneapolis.  And it was a lot of Fun!   As we celebrate twenty years it is important that we also visualize and prepare for the next twenty years.  We need to ensure our place in the media community.  Once again the FCC is preparing to make changes that will allow for one company to own more media outlets in a specific locale.  Thus, your local newspaper, broadcast television station and radio stations could be under a single control.  In many rural areas radio stations are now owned by a corporate parent company that feeds its signal right to the local transmitter, leaving little to no local content.   Those of us who create media know how labor intensive this work can be, but this knowledge also gives us insight into how easy it is to manipulate, or just tell one side of a story.  We know that no one media source can give us all the information needed to understand the complexities of any story.  Minneapolis is a complex place, made up of many people with different stories to tell.  This mix of voices is what makes up a true democracy. When we visualize MTN in the future, we cannot predict the technology that will be available to us.  What will a camera or edit suite be like in twenty years?  Will cable television remain a multi-channel delivery mechanism into our homes?  We can study and anticipate these questions, but we cannot predict the answers. But we do know that we will need a place where citizens can come and share their stories, where local events can be highlighted, candidates can debate, high school sports events can be featured and home grown entertainment shared. MTN will be needed. Thanks for all of your support over the last twenty years and stay with us as we continue to fulfill our mission of "Strengthening community by encouraging creation of and access to programs and information using electronic technology.” - Pam Colby