Behind the cameras: Gavel Alaska broadcasts the business of state government to Alaskans

Yahoo

a day ago

Tulio Fontanella, a first-year production technician with Gavel, controls the cameras at a Senate Finance Committee meeting on Feb. 13, 2025 (Photo by Corinne Smith/Alaska Beacon)
Hours after a historic second veto of a bill to fund public education, Gov. Mike Dunleavy called a news conference on the governor's floor of the Alaska State Capitol. The shades were drawn, and a handful of reporters lined a long conference room table, as Dunleavy spoke and took questions for over an hour, explaining his criticisms and his veto.
In offices throughout the rest of the building, legislators on all sides of the politically contentious debate on how to fund Alaska schools, watched from behind closed doors, as well as school district leaders, news outlets, and Alaskans across the state — live, via the cameras of Gavel Alaska.
In the room, Gavel production crew Michael Penn operated a live camera broadcasting Dunleavy, with Tulio Fontanella sitting to the governor's right side, in a baseball cap, microphone in hand.
During the May 19 news conference, Gavel Alaska was nearing the end of another legislative session. For nearly 30 years, Gavel has provided a free, public broadcast of the business of the state government to the rest of Alaska. A team of eight, mostly seasonal staff, operates cameras and broadcasts remotely from a ground floor production studio at KTOO Public Media, on Egan Drive along the waterfront of Juneau.
'It's kind of the C-SPAN of Alaska,' said executive producer Will Mader, referring to the nonprofit cable TV network that has streamed the U.S. government in Washington, D.C., since 1979.
Above the chambers and committee rooms of the Alaska State Legislature, overlooking lawmakers' debates, governors' speeches, the prayers over floor sessions and the introductions of guests in the galleries, cameras and microphones capture the business of the State Capitol and Gavel broadcasts it live to Alaska. The team has just wrapped up covering another 120 day legislative session, with over 800 hours of live coverage broadcasting from the Capitol.
The team of Gavel Alaska are used to dealing with technical problems, but now, they're facing a potential new hurdle of federal cuts. Gavel's crew finished the session at a sensitive time for public broadcasting. President Donald Trump has proposed large-scale cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides a share of funding to KTOO and public media across the country and state.
Looking closely at Gavel Alaska gives a sense of the work that goes into giving the public access to state government. While the people in front of the cameras make the news, the people behind them rarely capture public attention.
Behind the cameras
On a late winter morning, Mader sits in front of a wall of monitors, gearing up for a busy day covering the Alaska State Legislature, which typically runs from January to May.
Teams of two staff monitor three or four robotic cameras in each chamber of the House and Senate, the committee rooms, and the hallways. During hearings or floor sessions, they toggle between cameras to focus on who is speaking, add captions with names and titles, feature speakers' presentations and provide information for public comment.
Mader said the most newsworthy topics are recorded and streamed on KTOO's statewide public affairs TV channel, KTOO 360TV. It's also transmitted via satellite through the Alaska Rural Communications Service statewide, for those without consistent internet. 'So it's available to anyone out in rural Alaska that can view it, just with an antenna,' he said.
Though all hearings are livestreamed online, on some days there can be up to six committee meetings at a time, so Mader said that can be a challenge deciding which three to feature at once. 'We always cover House and Senate floor sessions, and we almost always cover finance (committee) meetings,' he said. 'The budget is always the No. 1 issue in session. So that's one reason for covering finance, as well as that it's the last stop for most legislation before it gets to the floor.'
The Gavel broadcast launched in 1996, first with one cameraperson moving a manually operated camera between rooms of the Capitol to cover meetings, 'which isn't ideal, because people are facing all different directions,' Mader said.
Eventually, the Legislature started some basic webstreaming with its own cameras. Ultimately the Legislature agreed to an informal partnership with Gavel and KTOO to provide a more quality broadcast.
'They share access to the cameras, and then they get a higher quality video feed from those cameras,' said Mikko Wilson, production manager at KTOO.
The Gavel production at the Capitol saw a major technological upgrade in 2020, when grant funding and the purchase of new robotic cameras arrived at the same time as the COVID-19 pandemic.
'We had the quotes for the cameras. And I picked up the phone and said, 'Ship 'em. Send us the cameras, like we need the robots now!' Wilson said, smiling. 'And so that was my COVID project in 2020, pulling about 2 miles of cable and installing the 40-something-odd cameras inside.'
At the controls are new seasonal staff, like fresh college graduates learning broadcast production, as well as veteran Alaska journalists, like longtime Juneau photojournalist Michael Penn and former TV broadcaster Bob Laurie.
In a small studio off the main production bay, Laurie wrapped up covering a committee meeting and had time to talk. 'I try to really listen closely to what is being said, so that I can make sure I get the right names up, the right explainers, and kind of follow the flow of what is going on in the room. It takes a lot of focus for me,' he said.
Laurie first covered the Legislature as a young TV reporter, for a highly contentious session in 1981.
'The leadership in the House, it took them a long time to organize…before they had their 21 votes together,' he said, to form a majority caucus. 'We didn't have the, you know, 121 day sessions, and people were dissatisfied with nothing getting through. Things were held up.'
He said he slept on someone's floor while covering the action. 'I was the first full-time television reporter from outside Juneau to cover the Legislature,' he said. 'My competition followed about three days later — three days after I got on the air.'
That launched a television reporting career, then work in state government, before Laurie returned to cover the session seasonally with Gavel.
'So this is nice, clean. This is raw. All we're doing is getting the different shots,' he said. 'This is what is actually happening, so people can see their representatives at work.'
Some days Laurie is in the studio, and some days he's in the Capitol operating a camera to cover live events, like speeches from the governor or Alaska's U.S. senators. He said it's an opportunity for Alaskans to watch their elected officials in action.
'They can actually sit there and actually watch it and say, 'Oh, that's who I elected,'' he said. 'Whether it's good or bad. Without any editorial comment.'
Across the hall, Tulio Fontanella is covering a Senate Finance Committee hearing a report on the state's oil revenues. He grew up in Juneau and just graduated from college with a degree in sports media. He said while there's some comparisons to sports broadcasting, it's much slower.
'There will be times that you'll stay on a wide shot, just because you don't know who's gonna talk next or how quickly they'll be done talking,' he said. 'There's other people who pause a long time before they start speaking, so it's a balancing act, getting that right.'
His partner in the booth on captions, Robbie Gabel, who also grew up in Juneau, is also in his first year of broadcast production.
'I like when it's a little more hectic. It's a little slow. So it's fun when they're trying to get stuff in,' he said. 'I like it when it's more hectic and a lot more going on.'
The crew is on duty whenever legislators are live, so that means long hours and sometimes weekends, especially when bills are being voted on, and final budget negotiations take place at the end of May.
'It's more complicated than someone would think,' Fontanella added. 'This type of television, you know, is somewhat simplified, but also still more complicated than anyone would guess. Like Will does so much planning for what we do. And Mikko, with all the tech mishaps or whatever needs to be set up — they do a lot of work.'
Like C-SPAN, Gavel broadcasts the activities of all three branches of Alaska's government: the Legislature; the executive, such as governor's speeches or news conferences; and the judiciary, including oral arguments before the Alaska Supreme Court.
At times, Gavel broadcasts emergency response updates, such as from the U.S. Coast Guard or National Weather Service; it provided updates when one of the strongest storms on record, Typhoon Merbok, hit in 2022, impacting more than 35 communities in Western Alaska.
Gavel partners in Juneau and statewide
Gavel Alaska is an independent press outlet, but those broadcasts require close coordination with public offices around the state.
For broadcasting the Alaska Supreme Court, that's the court clerk's office; for the Legislature, that's daily coordination with the media team of the Legislative Affairs Agency, a nonpartisan support agency based in the Terry Miller Legislative Office on 6th Street behind the Capitol.
The agency also provides webstreaming on the state's website of all legislative floor sessions and committee meetings, for the public record, said Tim Powers, the agency's chief technology and operations officer.
'So KTOO is going to do their high production quality for all the popular meetings, and we're still going to create the record for everything that may not be as popular, yeah, and won't have as high demand on television,' he said.
The agency also coordinates all call-ins for the public to comment. 'You can testify on every bill in every committee in Alaska when they have public testimony, and that is not the case in other states,' he said.
'In some other states, you have to go to the State House to testify. In some other states, you're not allowed to testify, even if you do go to the State House, because they just don't take it. So it's unique, uniquely Alaskan, and I think it's a benefit to us,' Powers said.
Powers said typically they see an estimated 1 million minutes per year of teleconferencing. 'Yeah, it's a lot of people connected,' he said.
The Gavel livestream is watched closely by Alaska news outlets and journalists too, like Matt Acuña Buxton, who writes the political newsletter, the Alaska Memo.
'Literally — and I mean literally — I couldn't do my job covering the Alaska Legislature from Anchorage without Gavel Alaska's hard work,' he said. 'It's a lot more than just a camera in a legislative hearing, and Gavel's crews do so much behind the scenes to ensure we can see what's going on in Juneau, whether it be news conferences or the beloved hallway cameras.
'Their work with the broadcast during the day, which has to keep up with packed days of simultaneous hearings as well as the slow days, does a good job of balancing the big-ticket issues while also offering a wide look at things that you didn't know needed to be on your radar.'
Federal funding under threat
KTOO receives local funding, as well as federal funding, whose future is now uncertain.
The partnership with the state to broadcast Gavel Alaska is an informal one. 'We don't receive any state funding for actually making this happen,' said KTOO manager Justin Shoman, 'So we're really relying on these other sources.'
Since its start in 1996, the public television broadcast has been partly funded by the City and Borough of Juneau, to provide Alaskans access to the Capitol. Amid a long-running dispute on the location of Alaska's capital, the city's funding of the broadcast continues still today.
'Regardless of where the capital is in Alaska, it's still inaccessible easily to a large number of people,' Mader noted. 'So that's why I think, of all the states, having this service is most crucial in Alaska.'
The Gavel Alaska staffing and production costs about $750,000 per year, Shoman said, with $455,000 funded by the city.
The remaining roughly $295,000 is funded by a mix of sponsorships, underwriting, community donors and federal grant funding, including funding through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which also supports the general TV operations of KTOO. 'The majority of CPB funding goes to television. That's simply because television is more expensive to produce,' Shoman said.
That federal funding is threatened now, as Trump has proposed steep cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Shoman and other supporters of public broadcasting in Alaska are actively advocating, including flying to Washington, D.C., and meeting with Alaska's congressional delegation, urging them to protect the funding.
'For those who are concerned with the future of Gavel Alaska and that level of government, accessibility and transparency — it is reliant, in Alaska, on some federal funding, and it's important that people know that,' Shoman said.