Visiting CMAC

Carey Higgins-Dobney
Mar 14, 2022
2 min read

CMAC is the Community Media Access Collaborative in Fresno. Fresno State partners with the organization to air a lot of our student productions, including Fresno State Focus, Focus on Sports, Technical Difficulties and other projects that we have completed over the years.

I work extensively with the wonderful crew at CMAC, including engineer Terry Dolph who fixes all of the things I find broken (!) in our studio at Fresno State. Executive Director Bryan Harley was even kind enough to appear on a conference panel I put together for AEJMC in 2020. Many of the other staffers are Fresno State graduates.

After 3.5 years, I finally made it see their studios. My car broke down the last time I was scheduled to visit and then a pandemic hit and made things weird for 2+ years!

March 7, 2022, however, was the day. The building itself is gorgeous, and is on the national historic register. It is The Fresno Bee building in downtown Fresno, where the local newspaper got its start. It then became the Fresno Metropolitan Museum of Art, History and Science. CMAC took over in 2012.

I'm a big fan of public murals, and CMAC sports a giant one that came about in conjunction with a grant from Arte Américas across the street.

Inside, it has all of the fun toys of a studio space! A nice-sized production studio, a big shiny TriCaster TC1 video switcher, a Behringer X32 audio board, LiveText for graphics.

Yes, I'm a studio nerd. But there are also other rooms for use, including a podcasting room (left pic) and a sound proof audio booth (middle pic). I think Terry got a kick out of putting me in there and closing the door behind me! ;) The pic on the right is essentially a one-person streaming studio setup.

They also have editing suites, conference rooms, VR equipment and a mobile production van. I'll have to dig up my pics of that last one from an event a couple of years back.