The People's Voice
WFUZ-TV | The People’s Voice Podcast
The People’s Voice shines a spotlight on the individuals shaping Coastal Alabama, Northwest Florida, and communities across the Southeast. Each episode features candid conversations with local leaders, public officials, business owners, candidate for office, advocates, and everyday citizens who are working to create meaningful change.
From local politics and policy to grassroots initiatives and community success stories, we go beyond headlines to explore the real issues impacting our region. Our mission is simple: give the microphone to the people, encourage informed dialogue, and highlight solutions that strengthen our communities.
If you care about civic engagement, regional growth, and the voices driving positive change, The People’s Voice delivers authentic conversations that matter.
The People's Voice
The People's Flock Camera
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Blair and Thomas discuss turning the tables to be a "Flock Camera" for the government, meeting meetings and more meetings, how you can help not letting Liberals win, and more!
Check out our BRAND NEW website at www.wfuz-tv.com!
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you may be. I'm Thomas Jenkins. This is WFUZ TV's the People's Voice podcast. I'm here in the studio today with Blair. I don't have a joke because nothing's funny about today. Blair, what is it you say we do here?
SPEAKER_01Well, we've been doing a lot of stuff lately, and I wanted to touch on for new followers, what exactly we're doing. So we have a video production service company. Our podcast is one component of WFUZ TV. So we have our show, The People's Voice, which has three seasons, which you can all find on WFUZTV.com and on YouTube.
SPEAKER_00Which is almost a hundred episodes in. This is like what 92, 93, somewhere in there.
SPEAKER_01We're almost 100 episodes of The People's Voice. So thank you everyone for watching. And on that same website and YouTube, you can also view all of our town halls and community meetings. So the other thing we do is we go to these town halls and community meetings, we pull up highlights, we post the whole meeting. Um if you don't find the whole meeting on our page here, you're probably gonna find it on YouTube. And you can watch these meetings in full. Now, let's talk about that. We don't get paid to do that, okay? We go do it because people request it and because people say they want to see what's going on. And then other people, you know, they go back and forth. So you talk a little bit about the community meetings and what's going on with that.
SPEAKER_00Well, let's talk about first of all, we didn't know that Foley doesn't live stream any of their meetings. That was a surprise to us. So that was some unique coverage that we were able to get for the Foley Horse Arena. Uh, and we were glad to do it, like she said. Uh the thing that is always interesting is people want us. Like we get messages, hey, go cover this meeting. Well, we may not actually have the means with which to do that. It's our time and dime, as I put it, uh, when we go do things, and there is a real cost to being able to do this. And so we can't always just at every beck and call go to every single thing. But we are glad to cover stories that matter. Every story matters, of course, and that's why we're called the People's Voice Podcast. But it takes real dollars, and we don't we don't get any dollars in return at this juncture. And the other thing that is that amazes me is the demand for the immediacy of release of some of these videos. Sometimes I gotta cook dinner, bro. You know, uh I gotta put food on the table for my family, and we can't always get right to it. It's hard, unless you're here in the studio with me, to understand, upload speed uh when it comes to transferring data from a card to the computer, from the software to the server on Facebook. It takes hours. This this is hours. It's all pretty much a full-time job for us to run WFUZ TV at zero cost. And that's why we offer video services, photography services, and we're about to offer sponsorships. You may have seen our neat little news ticker on the last couple of live streams that we did, and we're going to start offering advertising space and sponsorship space in those tickers. We'll talk more about that later. Uh, what else we got?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I just wanted to say that you some of you expect a lot from people who are doing this for free on our own time outside of our work that we usually get paid for. We would love to do this and get paid for it and make a living off of it.
SPEAKER_00We'd love to do it full time.
SPEAKER_01There are things that WKRG and other stations just don't do. We're the only people there. That happens frequently.
SPEAKER_00And they can't be everywhere at once either. No.
SPEAKER_01There's other media outlets, and you know, we have we see uh shout out to Grant, we see Lanyap at places, we see Gulf Coast Media.com. They're not doing video, yeah, AL.com. They're not doing video streaming like we are with like a direct source, they're reporting on it, but they're paying those reporters. Yeah, those reporters, that's their job. Like we're we're not paid reporters, we're people that want to promote transparency and civic engagement. So we try to bring the information to the people since we know the people can go to the meetings. That's the whole point of the town hall community meeting section of what we do. We want to keep doing that. If you're interested in helping us, you can donate. The website has a donate button. You can do a sponsorship. We will throw your logo up on our ticker when we go live and other things we'll promote your business. You can hire us for video services, commercials for your business, editing, creations.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00We'll read a commercial right here on the air before the show even starts.
SPEAKER_01Brought to you by so we're just getting started in that aspect of trying to make this something that we can do full time. Right now, we're not quite there. We're giving up we're basically doing it full time, but for nothing. We still have to work like double time. We have a lot of different jobs between the two of us to try to make a living. So it would be cool to see this grow. And if you're out there and interested in supporting us, we would absolutely love that. If you just want to watch, if you want to share, that helps too. Everything you're doing is helping. So just throwing it out there to be a little kind, to have a little grace whenever you urgently want something up. Just know that we are giving up our paid work hours and time in our personal lives to make this happen for people because we believe in it. And if you believe in us, it'd be cool to reciprocate and help a little bit.
SPEAKER_00And it isn't out of the norm to ask for your financial support. NPR does it. Don't let the liberals win.
SPEAKER_01Right. So also, I wanted to touch on the reception we get at some of these meetings. So, like 90% of the time, people are super nice.
SPEAKER_00Shout out to the Foley staff and council and mayor. They were very uh warm and welcoming when we were there.
SPEAKER_01So, shout out to the mobile MPO people, they were very cool.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Autumn, her name was Autumn. She was really nice. So everybody, like generally, when we go places, it is we get received warmly. Other outlets tell us they appreciate what we're doing. Even straight like it's the best feeling when you guys recognize us and you come up to a meeting and say, I appreciate what you're doing. Thanks for coming out to stream. Like it means a lot. The thank yous are small but very meaningful because this seems to be thankless work a lot of the time. So just throwing that out there. What else did we want to touch on?
SPEAKER_00So you're probably asking yourself, well, why watch us? We can watch the stream on the county page. You want to tell them?
SPEAKER_01There's multiple reasons you can watch us instead of the county page. Or you can watch both. We're not saying don't watch the county page, don't watch the city page. We know that people don't watch it. That's why we're here because they're not sharing it to groups, they're not coming at it with uh, you know, dynamic angles, they're not doing zooms and pans, they're stagnant cameras, they're motion detected. When someone goes up and talks, and you know, it works for the matter of public record, but for meetings that you want a little different perspective, that's why we're here. Obviously, we can't be everywhere. We can't guarantee we'll cover every single public meeting because that would be impossible. But we want, if you have ideas or a suggestion for meeting, we do appreciate suggestions as long as you know that they are suggestions that we can't physically and monetarily make that happen every time. But important ones where you know there's a hot contested item on the agenda or people are really worked up about something, we definitely want to try to be there, so let us know. And it doesn't have to be a contentious public meeting.
SPEAKER_00It can be And to speak that a little further, there was actually a sitting commissioner that was in attendance online on our feed. Uh and you know who wasn't in attendance? Uh newly erect elected erected elected commissioner Richard Cox was not at the meeting until the very end after we left. We left when the main part of the master plan meeting had finished, and it surprised us and disappointed us to not see him there, considering this was heavy on uh farmers. Farmers, yes. So that Richard Cox, you're still on notice. I got my facts straight.
SPEAKER_01So we we appreciate the Commissioner Alex and you know, current commissioners that were there at that meeting for planning and zoning. I've never been to a planning and zoning county meeting before. It was kind of interesting. Of note, um, the work session part before the meeting was interesting because that one planning member, Scott Schamberger, shout out to him. He was really fighting for the people, I thought. He was really like advocating for transparency and public input, and there needs to be more notice before we do these things. He was the one that was like spitting facts in the work session. He was quieter during the actual session. But at that point, they'd already decided to table this. They decided to table that master plan before it even had public comment. So the public comment at one point was kind of just for people to say their piece, but they already knew that this was there was no way they could pass this. Um yeah, it's interesting.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so let's segue back to the MPO meeting. So we post the MPO meeting, and all of a sudden there's a bunch of comments. No tolls, no tolls. Well, the time to do that would have been at the meeting. There was no public input, there were no uh concerned citizens at this meeting, and it's it's not difficult to go to your little Gemini AI there. I hate to say the the AI word, but Google is Gemini AI these days. You can't avoid it. When you Google search and you say, what's going on in Baldwin County? What's going on in Mobile? What are the main things and issues that are happening? It will give you a nice, beautiful, itemized list of every single thing that's coming up. And I did that, and it said, hey, there's an MPO coming up for the Mobile Metropolitan Planning Commission, and they're going to be deciding uh some important things, so that might be something to cover. It's we can't make you aware of everything. We can't fulfill your civic duty for you. We're kind of like National Geographic. We're gonna go there with a camera and watch the lion eat the bunny. I I like the bunny visual. And so your comments they don't matter. Showing up uh in the Facebook, sorry, your Facebook comments after the fact, they just don't matter. Argue about that in the comments below. But you've got to show up. We're we need an oil change, we need gas in the car, but we still win. Life is happening. You know, somebody was offended because I said, you know, get involved. Well, how dare you shame me for that? I'm not trying to shame you, but I am trying to say that everybody's living life out here and it's not easy, but we still do the shit.
SPEAKER_01That's right.
SPEAKER_00So we're gonna keep going to these events and we're gonna keep filming and we're gonna keep live streaming. You can kind of think of this as a flock camera for the government, if you will. Expound on that. So, really, that's all we had to say today. That is the end of the week wrap-up. And so, with that, we're gonna say motherfucker. Go ahead.
SPEAKER_01So, yes, we are gonna be a flock camera for the government. We're going to be there keeping an eye, and just like people say with the flock cameras, you know, if you're not doing nothing wrong, you're nothing to be afraid of. Same thing. If you're not doing anything wrong, you don't got nothing to be afraid of with the media coming in to just watch a meeting. We're not there to make a scene, we're not there to be to angle it as much as y'all want to believe that we're trying to put an angle on things. We're really not. We try to be so neutral. Oh, like the one guy.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's it. That that that was the other thing. We're not TMZ, we're not going there to go, whoa, look what they did today. We're going there to be objective reporters by and large.
SPEAKER_01They always say you're not telling the full story. We literally post the full meetings on YouTube, be full thing, from the prayer to the adjournment. It is online. And then we write a short synopsis of the meeting with the highlight reel. Like we're not trying to angle it. It's literally the we can't put a whole transcript of the meeting. So, yes, it's going to be shortened, but we're doing that to summarize because people have, like we always say, attention span of a goldfish, and they're not going to sit there and summarize it for themselves. They want to read a summary. That's what people do. So that is what it is, and that's what I got to say.
SPEAKER_00All right, and that's all we got. Y'all have a blue belt country day. We will see you next time.