The Main Street Metra station in Evanston, near the shopping strip where The Wine Goddess operates. Photo: User:JeremyA / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.5
Evanston Community Television has begun producing a new program about the city’s businesses and organizations. The show, called Wards, premiered in late 2014 with a profile of The Wine Goddess, the wine shop and tasting room on Main Street.
A second installment was already in the works. It was to feature Homestead Meats, an artisanal butcher shop on Chicago Avenue. ECTV said more episodes would follow, each focused on a different local enterprise.
About the station
ECTV is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that doubles as a television station and training center. On cable it occupies three channels in Evanston: channel 6 for programs made by community members, channel 16 for city government programming, and channel 19 for educational programming from Evanston/Skokie School District 65. Its content is also streamed live and posted to YouTube, so a show like Wards can be watched without a cable subscription.
Part of the station’s mission is teaching residents to make television, which is how much of its public-access programming gets produced. Wards fits that pattern. Profiles of neighborhood shops are a natural subject for a community channel, and they are a form of free exposure that small merchants rarely get from larger media outlets.
The first subjects
The Wine Goddess sits at 702 Main Street. It is a wine-focused retailer that, according to Patch, has worked to educate drinkers as well as sell to them. Its owner, Diana Hamann, has also appeared on Chicago radio programs devoted to wine.
Homestead Meats, at 1305 Chicago Ave., sells meat and poultry. A butcher shop is an unusual choice for a local profile series, and that may be the point: Evanston’s independent shops range well beyond restaurants and boutiques, and a show covering them can range just as widely.
The choice of two businesses on different commercial strips, one near the Main-Dempster Mile and one in the Chicago-Dempster area, also suggested the series would roam the city. Viewers were told to look for Wards on cable and on ECTV’s YouTube page.
Local merchants had been promoting themselves through video that same season, including a batch of short clips made for Small Business Saturday. A regular series gave the idea a more permanent home.
Daniel Okafor covers business, startups and the Innovators section for The Evanston Edge.
