The studio was mine. The record was always going to be everyone's.

I built a production studio in Fort Lee and ran it for twenty-six years. It was a business. It had lights, a control room, a green screen, and a schedule. Over that time we made more than three hundred productions — interviews, civic events, small institutions telling their own story on their own terms. I invested more than a quarter of a million dollars into the room where all of it was recorded.

None of that was the point. The point was the record. Somewhere in those three hundred tapes is a first-hand history that no newspaper was writing down: who started what, who showed up, how a community actually built itself when no one from the outside was watching. That history was accumulating in a private business, and a private business is not where a public record belongs.

So I am giving it away — not the equipment, the mission. KCED Foundation is a New Jersey nonprofit corporation formed to hold the archive, keep producing, and make all of it public: freely accessible, accountable to no advertiser, and designed to outlast me. The studio becomes the foundation's first asset, and its last private thing.

The work ahead is plain. Preserve what exists. Keep documenting the institutions the mainstream press overlooks. And train the next people to hold the camera, so that the record does not depend on any one person — least of all the one who started it.

It was mine. Now it is ours.