After going over just what Sun Devil Television is, I now get to reveal all the problems and tribulations with the station.

(P.S. when I write about subjects near to me, I tend to rant. Get used to it.)

The biggest problem surrounding SDTV is that it was never meant to work from the start. According to our history (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Devil_Television#History), we began as a text screen service from residential life in 1992.

In 1995, SDTV began showing programs in the form of two shows pre-recored and given to the station. That year, they also began to air movies.

It wasn't until 1998-1999 that the station joined student media and began with a set of officers near what they have today.

Here is where the problems begin. Sometime around 1999, the station "received donated equipment from various sources." This included two Cannon GL 1 cameras and it's first editing system.

Since then SDTV has purchased...well..not much. In fact, SDTV still uses the two Cannon cameras donated to us nearly ten years ago. The only other camera belonging to the studio is a very old stationary camera, which had to be soldered together by our station director.

Our second editing bay was added in 2002, which has lasted us until..well now. An expansion to third and fourth editing bays were finally made recently.

But in order to survive, Sun Devil Television volunteers and staff members have taken to purchasing cameras and even editing equipment of their own.

In the past year alone, we've had three broken DV decks, two broken cameras, and a broken editing bay. All because a lack of funding.

And again we see the problem. Sun Devil Television was never given a chance. It started out with donated equipment, and since then, few dollars have actually be put in.

By comparison check out some other student run stations:
South Carolina: http://www.sgtvonline.org/about.php
Student TV in Great Britain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NaSTA

So how do we make changes? By comparison ASU's State Press has dozens of staff members, each of whom is paid. SDTV has six. Each of our other staff members are unpaid volunteers. And if you have never compared a print story to a TV story, trust me when I tell you moving picture is much harder. I've done both.

In a print story you go out to the event, come back, write it. Or set up interviews for an in-depth story, and put it all together. For TV you go out, you film. Then you have to log your footage, which loads in real time (meaning for every minute you film, you spend a minute logging that to your computer). Then you must edit it, adjust audio, adjust color, and then print the video (again in real time) before you are finally finished.

What is SDTV? It's a failing student run station, with old hand-me-down equipment. More importantly no one cares. ASU has never hired a director of student media with any bit of television experience.

Whether we produce one show, or three shows, or 15 shows, no one cares.

This year, for the first time we have upped our production exponentially. Last semester SDTV produced only three series total. Two had my name as producer. This semester, we produced episodes for eight series in our first week of production. We produced an official weekly schedule, which runs daily in the State Press.

But for what? I was told by the higher-ups that my cause was a "noble cause." What does that mean? What should that mean? To me, it means I have no motivation to bust my butt trying to run our station like one really should be.

If my cause is simply a noble one, why does it matter if we produce eight shows or even one. In the end no one will care.

-mm

P.S. We were asked in this assignment to link to our favorite blog(s). While these links are sports related, they are certainly my favorite:
http://bostonsportsguy.com/
http://www.profootballtalk.com/rumormill.htm