Spotlight: UPTV

Last Updated on April 12, 2017 by askcbiorg

UPTV’s Pitt Tonight.

Tell me a little history about your station and where your station is now?

Our station started as the collaboration between one student and the Film Studies department in 2001. At the time it was called Creation Station and debuted with shows ranging from sitcoms to cooking shows. Eventually, around the time we got our closed-circuit up and running, the name was changed to University of Pittsburgh Television. As the years went on, in part due to temporarily losing the closed circuit system, the focus of the club changed to online content and mostly short sketches and films. In the last two years we have had resurgence in content, lead by the success of our late night show Pitt Tonight. We are just at the beginning of a new era for UPTV and are looking forward to the future.
– Mark Connor, Station Librarian

What sets your station apart from other college TV stations?

The new UPTV team.

The main things that set UPTV apart from other college television stations it’s unique structure and programming style. Because we have limited resources, we have had to get creative in the way that we produce content. We operate as a fully student-run organization and shoot mostly on borrowed equipment. While trying to create a media program at a school, without one has it’s difficulties, it has also given us the freedom to make the content that we want to make. We are one of few schools who produce scripted series along with core content and we release fully online, each show with it’s own showrunner, production team, and marketing team. We have an incredibly diverse staff who come from all corners of our university, and that difference in experience allows for incredible collaboration.

Our station is forging a new path at Pitt and we are creating our own opportunities, building our shows independently from the ground up. Our station and our shows act as a classroom for our members, providing students with the skills that they may not be able to get easily from other parts of our university. Our station is truly a community of students striving to make media production stronger and at UPTV we are able to dictate and create how and what we want to create.
– Hayley Ulmer, Executive Producer of Pitt Tonight

Why did you choose to work at the TV station?

I chose to become part of UPTV my freshmen year here at Pitt. After going to the first meeting, I knew I wanted to stay. I loved helping create random videos with this group of people, but the video aspect isn’t what got me to stay in the club. It was the people in the club that made me want to stay. This group of people quickly became more than friends, they became my first family here at Pitt and I am so thankful for each and every one of them. Over the past year, our club has restructured and has gained a ton of new members and I am looking forward to welcoming them to our family.
– Cassidy Fischer, Station Manager

Whats the craziest thing you’ve ever done for your station?

UPTV knit-bombs the Panther.

The craziest thing I’ve ever done for the station is something called a knit bomb. Our university’s mascot is a panther, so for a publicity stunt we had knitted (for weeks) a sweater to put onto the Panther. We went out at 3 in the morning and knitted this sweater onto the panther. It was crazy because the next day we realized we had done it on the Panther’s birthday.
– Cat Murray Assistant Station Manager

What’s the best part of college student media? And what’s the hardest part?

A college campus is a collage of opportunity and affinity; a compact version of the world we’re preparing to enter. As the narrators and chroniclers of this microcosm, media students are presented with a gold mine of potential material to cover during their four years, and anyone who disagrees simply isn’t digging deep enough. Even on a campus without a news studio, sound stage, or production facility, the potential for media is equally as achievable, if not more so.

The hardest part is simply finding it in yourself to make those possibilities a reality. Seeking out peers with a similar dream or passion isn’t just for the sake of networking or small talk. It’s for the sake of pushing yourself to create an outlet, whether that be in television, radio, film, print, or online, and to begin the lifelong journey of finding your verse in this world as early as possible. Students, professors, custodians, cafeteria workers all have a fresh story to tell, and the only person keeping it from the world is you.
– Jesse Irwin, Host of Pitt Tonight