Ian Jones is building a TV station from the ground up.
The new General Manager of Gorham TV, USM’s student-run television station is trying to get the station running again. But he’s dealing with broken or antiquated equipment and is currently the only employee.
“We had a lot of broken equipment we weren’t aware of until right before the semester,” he said.
An essential component that automates the stations programming is broken, and replacing it could cost $4,000, Jones said.
Despite the problems, the junior architectural engineering major has big plans for the embattled television station.
“I would like it to be something you can trust,” he said last Friday at the GTV table at Husky Fest in Portland.
Trust is something that had been lacking at GTV. In April, USM’s Student Senate suspended the station’s funding because then-General Manager, Franklin Kendrick, failed to show up at Senate meetings.
“Part of it is due to the inactivity of the general manager. It just fell apart,” Jones said.
Kendrick, the station’s general manager for four years, said he was off the grid last semester because he was busy fixing broken equipment.
“I had been running it pretty smooth up until that last semester. The real problem that came up was the equipment we had started breaking just from wear and tear,” he said Saturday afternoon. “When we found out what it was, it was a little too late to get the funding to have it fixed.”
According to Kendrick, the delivery system that transmits data from the station to the dorms was offline for about a month and a half during the spring semester.
“It seems like a long time, but when you’re working with the Senate and with Time Warner Cable, nothing really happens at the snap of the finger,” he said.
Jones wants to build GTV into a reliable source of information for USM students in both Portland and Gorham. Right now, the channel broadcasts to televisions in Gorham dormitories only. Eventually, he hopes to stream live over the Internet.
In the daytime, the station would broadcast listings of sporting events, class cancellations, bus schedules, and other USM news. In the evening, the focus would be entertainment.
“I wanted to have sports coverage, definitely, but we could also do broadcasts like a regular news station,” he said.
Jones also wants to hold filmmaking contests and produce more original content for the station. “We would maybe end up with a USM sitcom, like a reality show parody of dorm life,” he said.
But right now, the only thing playing on GTV is a PowerPoint presentation that lists bus schedules and campus activities. “We’re pretty close to [being] on track,” he said. “I’m looking to hire three to five work study students and I’d like to be getting ready for one new show for the next week and half or two. I wish we had a little bit more sophisticated equipment, but they’re little challenges that are always fun to try to get around.”