By James Keller
In the upcoming years, NUTV may be coming to a television set near you 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s quite a long step since they became a non-profit organization 10 years ago.
"We were sort of a club before that," says NUTV’s Executive Director Kevin Allen. "We wanted some kind of autonomy from the Students’ Union."
To honour the past 10 years, the station is putting on a celebration at Fort Calgary commemorating the anniversary. Aside from the token snacks and wine to start and finish the evening, NUTV is treating audiences with a retrospective, televised look at the past decade of our lone campus TV station.
"It’s going to be a montage of a whole bunch of things we’ve done over the past years," says Allen. "[We’re] particularly highlighting different members who’ve gone on to bigger and better things."
NUTV has gone through numerous changes since becoming non-profit. Everything is more efficient and accessible today, from their organizational structure to the process for recruiting and training new volunteers.
"It was a bit more slapped together [10 years ago]," admits Allen. "They didn’t have systems in place and I think we streamlined the process. We really created a structure where new volunteers can get plugged in right away, but before it was more of a club that was pretty exclusive."
However, NUTV isn’t just seeing changes. Many things within the organization from that period are very much intact. Most importantly, this includes the content and types of stories the station covers.
"I think a lot of issues that the university community are interested in have been very consistent," says Allen, pointing out that there has still been a shift within that focus. "I think we’ve really started to incorporate the community element so our programming has been a bit more challenging."
Allen isn’t the best candidate to pick out specific events that stood out 10 years ago, however. Instead, Program Director Tom Andriuk offers his take on the subject, bringing station consistency to mind.
"Consistency can be hard to do in an organization such as this because of the turnover," says Andriuk, adding that turnover has always been a problem in creating long-running productions.
In the future, NUTV will take another swing at wide scale production. Within the next year, they will become a campus-wide network with a full schedule. And after this initial test, they will broadcast throughout Calgary. It truly is a long step from their size 10 years ago.
While the past 10 years have seen many changes throughout the structure and offices of NUTV, the goals and mandates still remain the same. NUTV provides alternative media by focusing on local community and stories relevant to that target audience. And this project only helps towards that goal for future NUTV volunteers and staff.
"We’ve done a lot of research, and there were gaps in the files," says Allen. "It’s really important for an organization to know where it came from, so this process [of creating the film retrospective] has been to discover our history and to be a document for future generations."