HRTV Struggles To Reach Viewers

Two first-years pulse to a grinding beat in a Mather suite under a shower of beer falling from the cans held high above their heads. A typical scene…from the Harvard Radcliffe Television (HRTV) soap opera “Ivory Tower.”

But a scene with no one watching. Most of Harvard’s “Joe Millionaire”-watching student body has no idea that Harvard has a student television group.

Given that HRTV is a television group on a campus lacking widespread cable, this obscurity is hardly surprising.

But even with the no-cable barrier, HRTV has not always stood as it does now in the shadows of WHRB and other campus broadcast organizations. Six or seven years ago, HRTV had 120 members.

“At the time, it was probably comparable to what WHRB is now,” says John B. Walsh ’03. HRTV garnered campus attention through major annual events such as “Survey Says.” For this game show, HRTV would rent out a Science Center auditorium and have different house groups compete in a “Family Feud”-like format.

Any news of that fame has long since fled the minds of Harvard students.

“I’ve heard of HRTV but I don’t know what they do. I don’t think anyone [at WHRB] really knows about them,” says Stanley P. Chang ’04, general manager for WHRB.

In the past, HRTV screened its productions in Loker Commons, in House common rooms and during Arts First.

For a while, they even uploaded their footage to the web—a practice that ceased after their server crashed about a year ago.

But none of these solutions were ideal. Jennifer G. Altarriba ’03, HRTV’s president, explains the difficulty in drawing large audiences even through webcasts: “We are Harvard students. We want instant gratification.” Webcasts involve too many steps and are too time-consuming to watch, she says.

Presently, HRTV is focusing on membership rather than viewership. It is pitching itself as a rare opportunity for students interested in broadcast at a school that has no communications major. For some staffers, it has proven to be a stepping stone to professional broadcasting. Altarriba interned at CNN Cuba and says she gained qualifying skills for the job by working at HRTV.

HRTV is also trying to entice new volunteers with a new, open and creative comp process. “We just want you to produce something,” HRTV member Kit Tempest tells a potential volunteer who has come looking to learn how to edit films. Tempest is a Harvard Extension School student who has been involved in HRTV since 1998.

Altarriba says that the freedom provided by HRTV is its strength—“the fact that you have the ability to express yourself in almost any way you want, whether it’s production, editing, taping or teaching others. “There’s so much that you can do,” she says.

But this freedom has also been the destabilizing factor inhibiting HRTV’s growth. Although “Ivory Tower” has been one of the longer-running shows in HRTV’s eleven-year history, even it has been on hold recently. The only project listed as being “current” on their website (www.hrtv.org) is a collaboration with Harvard Model Congress intended to help train high school participants interested in entering the mass media field.

HRTV’s past is littered with various creative ventures: news clips, game shows, sitcoms and even an animated cartoon depicting Harvard life from the perspective of neon birds.

However, most have disappeared from the HRTV lineup with their creators’ graduation.

This discontinuity is not helped by the small size of its active membership. Many of the people that pass through HRTV simply want to use the organization’s equipment and manpower in order to pursue their own creative endeavours or professional goals.

Seniors will often comp HRTV in their final semesters in order to construct a news portfolio destined for the HR departments of CNN.

A senior has approached HRTV this semester to create a film version of his puppet staging of Macbeth; that performance will be filmed and edited by the few core HRTV members.

“It’s mainly one person doing a lot of the work,” says Tempest of many HRTV ventures.

Perhaps this is simply the nature of what is really not so much a television group as a convening point for a bunch of Harvard students who are interested in film as a means of channeling their creative energies.

Indeed, despite their current recruiting efforts, HRTV members seem to be at peace with their current situation. In response to a comment in a Crimson article last November that HRTV “wasn’t really with it,” Tempest responds, “We’re ‘with it’ as much as we want to be.” The problem may be that people hear the word “television” in HRTV and believe, perhaps not unjustifiably, that they will be able to broadcast, he says. “They came here expecting to flip a switch and get live and broadcasting,” says Tempest.

WHRB’s Chung says that in order for HRTV to survive, it has to attract new volunteers dedicated to the club, rather that people who come, film and leave.

“They’re going to have to find some sort of niche,” says Chang.

The organization hopes to begin broadcasting on the web again in the next year.

In the meantime, they will show samples of their work on May 3 at Arts First.

“Good luck to them,” says Chang.