Crimson and Gold Connection; Jon Bartlow

Welcome to Crimson and Gold Connection. I am Dustin Triber. And today's guest is John Bartlow. He's the director of alumni and constituent relations here at Pittsburgh State University. John, thank you for coming in today. Absolutely. It's great to be here. I appreciate you having me. You do many things here on campus and with the alumni and constituent relations. But today, specifically, we want to talk about a new show that's going to go on pitstate.tv. First of all, can you tell us a little bit about what pitstate.tv is for those that don't know because I didn't? Sure. Pitstate.tv is, I'll call it a vehicle for us to broadcast different things that we have going on at the university. I know in the past, Jacob Ann Selmy, of course, who's in marketing communication has worked a lot with pitstate.tv. And often when we have our awards ceremony, so Distinguished Service or a Maritory's Achievement, we will come in and he will actually live stream these via pitstate.tv. And so the great thing about it is people can tune in and watch it live. And then once it is over with, it is archived and they can go back and watch it at a later time. So it's just a great way to share with our alumni and friends a little bit more about what is going

on on the pitstate campus. And that's a nice thing to have. I know I get emails every now and then the Pisted Email. I think that's where it's coming from. But I just never actually visited site pitstate.tv. And that's where you can go to see these videos. Yes. And I think, you know, they even broadcast some of the athletics events on it once in a while, I believe so. And you actually have a new show that you guys are going to do here in the future. Yes. We are putting something together and it is called Pit Pulse. And basically what this is going to be, the show is going to be hosted by me. And we're planning for it to occur about once a month. And we are going to have different individuals mostly from the university community on the show. And it's an opportunity for us to share with our alumni and friends a little bit about what's going on on campus. So I mean, obviously we have grully gathering alumni events that go on all throughout the Midwest. But we are not able to make it out to those, you know, further parts the east, west,

north, south within this country and even within the world to reach all of our alumni and friends. So this will be a mechanism where people can really tune in live or tune in after the fact. And learn a little bit about the exciting things going on on our campus. Now will this be something done at a studio or is this going to be like a live on location type of a program? Well, it is actually going to be done in the Wilkinson alumni center. That's where we're going to do it for the at least this first show. The beauty of it is that we have quite a bit of flexibility. We have some portable equipment that would allow us to do it really pretty much anywhere we want. So we're going to start out though in the beautiful Wilkinson alumni center. And if it's fitting, you know, we might do something somewhere else, you know, possibly even on location as you mentioned. Now who are some of the guests you have lined up and when do you plan on beginning this program? Well, our first air date is going to be on Wednesday March 29th at 3 p.m. Central Standard Time. And so we're very excited about that. Our first

guest is actually going to be Sean Nakhirado. And Sean wears a couple of different hats at the university. He is the director of government relations, but he's also the executive director for the center of innovation and business development. And what we're going to be talking about is a very exciting project that's going on in the Pittsburgh community. And it's the Block 22 project. And so basically what this project is all about is there are several, I believe, four buildings downtown at fourth and Broadway. And these buildings have been slowly deteriorating over the years and not a whole lot has been done with them. So Pittsburgh State has entered a partnership with some other entities to really restore these buildings and make them part of Pittsburgh State University. We will have about 100 efficiency unit apartments in those and the upper levels. And we will have the Center for Innovation and Business Development will actually be located

downtown. So it's very exciting, you know, on many different fronts. It's helping downtown Pittsburgh. It's helping to reinvigorate downtown Pittsburgh. There will be local shops in the lower levels. And it's just really an exciting partnership with Pittsburgh State University and the city of Pittsburgh. So we're going to be going into some details about what is going on with that project. We know we've heard a lot about it here locally in the Pittsburgh community, but I suspect our alumni and friends who are a little bit further out haven't heard a lot about it. So it's exciting. We'll be able to share hopefully some video and some pictures and we'll be able to hear from the man himself, Sean Nakarato, who's been really probably more involved than just about anybody with this project. Oh, absolutely. He's talked to us here on Crimson Gold too. And it sounds like an interesting project. Who else do you have lined up? Well, actually, we haven't lined anybody else up yet, but I can kind of tell you an idea of what we're what we're thinking about. Sure. We wanted to make sure and get all the bugs

worked out before we asked Dr. Scott on the show. You know, brand new show, brand new endeavor. So, but no, we will definitely have Dr. Scott on the show sometime in the near future. I really, you know, see us reaching out to administrators reaching out to coaches, faculty, and even talking to our students because I know that our alumni and friends really like to hear from our students on campus about what's going on in their world and the exciting projects that they're doing. How often do you plan on doing the show and how long is it just like a half-hour program hour? Well, we're playing a letterman type thing. Right, right, right. Well, you know, the neat thing about this Pitsy TV is there are a lot of different possibilities and we really have a lot of flexibility as well. You know, we don't have to try to, you know, cram it between one TV show that ends at three o'clock and another one that starts at three thirty. So, we're shooting for about a half an hour. But, you know, if it's 25 minutes long, that's fine. If it's 35 minutes long, that's fine as well. But, there are all different sorts of things that we can do. We can have multiple guests,

we can have one guest, we could even have entertainment on the show. So, I don't know, I had some visions of, you know, Todd Hastings playing trumpet, you know, kind of like the old tonight show, Todd standing over there in the corner and, you know, having a band and no, it probably won't go that route. But, we want to have some fun with it. But, most importantly, we just want to let our alumni know about the really exciting things that are going on on our campus and in our community. Can you tell us, obviously this is a new thing, but can you tell us where can we watch? We'll be posted on the Pits State website. You know, once new shows come on or should people just kind of continually check out pitstate.tv? Sure. If you go to pitstate.tv, of course, you'll be able to find it, you know, live at that time. So, that'll be three o'clock central standard time on the 29th of March. But, we will, we will be putting the links up on our alumni relations website as well. I know pitstate social media as well as our alumni and constituent relations media is going to help us get the word out about that. So, hopefully if folks are looking for it, they won't find it

too hard to find something because we're planning to talk about it a lot and post it in multiple places. There will also be a blurb coming out about it in the pitstate magazine that's coming out here in the next couple of weeks as well. All right. The polls. Pit polls. Pit polls. Pit polls. Pit polls. Look for that on pitstate.tv coming soon. John Bartlow, thank you so much for coming in and speaking with us on Crimson and Gold connection. Thank you very much.