I really hope someone in SG got a nice camera for Christmas, because it sure seems like they need one.
I was going through emails from the executive branch in August when I saw an interesting email from deputy chief of staff Branden Pearson. He was asking one of the professional staff members if it was possible for her to utilize her interns to make a platform tracker video to be published the first week of September to promote mobile ticketing for football games.
For those unaware, SG used to publish frequent videos claiming to have accomplished things they promised to do during the campaign season. In this case, it seems that SG wanted to claim credit for the work the UF Athletic Association (UAA) did on mobile ticketing. The Alligator reported on mobile ticketing twice, and no one ever said that SG was involved in any sort of way.
Perhaps they were tangentially involved, but likely this was yet another case of SG trying to co-opt the work of others for its own personal gain. SG folks always like to promise to do things that are already in progress by other entities to make up for their true inability to make a difference on campus. It’s kind of annoying to be honest.
The professional staff wrote back to coordinate the video and one line, in particular, stood out to me: “SG does not have a camera to loan out.”
Wait, so our SG who has always been happy to spend thousands of dollars on commemorative coins doesn’t even have a camera? Is this why we repeatedly spend $190 on headshot sessions for top officials?
The video Pearson wanted mysteriously never materialized. This past Fall semester, our Facebook page had posted a whopping total of two videos. One is a message from President Fuchs with high video quality that makes me believe it wasn’t shot by SG officials. The other video christened as “our first Monday in a Minute” has all the hallmarks of being shot by someone within SG: it’s low resolution, backlit, shaky and awfully color balanced (it’s very orange).
Still, I appreciated the effort as the video did provide viewers with updates on what SG was doing. Interestingly enough, the description of the video encourages viewers to “tune in every Monday to hear about what we have going on each week in SG.” There have been no subsequent “Monday(s) in a Minute” so I guess nothing has gone on since then in the three months since its publication.
The Spring 2019 semester wasn’t any better with only two videos posted then as well. One of the videos actually looks really well done which means that there is a one percent chance it was done by SG officials and a 99 percent chance it was done by literally anyone else.
In the span of an entire year, our Facebook page only posted four videos, down from nine the year before and 10 in 2017. Somewhere in the bowels of the SG office, there’s supposed to be a whole agency of hapless fools banging pots and pans together in order to come up with social media content. It’s clear that they aren’t good at what they do. It’s clear they could use better
equipment, too.
Someone please buy SG a camera and help them out. Do it for the kids.
Zachariah Chou is a UF political science senior and serves as the Murphree Area senator.
