by @CodyBrown
This saturday I experienced ‘Young Media Weekend’ and I’m still processing how surreal the event felt. For those that haven’t heard about it, Young Media Weekend (#YMW) is a panel/party organized by NYU Local designed to bring aspiring media kids from around the east coast to NYC for a few days to talk to each other and network with people who could hire them. The panel Annie Werner and Charlie Eisenhood were able to line up was outstanding, Reuters, Gawker, NYMag Vulture, Think Progress, Jezebel, Salon, and The New York Observer were all represented. The marketing for the event was awesome, they packed a lecture hall. The party was at a swanky overpriced hotel bar but they even managed to pull off a sponsorship so beer was not atrociously priced.
In between talking to excited freshman about how to angle their Tumblr’s and watching the national section throw beers back with Matt Yglesias on a hotel terrace, I couldn’t help but think about the beginning of NYU Local and how the culture around blogging has matured in the past three years. So, for the sake of a.) imparting historic knowledge to freshman NYU Local staff and b.) illustrating just how long it takes to get things right, I did some introspective googling and pulled up a few articles.
NYU Local Ancient History 101 - First Day
Remember this puppy? Lily Q, Ned Resnikoff and Joe Coscarelli know about this puppy.
The day we launched Gawker accused NYU Local of plagiarism. They eventually retracted the word ‘plagiarism’ (it was due to CMS formatting) but the damage was done and our entrance to NYU was to the tune of these awesome comments:
“Look, I’m an NYU alum (Grad school from the MK and Ashley Daze), and all I have to say is there is nothing worse than a bunch of trust-fundy, navel-gazing, legacy NYU students writing about “issues”. Can we please get a DNS attack on this waste of bandwidth and memonry, like pronto?”
“I go to a school with twice the enrollment of NYU (and a better journalism school), and I know that WE don’t have enough news to even attempt to fill a 24-hour news blog, so I have no idea how these idiots think they do.”
“I doubt there’s enough news about NYU to sustain a 24-hour cycle, and I don’t see what this is doing that the WSN isn’t. Also, hardly anyone at NYU actually reads the WSN, I don’t see who’s going to read this. But it’s good resume padding, right?”
Even our peers wanted to stab us. Jessica Roy (who was recruited by Ned in the comment section and went on to become EIC) posted the following:
A self-important team of NYU journalism students is launching NYU Local, a “snarky” alternative to the never-read Washington Square News. The site will keep up-to-date on happenings around campus, and seeks to “make the NYU voice heard and recognized in the city for what it is: smart, witty, and even snarky.”
Say it with me now: LOL!
Reaction from the school newspaper was consistent.
“Adam Playford (who was WSN’s editor at the time) never seemed to truly acknowledge NYU Local as legitimate competition, and none of the rest of us really saw it that way, either. We just figured this Crazy, Gawker Wannabe, NYU Blog Experiment would never fully gain traction and fail.”
So it was painful and over the past few years a number of people have poured ungodly amounts of work into the site but as the kids say now… #swag:
