The Embittered Feud Between NYU’s Junior Journalists

Anyone who knows me will attest that despite my affiliations with the Washington Square News, and unlike most of my colleagues there, I’ve rarely — if ever — talked smack about its online rival, NYU Local.

“Local,” as people call it, launched in 2008 as the brainchild of two undergrads: film/TV student Cody Brown, and journalism student/fashionista LIly Quateman. Its purpose, ostensibly, was to cover campus news and foster discussion and community among the university’s disconnected student body.

At the time, the fledging project was (and still is, sometimes) controversial, especially as a conversation topic within the bull pen of NYU’s older, “more established” publication: WSN.

“Controversial” might be a little generous, actually, since the newsroom’s response was mainly to mock the idea altogether. In retrospect, it’s funny to realize how dismissive my co-workers were to our up-and-coming competitor when we didn’t even know what it was, yet, really. But I guess when “dismissive” is just a manifestation of “arrogant, fearful, and resistant,” it sort of puts things in perspective.

And when Local finally launched (an event which itself was not without some embarrassing gaffs), WSN’s attitude about the new kid on the block did not improve.

Outwardly, WSN seemed to welcome this new player to the game. But personally, I still felt the paper had been condescending from the outset. In his public statements, 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.

Plus, the name was (and, I contend, still is) stupid.

But before you knew it, while WSN struggled with churning out a print edition every day; waning ad sales; staff turnover; and a disasterous website, NYU Local had captured the community and administration’s attention; outpaced WSN’s web traffic; and was publishing a product that was, honestly, informative, smart, and funny.

To recap: WSN (the newspaper) overestimated its clout; while NYU Local (the Internet blog), free of pesky overhead costs and the usual conventions of traditional media, published an entertaining/useful product that attracted a lot of readers very quickly.

Sound familiar?

Of course, the fact that this went down in the same year that the journalism industry at large began to collapse upon itself is just a sweet, delicious, Maraschino cherry of irony on top of all this. (And fodder for another post, I promise.)

Anyway, fast-forward 1½ years, and the rivalry between NYU’s precocious student journalists is still going strong.

The battle lines are a little hazier (troops from both sides follow each other on Twitter and are Facebook friends, for instance, which I guess just means the media industry, no matter what the scale, is always just one big, insular circle-jerk), and some of the players have changed (Adam’s graduated and retired to Florida, and in his stead are Rachel Smith and Mary-Jane Weedman), but the war wages on, just as (if not more) passive-aggressively as ever.

Take, for instance, Jessica Roy’s swipe in a recent post about NYU’s bookstore:

We could pull a WSN and contact our BFF John Beckman for further comment, but he’s probably shopping at American Apparel.

The “let’s make fun of WSN’s self-imposed policy to get the university’s response” meme is, for some reason, pretty popular among NYU Local’s writers and commenters (or maybe just Roy? I don’t really pay attention to their bylines).

Now, believe me, there are plenty of things I’ll openly criticize about WSN (loyalty be damned), but adhering to the principle of “get both sides of the story” isn’t one of them.

Local would be much better off (i.e., sound less juvenile) if it stuck to its habit of pointing out each instance that NYU Local beats WSN to the punch. Because while they’d probably never admit it, I’m sure getting scooped pisses those WSN editors off more than getting called out for, um, trying to be fair?

Then again, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a WSN editor actually acknowledge getting scooped by NYU Local, either. Somehow, they always manage to turn a failure in quick reporting into a tirade about shoddy fact-checking and biased journalism and how they let their writers comment on their own articles, and for some reason that last one is particularly offensive to the tenets of good journalism.

Again, sound familiar?

In another post, NYU Local’s Charlie Eisenhood critiqued a WSN editorial about a student protest in California. Charlie, sadly, can’t help himself, and starts off with:

Set aside the fact that WSN (as usual) failed to attribute credit to NYU Local for breaking the story while adding almost no value to it.

Apparently Charlie forgot what “breaking a story” means, because I doubt NYU Local was the first media outlet to report this story. And by “first,” I mean, you know, first. Anywhere. Ever. Because that’s what “breaking” a story means. And a story that’s attracting national attention (students occupying buildings in a state university, just to give an example) isn’t so exclusive that you get to claim some kind of “breaking” rights to it, anyway. Dig up some juicy court documents or put together an investigative report or something, and then we’ll talk, but if you’re just reporting on an event that’s going to scroll by beneath Soledad O’Brien’s face on the CNN ticker in an hour, get over it.

That said, I don’t really understand why Charlie thinks WSN is obligated to credit NYU Local for anything to begin with. I guess if NYU Local actually broke something, or if it had done its own reporting and had some kind of exclusive that nobody else had caught onto yet, it would make sense (although even then, Media Outlet X would only cite Media Outlet Y to either avoid embarrassing itself if Outlet Y got it wrong, or if Outlet X couldn’t confirm the report on its own).

Now, don’t get me wrong, usually I adore Charlie Eisenhood’s work. I think he’s a brilliant writer, and I was extremely impressed by his reporting when a group of students occupied an NYU building.

Speaking of which, I clearly remember following the coverage that day, and never before was WSN’s ineptitude at covering developing news (or operating a website) more obvious. NYU Local’s coverage, on the other hand, earned some well-deserved accolades from its readers, the community, and the mainstream media, alike.

And yet, my WSN colleagues still refused to admit that they had been out-reported.

Listening to a group of 20-somethings dismiss Internet journalism is pretty hilarious, if you think about it, since those same kids probably grew up with the Internet and you’d expect them to embrace online journalism above anyone.

NYU Local doesn’t have much to worry about. It continues to build a reputation for quick news, humor, and biting commentary. At this point, its writers can probably afford to stop taking pot shots at Local’s geriatric journalistic cousin. (The underdog shtick only has so much life in it before Local’s status elevates it to the position of “obnoxious, schoolyard bully.”)

But WSN has much graver concerns. It never anticipated that its competitor might offer a product that readers found more desirable than its own. But that, at least, could be dealt with, if WSN wanted to. Instead, its editors chose arrogance, to be too stubborn either to realize the paper’s shortcomings or to fix them amidst a changing media landscape.

But hey, I guess that means they really are teaching us journalism. So at least we’re getting our tuition’s worth.