Gawker
Full disclosure: I graduated Barnard College in '05, and while there, wrote for the campus newspaper, The Columbia Spectator.
Columbia University prides itself in being in the city of New York; that's literally their slogan. Even if Morningside Heights is Manhattan lite, there are very real elements of New York living there. For one, with Barnard, the female to male ratio is two to one, giving Columbia females a head start on real life New York dating. For two, Columbia student journalists take themselves as seriously as real New York journalists do. From the years I was at the Columbia Spectator, two reporters went onto Newsweek, one is tenured at the Washington Post, someone else is at Fortune and another has his own blog at Slate. That's why the latest campus controversy over the Bwog, the blog of the campus publication the Blue & White is no surprise. A tipster writes about upheaval on the site: The new editor is alienating writers, the Bwog has lost its focus, along with its campus cachet. Sound familiar?
At Columbia, the Spectator is like the New York Times. Yes, there are problems, institutional and otherwise, but it remains the must-read campus publication. The Blue & White is like the New Yorker, containing book reviews, profiles of campus characters, witty asides, but only read, and written by, an elite group of effete students. When the Blue & White launched the Bwog the year after I graduated, it soon became the Gawker of Columbia.
Campus drama is a bubble, so media drama within a campus is perhaps too insular to take seriously. The tipster's complaint &mdash that the Bwog has resorted to criticizing campus publications &mdash is old news. Josie Swindler (one of my former editors at the Spec) did a fascinating piece on race at the Spectator for the Blue & White in 2006. Swindler took the issue as seriously as the New Yorker would writing about the Times.
But according to the tipster, things are down a notch on the Bwog. The site mocks the Barnard Bulletin's soduku box. (By the way, has anyone noticed the Post's word scramble is totally sucking lately?)
I emailed a friend who graduated after me about to ask about this and she said, "it sounds like a group of sore-losers who want some bigger media attention ... the Bwog was originally almost purely vicious and intended to criticize other students and other publications ... things change when editors change, esp at campus publications."
The bad news, tipster, is that you might be a sore loser. The good news is that Columbia has prepared you for the real world. Or at least the internet part of the real world.
Comments
rebecca omg I love you so much now! I went to barnard too!!!! (that's really all it takes with me, people.)
I graduated last year and I still read Bwog when I'm feeling nostalgic!
or when Gawker is focusing exclusively on J.A. or Emily Gould's love life...
Has rebecca's memoir been fact-checked?
oh, wakers. you two-timing wonderful bastard.
I went to Columbia and wrote for the Spectator and I'm still having a hard time getting invested in this. Maybe I'm missing the sizzling part? I haven't had my coffee yet.
I've often wondered why so many journalists use the strange construction "I graduated college." Rebecca graduated from Barnard, just as she wrote for the newspaper; she didn't write the newspaper.
Call me a pedant, because obviously I am one.
@ambitious: Yeah, me too. I think I'm too old for this item. What's Bwog again? No one really cared about Spec except the people who wrote for it. But hey, go Lions!
Eff Columbia, Grady College At the Universty of Georgia FTW! We give out the Peabody Awards, bitches!
Ahem. Excuse me. But really, why does it matter if a college blog (excuse me, Bwog) is criticizing a college newspaper? Am I missing some kind of larger point?
I was going to write something along the lines of, "Some of the people who read this blog gave your friends at The Spec their thrilling first jobs, so enough with the post-grad nostalgia, we're all way beyond that" but then I read all the comments and I realized that I'm the anachronism here.
I feel sad.
With quality J-School products like this, is it any wonder why every newsroom in the city is sending out new refugees daily?
Rule #1 of Publishing in NYC: If you didn't go to Columbia, for god's sake don't hire them. They will infest the shop like rats, and write like them, too.
@Otto-Reimer:
I kindly say "Fuck You, Sir" to you, sir. And prove you wrong, for $1,000.
A former newspaper reporter bashing her rival on a blog because she thinks the rival bashes too many publications based on some whiny emailers with an axe to grind. It squares the circle!
I was forwarded this response to Gawker from Bwog's editor. I thought it was funny.
Hi Rebecca,
Thanks for you interest in Bwog. Since I was never contacted to comment on your post-which seems odd, given that it is about the blog I run-I'd like to take the opportunity to point out some things. First of all, W.M. Akers is an NYU student that we commission to write pieces for Bwog. He does not write for another publication, as implied in your Julia Allison:Gawker::W.M. Akers:Bwog analogy, and most importantly, we've never mocked him. He's also not a dating columnist at all-- he's our NYU Diarist who happens to have written one post about relationships.
You've based your post on one anonymous tipster (who's actually not so anonymous, and is a former Bwog daily editor who recently quit before she could be fired), whom even you recognize sounds like a "sore loser." After your attempts to contact Blue and White alums proved fruitless (our EIC two cycles removed was contacted 40 minutes before your posted), it would have sense to hold off posting until you could get some substantive information from someone still associated with Bwog. Especially in the wake of Gawker ME Nick Denton's credo that "It's no longer enough to take stories from The New York Times, and add a dash of snark. Gawker needs to break and develop more stories."
Also, Bwog isn't a campus blog dedicated to making fun of other publications-- though this post certainly delves into that territory. But I understand you're trying to reach your post-quota and it's hard when things move faster at Gawker than they did at Jossip.
And while you did feel you owed it to your readers to disclose your past affiliation with the Spectator, you didn't fill them in on the fact that the Bwog and the Spec are direct competitors, and that the Spec was the campus's sole source of daily news before Bwog came along. Given the conflicts of interest inherent in this post, I'm surprised you'd be willing to publish a take-down of your old paper's rival media outlet grounded in one anonymous tip about something "sucking." (And wasn't proclaiming suckiness just listed in Gawker's own list of death row internet cliches?)
In the future, I'm happy to comment on the record concerning Gawker's coverage of Bwog-I could probably help with some fact-checking, too.
All the best,
Juli Weiner
Barnard c/o 2010
Bwog Editor in Chief
If the coming recession means fewer self-aggrandizing posts like this, I'm all for it.
and why does anyone outside of morningside heights care about any of this?
This post is disappointing and not up to standard.
Bwog? Really?
@pkarchive:
akers is the WSN film editor.
Also, Rebecca, it's pretty low to change a post completely without noting the update. But damn.
@the supergoddess:
i went to barnard TOOOOOOO! heehaw.
@pufflehuff:
COWWECTION: In her last post, pufflehuff mistakenly spelt "Reawwy?" as "Really?"
She would like to apologise for this error unreservedly.
@pufflehuff:
CORRECTION: In her last post, pufflehuff mistakenly spelt "Reawwy?" as "Really?"
She would like to apologise for this error unreservedly.
@pufflehuff: Shhhhh
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