By Leora Rosenberg

It’s time to get meta, folks: New research from an NYU professor shows that NYU Local plays an important role…in making NYU look bad.

Ethan Youngerman, a Writing the Essay professor pursing a doctorate in higher education, has been researching how student journalism fuels the national media’s negative portrayal of college life. Besides writing specifically about us, Youngerman has also directed the singe of his academic magnifying glass at Gothamist, a popular website whose coverage of New York City occasionally refers to NYU Local’s own work. His analysis of all the Gothamist posts that link back to us reveals the role that student journalists play in helping national media sources make college kids look stupid.

Youngerman points to a number of Gothamist articles that make NYU students look dumb, with condescending headlines like “Scantily Clad NYU Co-Eds Strip Down for Snow Day, Page Views,” “Do NYU Co-Eds Make The Best ‘Sugar Babies?’” and “NYU Student Says He Was Taken To Psych Ward After Annoying Classroom Experiment.” Nearly all the articles he cites are re-hashed versions of NYU Local articles, wherein Gothamist quotes and summarizes NYU Local stories at length with only a little bit of reporting or development. Youngerman also says Gothamist doesn’t even add all the snark. Much of the disdainful tone comes straight from NYU Local, which often depicts students as “silly, over-sexualized, frivolous, stupid, [and] taking themselves too seriously.”

He thinks the problem goes beyond a campus blog that mocks its own students. In the new media ecosystem, popular sites like Gothamist bring NYU Local’s coverage of college shenanigans to a national audience. “There’s something really different when the audience is not just the college but the world beyond,” he said.

He worries that the tantalizing possibility of having a popular national publication pick up the story may spur college journalists to put out just the kind of gossipy stories these sites seem to want. “There’s a potential for the possibility of the professional sites being more interested in depictions of students as frivolous,” he said. “I think that that potential interest could skew depictions by student journalists.”

“There’s a codependent relationship between Gothamist and NYU Local,” he added. “I think to the extent that Gothamist wants to cover NYU, it needs NYU Local. And I think to the extent that NYU Local wants its message spread beyond the NYU community, Gothamist is a very big help.” The relationship seems particular to NYU Local. Youngerman says that Gothamist is less reliant on articles from Washington Square News or from Columbia’s two main publications, The Columbia Daily Spectator and Bwog.

Representatives of both NYU Local and Gothamist, for their parts, were skeptical about Youngerman’s conclusions.

Ari Lipsitz, NYU Local’s Editor-in-Chief, said that NYU Local takes its position as a popular campus news source too seriously to sensationalize stories for the national media’s sake. He acknowledged that NYU Local publishes plenty about sex and frivolity but says it publishes at least as many articles on substantive issues. “The fact that the national media picks up on certain things rather than others: that’s on them, not on us,” he said.

John Del Signore, Gothamist’s managing editor, dismissed the notion that his publication is specifically derisive towards NYU. “Send us video (please) of half-dressed Baruch students getting dragged out of class by security guards and we’ll gladly publish it,” he said.

Gothamist’s publisher, Jake Dobkin, agreed. “I can’t believe that your $50,000/year tuition is being used to support research on topics this silly. If you guys aren’t too busy being stupid, over-sexualized, and frivolous, you should really consider confronting the administration about those exploitive tuition payments and the idiotic stuff they spend the money on,” he said.

[Disclaimer: Given the obvious delicacy of an outlet reporting on itself, we want to disclose a few potential conflicts of interest: Ari Lipsitz, who was interviewed in this piece, recused himself from its editing. In the final stages of writing this piece, this reporter also discovered that Gothamist had briefly referred to her own reporting in a February 2014 article on snow days. Finally, some NYU Local staffers have also spent many a semester and summer in Gothamist’s offices as interns.]

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