New Voices (and the YU Beacon) has been included in a “Most Viral Student Media of 2011” list by Dan Reimold, official curator of all things important in the college media world.
Any college journalist who isn’t following Reimold is doing it wrong. His blog, College Media Matters covers the most innovative corners of the college media world, and he’s always full of story ideas that any college paper or blog can localize and pursue.
He also blogs at Mediashift, where he posted the Most Viral list, which he introduced like this:
Strippers. Shootings. The Oscars. Osama bin Laden. One-night stands. Natural disasters. Asians in the library. And skinny jeans. These are a few of the most prominent buzzwords at the center of the student news stories, columns, online creations, and video rants that went viral in a major way over the past year.
Referring to our coverage of the YU Beacon’s first-person tale of an Orthodox college student losing her virginity and the minor fiasco that followed, Reimold wrote that some “content garnered web attention for its eye-opening sexual candor or controversial views.”
Toward the end of the un-numbered list, here’s what he had to say about the Beacon situation:
ONE-NIGHT STAND’S WEEKLONG UPROAR
Near fall semester’s end, an erotic essay about a one-night stand published in an Orthodox Jewish university’s student newspaper caused controversy on campus and sparked a weeklong news feeding frenzy — one that stretched from Manhattan to the Middle East.
The piece appeared in early December in The YU Beacon at New York City’s Yeshiva University. It was an anonymous first-person account of a female student’s tryst with a male classmate and the shame that accompanied it the next morning.
As a New York Times report noted, the essay’s explicitness angered the conservative school’s “religious students who consider premarital sex — not just the act but even talking openly about it — well beyond the acceptable bounds of modesty.” Initially, talk about the piece itself was confined to the national Jewish student magazine New Voices, but was soon followed by“everyone else on the planet.”
At one point, as New Voices editor David Wilensky wrote, “[T]hings really went nuts. Once theWall Street Journal had it, The New York Times mentioned it in a blog post, the Daily Mail had an article and then Haaretz [the leading English-language news source focused on Israel] came in, riding the Mail’s coattails.” The Jerusalem Post declared, “It’s less of a sex scandal than it is a sex shanda, an embarrassment.”
When the firestorm first sparked, there was speculation the university would sever its ties to the Beacon. Staff subsequently decided to proactively end the affiliation, losing $500 in related funding per semester. The paper’s news editor and a co-editor in chief also quit.
Props to Reimold for giving credit where credit is due. The rest of the list is well worth a look too, so go check it out.
