Kim thinks that a new focus on social media content could work really well for NYU’s online community. Just because the written content is gone doesn’t mean The Black Sheep is gone. “But instead offering the interpretation of everything that was going on, which was incredibly helpful for allowing a very genuine, very earnest discussion to transpire.” “There was no need to get the facts necessarily straight,” Schmidt said. That’s why Schmidt and Kim value written satirical content so much. “You can do that in a satire piece, but you can’t do that in video. “You can write Andy Hamilton into an article, but you can’t interview him and say things that he didn’t say,” Kim said. It is also hard for the team to create video content with made-up quotes that are often found in satirical articles. But sketches are hard to produce on an SNL level, especially when you have limited resources - such as a lack of producers, actors and comedy writers. He thinks NBC’s Saturday Night Live is a good example of how satire, in sketch form, can offer insightful interpretations of current events. To avoid this, Kim wants to focus on sketches, which he thinks are a better platform for satire. “We’re now saying, ‘Hey, what’s the strangest thing you’ve seen someone wear in New York?’ It’s more memes than. “Video has gone the way of entertainment instead of satire, and I think that’s another thing that a lot of the staff has beef with - is that we’re not doing satire anymore,” Kim said. Instead, they’d like to see satire used as a way to create meaningful discussions about systemic issues at NYU. However, these types of videos only touch on on superficial characteristics of students, which isn’t what Schmidt and Kim want The Black Sheep to focus on. The latter illustrates the quirky aspects of traditional university life. “It isn’t because we don’t have these things, but because the culture does not exist here.”Īccording to Schmidt and Kim, corporate has asked they focus on generating memes for their social media platforms and man-on-the-street videos for YouTube. “While most schools could thrive on mocking Greek life, how terrible one quad is, or the latest antics of their horrid sports teams, we could not,” Schmidt said. The structure of The Black Sheep allowed each campus to develop its own voice and content catered to its audience, The Black Sheep’s brand of satire was tied to traditional campus culture and climate - and NYU is simply a very different kind of campus. Instead, it simply became too expensive to maintain a wide network of writers website and server maintenance, used to host the writers’ content, was costly. The cuts weren’t due to a lack of interest on campus, Schmidt said. Over time, corporate began to tell campuses to cut down on the number of writers they brought on, even though the writing staff was unpaid. When Schmidt joined The Black Sheep as a writer when he was a first- year, the publication was mainly focused on written satirical articles.
The cuts - including Schmidt’s current position, for which he receives a weekly stipend - weren’t out of the blue. Schmidt hasn’t published a new article since Oct.
The team at NYU was given one week to cease editorial production. The news of the publication’s pivot to video and social media came from national headquarters in mid-October, according to Schmidt. “It was fantastic because it allowed content to be diversified to each campus.” “Take in terms of format - not in quality, we’re better than that - and then take The Onion in terms of content, put those together, and make it college-oriented and that’s what you get,” Chief Campus Manager and Steinhardt junior Travis Schmidt said. Each campus has a team of content creators that reports to the national corporate headquarters in Chicago. The Black Sheep NYU is part of a national network of other Black Sheep publications. The Black Sheep Online’s national headquarters hopes to be able to generate revenue from monetizing YouTube videos and social media content. The team is now putting all of its effort into producing content for The Black Sheep’s YouTube channel, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, primarily memes and satirical headlines. “We’re sort of, right now, in a stage where we don’t know what we’re doing,” Video Production Manager and CAS sophomore Paul Kim said. The site’s social feeds, especially its Twitter account, remain active, and the Black Sheep’s archives are still available.
Though the publication is no longer producing written articles for its website, its team is moving forward with purpose. The digital satire publication’s writing staff was recently cut by The Black Sheep Online’s national headquarters in an effort to focus content on social media platforms.
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