Chatter box
When The Onion, CollegeHumor and Syracuse University are combined, the only result could be ‘Cuse My Campus,’ the ‘un-affiliated, uncensored and un-edited (Web) page of Syracuse.’ Since its launch on Feb. 14, the site has become home to articles mocking Alcohol Edu, parking ticket notification violations (that may cost those fined up to $9,000), as well as South Campus seceding from the university. Articles mocking the stereotypical freshman night out, as well as the ‘self-proclaimed 99 percent of arrogant students’ in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, have also been featured on the site. While their content might be offensive, the creators of the site hope nothing is taken to heart, yet they want their content taken seriously. The minds behind the Web site, Brian Weinreich, a senior biology and psychology major, and Alex Piliouras, a senior television, radio and film major, talked to The Daily Orange about the site and what they hope it will become.
How did you get the idea for the blog?
Weinreich: The first idea came from me and my friend Tory Gentes. We started a T-shirt company at first, and we wanted to find out about the juice and gossip about Syracuse. We thought of making a gossip site, but we scratched that idea. So then Alex came in. He wanted to build a site that looked like CollegeHumor and The Onion. It’s satirical news – we want to emphasis satire. The idea was born because at first we wanted it to be for our ‘Squeeze my Tees’ Web site, but now it’s Syracuse’s own unedited page. So Alex and I started writing up stuff.
How long have you been planning it?
Piliouras: It’s been awhile. We started planning it a month ago or two. It took a month to write it. Brian’s the engineer of our site – he knows all the codes and stuff. It took awhile for him to do that.
BW: Alex came up with a bunch of ideas to launch it. We have some friends of ours that write in the style we are going for so we enlist their help when we don’t have enough stories to fill up the day. We hope that people who go to SU will start posting their own content. We want a lot of user content too. We don’t want to be the only people posting on it. Things we think are the best will be on the top of the site but we don’t want to turn people away. It’s like an unofficial site for SU.
Are you solely keeping the focus on SU?
AP: We’re trying to keep it SU-related for now. If CollegeHumor is the network of these kind of sites, then we are the cable affiliate and we want to be geared toward SU.
BW: There’s a lot of sports blogs and fashion blogs for Syracuse, but we want to unite everything under one hood so you don’t need to go through 3,000 pages to find what you want. It’s one place where you can find everything you need, but it’s all Syracuse stuff. The problem we were seeing is the actual SU homepage doesn’t have Syracuse student content, so we want to give a medium for people to really express how they feel about certain things, and this is a great place to do that. On the ‘Juice Box’ on the site you can post your opinions and whatever you are thinking about.
AP: The thing with Jerk magazine last week was a perfect example to give a voice to people that can use bias. In a newspaper you have to report it like it is, but on the Web site we can have whoever wants to voice their opinions.
What are you hoping people will get out of the Web site?
BW: We hope that people can read stories about things that are going on and enjoy it in a satirical context. We don’t watch CNN and Fox as much as we watch ‘The Daily Show.’ So we provide news in a comical way and we think people want to read things that are funny.
What kind of content are you putting out?
BW: We’re sort of putting up pictures and articles, but they have flowcharts incorporated with them. We are going to have merchandise and we are thinking of opening it up to an academics part where people could share notes and maybe even old exams. I think it would be great – it’s a good way to study.
Are you planning on doing any serious stuff?
AP: We are going to mention serious things, but we can’t help but have a satirical tone with it. The whole basis is for it to be in the comedy spotlight. We kind of want to do just Syracuse content. We aren’t limiting it to funny things, we just seem to have funny things to say that we’ve put up so far. Syracuse is kind of ripe for jokes.
Have any other Web sites inspired you?
BW: I think our site is a conglomerate of CollegeHumor and The Onion. We knew what we wanted to make and I started looking around at the sites I go to the most. And we thought, why not put all these together? But we don’t want to be a copy of those sites. We look at the best parts of those sites and think about how we can put them all together with a Syracuse angle. The Juice Box is like Twitter, our general motif is like CollegeHumor and The Onion. In today’s world many Web sites are (put) out the same way. With everything we have it’s more CollegeHumor than The Onion, but the articles are more like The Onion.
Published on February 22, 2010 at 12:00 pm
