How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
NYU Local publisher Cody Brown is a thinker. Not a thinker in the moody, introspective mode chiseled into stone by Rodin — he'd probably call that loser statue a crusty antique, like the newspapers it's become his mission to render passé. No, the Tisch senior is a thinker in the new-media sense of the word: An animated, tireless idea machine who believes — to the very core — in the power of the Internet to circulate and enact his ideas. He's full of concepts, and if you visit his blog, you can see them laid out in their gargantuan sprawl like a rainforest of words and diagrams.
About a year and a half ago, Brown was randomly immersed in an introductory class that many NYU students have grown to loathe or dread: "Foundations of Journalism." He quickly adopted the view — as many others have — that the course title is a crucial misnomer.
"There really aren't any foundations of journalism because this entire thing is being reworked at the moment," Brown said. It got him thinking — more accurately, got him obsessed.
Print is in decline and blogs are on the rise, but more important than any strict dichotomy between new and old media, according to Brown, the way a community renders its discourse is moving away from the "paternalistic" paradigm of reporter, newsroom and house editorial.
"Every source is going direct," Brown said. "If a person has a message, there are now a million ways to get it out there, and only one of those ways is to call up a reporter and talk to them about it."
So he channeled his academic energy into a real-life project: NYU Local. The site was initially going to be called In Why You, an adorably clunky pun that just about sums up Brown's intentions. The goal was to create a conduit for conversation; a usefully unfiltered space for the kind of information that Tom Wolfe would have to dig through if he were making a city-set sequel to "I Am Charlotte Simmons."
"More than anything, what I hope that NYU Local has given NYU is a place where NYU students can sanely discuss what their school is all about; what's wrong with their school; what their school should be doing," Brown said.
The site has proven adept at capturing milieu, listening to the little cultural things close to the ground, "tapping into all the stuff that's between the lines of most newspaper articles," Brown said. It was definitely one crucial way to get a handle on a ridiculous schoolwide lockdown crisis bonanza.
"I think probably the best compliment NYU Local received repeatedly was at the height of the Kimmel occupation. It was something to the effect of, 'I could not have imagined this story without NYU Local,' " Brown told WSN.
So what's next? The most interesting thing about Brown is that he's definitely not done, even with a successful alternative journalism project behind him.
"When you create a start-up website, you have a chance to really see what people want. Blogs are more of a midwife for the future of journalism," he said.
Like an overzealous ultrasound technician, Brown has made it his business to figure out the baby.
Maybe it'll be Kommons, a new site he's working on that he hopes will bring "direct journalism" even further. Maybe it will. Maybe it won't. Whatever the case, he's going to keep inventing models until he finds it. His version of J-school is being a frontiersman with an iPhone, and it sounds like a lot more fun.
"If you're a student at NYU and you have a project, just do it as soon as you can, and get out a beta," Brown said. "Your time at NYU is so much more fun and interesting if you really throw yourself at something and try to create your own institution."
Well, I'm inspired. Who wants to pose for NYUNaked?
