Imagine this headline: Survey Finds More Black Squirrels on Campus Than Black Students. No, it’s not from North by Northwestern and it’s not from The Daily Northwestern. It’s from Northwestern’s new satirical news source, The Shmaily. Three roommates, Medill senior Dave Orlansky and Communication seniors James Belfer and Brendon Boutin started the site, which launched May 4.
North by Northwestern met up with the trio on a rainy Wednesday evening in Norris (a booth, at their insistence). The gloomy atmosphere didn’t faze the creators of The Shmaily, though.
The roommates met in Allison their freshman year. They share everything from jokes and ideas to toilet paper. According to Boutin, whom we last spoke to about his “escort service” business, toilet paper runs out quickly, but it’s clear that the laughs and ideas don’t. Just remember, their bathroom’s not the only place with shit. Like their Web site content, their answers are probably “completely and utterly 83% fabricated.”
Orlanksy, Belfer and Boutin dished to North by Northwestern about their high-reaching goals for the site, their affiliation with boy band LFO and their, um, unique methods of advertising.
When did you guys start working on The Shmaily?
Dave Orlansky: It launched on Monday. I guess we started working on it back in ‘97.
James Belfer: Summer of ’97, I remember it distinctly now.
DO: But it was ahead of its time, so we kept it under wraps for the next eight to nine years.
JB: Part of the reason why is that Dave was a big LFO fan at the time. He just toured with him them around the world and it sort of just put a damper on my and Brendon’s lives.
Brendon Boutin: Yeah, we didn’t write anything.
JB: All of our articles were about how we missed Dave and “where’s Dave?” and “I hope Dave loves Cleveland…”
DO: No one knows who I am, so no one understood it. [...] We started working on it about month ago. Sometime after spring break.
How did you guys start talking about it?
BB: I came home from work one day […]and I said, “You know what, guys, would be great? If we did something really amazing and really funny.”
DO: That’s very typical of him. He throws out very enthusiastic, vague comments. From there, we had the idea of coming up with some sort of satire magazine or online Web site for a little while. We figured, we’re all spring quarter seniors; we all have the time to make it happen, so we thought why not? We actually didn’t think it would be that much work to just get it up there, we thought we could do it five or six hours.
BB: Our initial plan was to get it up that night.
DO: It took a little longer than that. About a month longer than we originally thought. It took a month and six hours to make the site. And then we finally got it up.
You guys are graduating. Are you still going to keep doing stuff with The Shmaily?
DO: The thing is, this has been a huge success so far. We got 5 million hits the first day.
Is that true?
DO: Well roughly, four million were my mom, just refreshing, but then one million Northwestern students still, so that was pretty good. I plan on just writing as much as we can in the next quarter, try to build it, get a good team of writers, and then pass it on to a junior who wants to continue it. But I feel like even next year, I’d love to keep writing for it. I don’t think you really need to be on campus to write for it.
How did people know about it?
DO: We had a fourfold advertising campaign that consisted of painting the Rock, flyering around campus, sending out a Facebook message to 120 friends of my closest friends, telling them to make it their status. About 15 of them did. I lost about 105 friends that day.
JB: Very tragic.
DO: I think Facebook was pretty big. I think between that and the flyering and the rock, and our friends…
BB: Plus we had people placed in the computer room at the library just going to The Shmaily and being like “Oh! The Shmaily! What is this? This is hilarious.”
DO: Yeah, that was key.
What do you guys see as the future of The Shmaily?
JB: Its own government. Owning an island.
DO: I mean that would be nice. I don’t even think that’s idealistic. I think that’s right in the next couple year plan.
JB: Five year plan.
DO: I think in terms of the future…we ‘d like to definitely crack the top three of Northwestern’s news sources. We don’t want to pass NBN. We love you guys. We want to really be in there between NBN, Daily…I actually don’t know any other news sources.
NNN? WNUR?
DO: Never heard of any of these.
BB: Yeah, you’re speaking gibberish.
DO: Anyway…satire’s one niche in Northwestern news, and no one really does it on a mass level. I think Northwestern’s quirky enough. And there’s a lot of things to make fun of. There’s plenty of material and plenty of funny people here who want to write. I feel like we can build it into a mainstay and hopefully will continue. We’ll be like the Harvard Lampoon. One day, we’ll be replacing Conan O’Brien and it will be traced back to our own Harvard Lampoon-type publication. I’m sure they started just like we did — Web site, grassroots organization, door to door campaign, planting people in the library…
BB: At an LFO concert, singing that famous song.
JB: It’s a wonderful band. It’s full of wonderful kids.
BB: (sings “Summer Girls” by LFO)
Who designed the logo and what’s the idea behind that?
JB: Yo. The logo developed just involving some kind of butt and fart joke and a piece of paper was sort of a template that it began as. And something sort of devilish, like the Calvin and Hobbes logo, like the Calvin peeing or mooning. They then wanted someone sitting at a toilet. And I was like, “We can do that.”
DO: He took AP art in high school.
JB: Yeah I took AP Art, tons of 2D design and drawing. Millions of dollars of talent. And then basically said hey, how about just a guy reaching for a newspaper as a means of help on the toilet.
DO: The toilet paper has run out, and he’s looking at the newspaper on the ground, so he’s eying it as if he’s going to wipe his ass with it basically.
-Dave Orlansky
What role does each of you have as a team?
JB: Dave is our fearless leader.
DO: I’m just like editor-in-chief, writer, photographer, publisher, Photoshopper and updater. These guys are our team of writers and idea men, and they help paint the rock and make the logo and upkeep on the site.
BB: We write all the funny articles.
DO: We all mesh our ideas together, in terms of what content ideas and article ideas, we all talk about it and contribute. [...] We don’t have official meetings necessarily. When you live in the same place, you don’t have to have meetings. As soon as we buy an easel, then I think we’re going to start having daily meetings. Which I plan on buying an easel soon. As soon as the Web site makes money, easel is the first thing. [...] There’s no revenue scheme though, so it’s a catch-22. The Web site’s not going to get big unless we have meetings, but we can’t have meetings unless we have an easel and we can’t get an easel unless the Web site is a success.
Do you guys ever fear offending anyone too much?
DO: When we first launched the first day, we envisioned some sort of violent protest at the rock.
JB: I prayed for one actually.
DO: It would’ve been great for publicity. Unfortunately, we didn’t get egged. There was no violent protest. Nothing was burned. I would’ve loved to see a Shmaily flag just get burned. We didn’t manufacture any flags, which I think is half the problem. I guess we’re definitely concerned about offending people. Our intentions are not to offend anyone. They’re just to be funny.
BB: We want to be smart funny, not like potty funny.
DO: In the “About Us” I made sure that everything’s made up. We’re satirical. And as long as everyone understands that, then there shouldn’t really be a problem. As long as they know we’re joking, then no one should be offended really. But there’s always going to be people that are offended, and there’s nothing really you can do.
Is there anything else you guys want to add?
BB: Do you include marital status?
Sure.
JB: One of us is single.
BB: And really hot. He’s so hot.
DO: This whole Web site was just a ploy for me to get a girlfriend.
Disclosure: Brendon Boutin wrote an article for our print magazine last year. Also, North by Northwestern’s Director of Operations Andy Ertell did technical work for The Shmaily.