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« Cinecast: Now Videocast | Main | "Blink" » October 22, 2005"MBAlmer: Fake News For Real MBAs"The Fall 2005 issue of "Business" (the official magazine of the UW Business School) has an article about the MBAlmer - a spoof newspaper that we started in the Spring quarter of my first year in b-school: It began, appropriately enough, with the surreptitious passing of notes in the back of class. Feeling uninspired one day, Gavin Shearer (MBA 2005) and Chris Meyer (MBA 2005) traded invented headlines—some satiric, some sophomoric—affectionately lampooning friends and favorite profs. The in-jokes got out, and soon someone suggested culling them into a fake online newspaper, a local version of The Onion. You can read the entire article here. (PDF) Look, it's incredibly gratifying when you can be part of something that catches fire with people. But in the case of the MBAlmer, I had a lot of help. Aside from owing a spiritual debt of gratitude to The Onion, the original genesis of the newspaper was a spoof that was dreamt up by classmate Flavio Kaplan. It had just been announced that Dean Gupta was leaving us for USC, and I was hanging out in the MBA lounge. Flavio, tapping away on his laptop, looked up at me and said, "Gavin! You know how to build Web pages, right?" (Uh, sure!) Flavio was trying to wrap a Seattle Times look-and-feel around a fake news article. The gag was simple: we'd hired USC's former dean in retribution for USC hiring Gupta. I was totally in to it, of course, and the two of us quickly whipped up this little gem ("UW Business School To Hire Former USC Dean") and sent it out to the MBA mailing list. Response was positive. And the seed was planted. From there, the "Business" article is pretty accurate. Chris Meyer and I were cracking each other up during a very slow Operations class one day, and it was all downhill from there. It's really, really important to point out that the MBAlmer was (and is, now more than ever) a team sport. Cintra wrote articles; Marnie and Joanne were forced to sit through thousands of iterations of the same crappy joke as we tested and tested; poor Mike Liu and Arkan Kayihan ('05 and '06 class presidents, respectively) were terrificly good sports, as were the members of the Program Office and faculty. Everyone liked the joke. And now, of course, the paper is under the safe control of 2006 funnyman Andy Boyer. It's a pretty "inside baseball" spoof, but seems to translate well to other MBA programs. If you're interested in reading the MBAlmer, you can get the current issue here. Archives are available, too - first issue, second issue, third issue. And remember: MBAlmer is a satire. Please read responsibly. (And big thanks to "Business" writer Ed Kromer, who sent me a few free copies of the issue for my scrapbook. You rock, Ed!) Posted by Gavin Shearer at October 22, 2005 12:36 PM. Posted to Entertainment | UW MBA. CommentsWow, I knew you had invented the Internet but i had no idea you had also invented the MBAalmer. I've been touched by greatness :) Have you seen the recent Presidential attack on the domestic insurgents known as The Onion? Talk about people with no sense of humor. You'd think people that start a few wars and leak national secrets would have a better sense of irony... I read about it on slashdot: Posted by: purple Post a commentThanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out) (If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.) |
