Something interesting on the internet for a summer Friday! Rising Stanford sophomore Sam Gerstenzang launched a website yesterday — weddingcredential.com — that tallies how many times different keywords (e.g. the names of Ivy League Schools, investment banks) are mentioned on The New York Times wedding page.
“Everyone seems to love the wedding page,” Mr. Gerstenzang told the Media Mob this afternoon over gchat. “It’s almost as if they buy the Sunday paper for the news as an excuse, take one look at the frontpage and then head to to ‘more interesting’ stuff.”
Mr. Gerstenzang wrote that he built the site to test the hypothesis of whether certain keywords were overrepresented on the page — “Harvard” (416 mentions) and “law firm” (913) were the examples he gave. “People like to make fun of ‘elites’ but also to read about themselves and I think the wedding section sort of provides a bit of both. Ironically, I imagine the site will be the most popular among the Ivy League set themselves,” he wrote.
Mr. Gerstenzang, who has yet to declare a major, is interning this summer on Buzzfeed‘s development team. He built the site in one weekend. “My plan is to start a bunch of things like this until I find one of them that I can turn into a business,” he wrote. “No plans for profit with this one though, just for fun.”
“My big hope is that someone at the Times will give me access to their data, so I’ll be able to look at trends reaching back to 1981,” he continued. “Who knows if they’ll be interested, though. (I hope so).”
A few blogs, including the The Nytpicker, linked to the site today, saying that the site’s creator was anonymous. “They clearly didn’t read very far,” wrote Mr. Gerstenzang, whose name appears in his email address on the site. “I think it adds to the mystique a bit though.”
zturner@observer.com
