BusinessWeek posted a really interesting story, "Facebook Faces Up," about a variety of college-specific web sites gaining traction against Facebook by specifically courting the college audience.  The story featured OTR.  It's an interesting read -- we've heard many students discuss how Facebook is losing relevancy as the site quickly eschews its college-oriented roots in favor of becoming a broader social network.  

Of course, like I say in the article, we feel that online media in the college space is additive, rather than competitive, as college students spend a lot of time online and seem to digest anything and everything of relevance.

Read the entire piece here and below find an excerpt detailing OTR:

College-Specific Blogs

Furthermore, research done this April by iProspect shows that among the younger age group, the top social networks have overlapping user-bases. For each of the eight social sites in the report, 30% to 40% of 18- to 24-year-olds surveyed reported some involvement, which means most respondents are frequenting more than one of the sites. According to iProspect, the likely overlap is three to five networks per average student user. If that's true, the niche model just got a whole lot more interesting to mainstream business.

College campuses provide an ideal niche case, not only because they are self-contained, but because they are communities with ample social needs and active online populations. "[They] are probably the best example we've seen of communities that can be easily activated by online media," says Columbia alumnus Doug Imbruce. This September, Imbruce is launching a series of college-specific blogs called Off The Record, where students can post information about their schools, their peers, and their professors and administrators, while using a pseudonym.

Content will be managed by student-editors reporting to an editor-in-chief in Off The Record's New York offices. Though the controlled structure and pseudonyms may seem impersonal, Imbruce promises that editors will be chiefly concerned with controlling logistics, technology, and privacy. He predicts a site culture in which students collectively feel free to post the truth of college life as they see it. By virtue of its selectivity—students can only contribute to their own college's page—Imbruce believes Off The Record is "more intimate" than a larger network or more public blog.

Given the specificity of the information that will be contained within each blog thread, Imbruce also promises the sites will remain exclusive to each college. "We're looking to create college sites," he says. "We may add more content, sports scores, and news, but we will stay vertical within these communities."

...so well written!  The only item the writer forgot to mention is that we're really good at photoshop.