Nutellagate

Stephan Adamow, CC '15, poses for Spec as he ladles himself some Nutella at Ferris Booth Commons

Nutellagate occurred when misinformation spread that students were stealing $5,000 worth of Nutella a week from Dining Services during March 2013. It was also a tremendous coup for the Columbia Daily Spectator, and got them links from literally almost every notably news site on the Internet.

Basically: Peter Bailinson, a first-year CCSC rep posted on his class Facebook page that students were stealing tons of Nutella. Said rep (who was also on Spec) later told Spec that students were stealing Nutella; $5,000 per week of it. Naturally—give that $5,000 is a nice big round number and that few news sources can resist a good class-baity blog post about Columbia—the New York Times picked up the story, as did Gawker and everybody else. Dining Service person Vicki Dunn vaguely agreed with Bailinson's misinformation—which is how an 18-year-old's unverified Facebook post was printed as fact in the New York Times.

Then—in a press released actually titled "It's a Smear!", the University said that it wasn't nearly so much.

Kevin Shollenberger, wanting to show just how much damn fun he was/jump onto the blog-rush bandwagon, made a video of himself eating Nutella in his office (with the help of Kat Cutler, naturally). (Commenters concurred that Shollenberger's idea was funny but poorly executed, ruined by his "look right at the end that says 'can i stop yet?' " .