The IvyGate Index: Calibrating Hegemony Since 2006
The price of attending an Ivy League school is not the tuition — it’s the subsequent lifetime you spend encountering your classmates’ bylines.
A brother can’t even glance at a periodical without suffering flashbacks. Open the New York Times and boom, it’s 30 years ago and Nick “One F” Kristof is hitting on your girl at a Crimson party. Grab The New Republic — God, that dweeb Beinart would wake you up every morning at 7 a.m. braying show tunes down the hall in Pierson. Flip through the New Yorker and wow, there was that time you and Phil Gourevitch stayed up after that party in Risley, had a lot of wine, really just talked, and one thing led to another and it’s not like it makes you gay, it was just college, you know? We digress. Ivy bylines — they’re everywhere! And they will haunt every minute of your media-soaked life.
It’s no secret that Ivy Leaguers run the Fourth Estate. It’s a given, a commonly acknowledged conceit … that also happens to be completely, totally wrong. How do we know?
Meet our newest recurring feature: the IvyGate Index®, a highly scientific measure of Ivy influence in various industries. In each installment, our crack statisticians (poached in a clandestine midnight raid on the U.S. News & World Report compound) will pore over reams of data, using patented hegemony formulae to give you the numbers you crave with cutting-edge graphical representation. That’s right, bitches: pie charts.
This week, we point the mighty IvyGate Index® telescope at the top rungs of the media ladder. Verdict: Shockingly little dominance!
In conclusion, the media industry’s IGIQ (IvyGate Index Quotient) is 44 percent. After the jump, we’ve included a note on methodology for all you budding freakonomists. Next week: robber barons of the extraction industries.
A Note on Methodology: In the spirit of transparency, we present you with the raw data compiled by our Ivy-pedigreed social economists. The IGI considers the almae matres of the ranking editors of the country’s top 10 daily papers, plus the 15 best magazines, arbitrarily chosen. After much gnashing of teeth, we dedided to count Ivy graduate programs but assign them less weight than undergraduate schools. For example, Mort Zuckerman received an M.B.A. from UPenn and a J.D. from Harvard Law; we counted his influence as one Ivy share — half a share for each graduate degree.
Raw Data
| Publication | Top Editor | School | Ivy? |
| USA Today | Ken Paulson | Mizzou | no! |
| The Wall Street Journal | Paul Steiger | Yale | yes |
| The New York Times | Bill Keller | Pomona | no! |
| Los Angeles Times | Dean Baquet | Columbia (dropout) | yes |
| The Washington Post | Len Downie | Ohio State | no! |
| Chicago Tribune | Ann Marie Lipinski | Michigan | no! |
| New York Daily News | Mort Zuckerman | Penn, Harvard | yes |
| The Philadelphia Inquirer | Amanda Bennett | Harvard | yes |
| Denver Post/Rocky Mountain News | Greg Moore | Ohio Wesleyan | no! |
| Houston Chronicle | Jeff Cohen | Texas | no! |
| Glamour | Cynthia Leive | Swarthmore | no! |
| New Yorker | David Remnick | Princeton | yes |
| Time | Richard Stengel | Princeton | yes |
| Newsweek | Mark Whitaker | Harvard | yes |
| Esquire | David Granger | UT-Knoxville | no! |
| The New Republic | Franklin Foer | Columbia | yes |
| Weekly Standard | Bill Kristol | Harvard | yes |
| The National Review | Richard Lowry | UVA | no! |
| Atlantic Monthly | James Bennet | Yale | yes |
| Wired | Chris Anderson | GW, Berkeley | no! |
| Slate | Jacob Weisberg | Yale | yes |
| New York Magazine | Adam Moss | Oberlin | no! |
| Vogue | Anna Wintour | no college | no! |
| Vanity Fair | Graydon Carter | no college | no! |
| Sports Illustrated | Terry McDonell | Berkeley | no! |
Source: the Internet.
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