The away message of the Crimson's associate managing editor said it all: "does anyone have a spiderhole i can borrow for a few days?"

The newsroom staff at 14 Plympton Street is agog this weekend over top editors' handling of what should have been a minor incident: a single poorly sourced column. Now the campus is talking about the paper's credibility, and the controversy is entirely of their own creation.

At 3 a.m. Friday, Crimson president Will Marra '07 decided to pull a news story on columnist Victoria Ilyinsky's firing from the print edition, and posted it online the following morning instead. Managing editor Dan Hemel '07 ran a blank space on page three in protest -- the universal journalism symbol for "CENSORED," and an unmistakably public Eff You to his boss.

Marra explained in an email to the news staff that he wanted to let the paper's opinion editors have first dibs at addressing the flap with an editor's note. "Holding off for a few hours with the story did not at all undermine news' credibility (and among our readers would have only increased it)," Marra wrote. But in what universe does withholding news increase cred? In an effort to be hyper-ethical (or just cover his own ass), Marra's bending over backward just became convoluted.

Crimson bigshots flipped. Former managing editor Zach Seward (who covers Harvard for the Wall Street Journal) slammed Marra's "extraordinarily cryptic" decisionmaking. "The Crimson was censored on Thursday night," Seward wrote everyone. Sitting on hot news for arcane reasons of propriety, while the Boston Globe and others wrote all about it, meant "the paper was, in perhaps a first, willfully scooped. To protect its own credibility? It's like destroying the village in order to save it." The rest of his blistering critique is after the jump, along with Hemel's response. (Marra didn't respond to our interview request; the author of the news story had no comment.)

We don't have enough buckets to catch all the Crimson leakage. Editors are pissed. Alumni are coming out of the woodwork with questions. Everyone agrees: Marra screwed up. 

Does it get worse? Yup. History seemed to repeat itself this weekend when news staffers - remember blood in the water? -- discovered that an editorial cartoon by Kathleen E. Breeden, '09, bore similarities to another cartoon published recently in Newsday. As with the Ilyinsky piece, CrimEds spent Sunday night waffling over publishing their news piece in the print edition vs. online. Last we heard, the story's gonna be in the paper.

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One of the things we learned when compiling Ivy crime stats back in August was that universities get to report or withhold pretty much anything they want. If someone steals the entire contents of your dorm room, but there's no sign of forced entry, sorry! That's larceny, not burglary, so as far as the public knows, it never happened.

Harvard's Zach Seward -- he of Summers-scooping, academic-probation fame -- has a good piece on the subject in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, detailing how universities game the system. Seward also re-calculates Ivy crime data to include both kinds of theft, yielding the authoritative chart at right on which school is the robbingest.