The Columbia Spectator launched its new blog Spectrum last night around 3 a.m., a launch heralded with a full-page banner ad on the cover of today’s paper. “We’re trying this blog thing again,” an all-caps headline pronounces, and trying they are! The new blog takes up the entire left side of the page, granting, as of this reading, equal visual precedence to an article, by the news editor, on the permanent appointment of a Dean of Student Affairs and an article beginning “What happened to you, Columbia? You used to be cool.”

This is bloggy, no doubt! And aggregatey! Spec’s site now grants a great deal of visual presence to a blog whose content promises to be less dry, if less newsworthy, than the daily paper itself. If the site maintains its current pace of uploading new posts — past blogging efforts, including “Spec Blogs,” the Opinion blog “Commentariat,” and the Arts blog “Spectacle” died a somewhat protracted death — it could become a go-to place for Columbia students. It’s certainly attractive! Really nice looking. This gives us pause, though: “Unlike Spec’s previous efforts, the new blog, Spectrum, will be supported by a dedicated blog team, meaning that it’ll be updated around the clock.”

And that’s kind of the problem, right? News worth reading isn’t constantly happening — the Spec, like every college daily ever, has to do a lot of stretching just to make its daily eight [or whatever] pages relevant. Minute-by-minute, what can Spec’s voice add to the discourse? Spectrum is a shot fired in Columbia mainstay Bwog’s direction, perhaps, but Spec and Bwog will end up fighting over the same stories, and Spectrum is at a disadvantage given how long Bwog’s had to establish its voice.

Well, hm! It’s not so much contributing a Spec voice to the discourse as letting the discourse change Spec, maybe! Right? It seems that opinion columnists will play a large role in the day-to-day workings of Spectrum, as will “daily editors” [a la Bwog, itself the well-defined internet outlet of monthly magazine The Blue and White] who will edit the site one day a week. Which gives them about as much power to define Spectrum’s voice as the editor-in-chief and managing editor have to define Spec’s? And both, Spec and Spectrum, are, again, equally prominent on the site. Which one is the cart and which the horse?

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The girls who brought us the Harvard douchebag contest have extended their reach beyond Cambridge. Yesterday, Windsor Hanger ‘10, Stephanie Kaplan ‘10, and Annie Wang ‘11 of Harvard’s Freeze College Magazine launched their new “collegiette’s guide” called Her Campus, setting a new precedent for useless Ivy League publications (which, to be fair, could explain about 90% of all Harvard media enterprises).

After contacting co-founder and CEO Kaplan about what these three Prada Devil wannabes hope to accomplish with their new cyber digs, she responded with a lengthy mission statement:

From: stephanie@hercampus.com
To: qichen@ivygateblog.com
Subject: Re: IvyGate’s inquiry about Her Campus
Date: Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 4:20 PM

HerCampus.com is an online magazine for college women that seeks to pave the way for the media industry to successfully make the transition online.  Her Campus will transition magazines to today’s digital world by individualizing its content college by college by setting up “My Campus” branches, beginning at Harvard and eventually expanding to 1000+ colleges and universities nationwide.  By supplementing national with local content, Her Campus represents the future of online media.

Uh, was there ever a time when the internet wasn’t national? Not only that, but the pearl-donning triumvirate of the Ivy League’s new Seventeen seems to think they’re the first ones to come up with the idea of female-oriented college media. Read more after the jump.

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We’re beyond jazzed about The Man Time Forgot, Y2K YDN editor-in-chief Isaiah Wilner’s fun-formative romp through Time Inc.’s heady all-Ivy Twenties days.

The book details how Time co-founder Henry Luce stole all the credit and company shares for the magazine from Skull and Bones brother Briton Hadden … on Hadden’s deathbed, no less. It’s like This Side of Paradise without all the shit subplots and pro-Princeton superfluity! (This, despite David Propson calling The Man a “first book, and it shows” in a hilarious New York Observer review.)

This seems as good a time as ever to recap Wilner’s own shady history with journalistic ethics. Turns out Wilner was forced out of his YDN editorship for his alleged involvement in New Haven voter fraud! According to an October 1999 Rumpus “Remedial Media,” Wilner ran a week’s worth of puff pieces on his roommate Asit Gosar’s aldermanic campaign. Then Wilner minimized city section coverage of his roomie’s election chicanery, which involved Wilner and Gosar telling members of Pierson and Davenport College to vote for Gosar under their residential college addresses (as opposed to their real, off-campus ones in another ward). And Wilner recused himself from office only after Gosar’s opponent demanded a recount. For an abridged version, see this 1999 Yale Alumni Magazine short-take. Rumpus lovingly chronicled other charming encounters with Wilner here, here, and, oh, here.

We cite The Book of Isaiah Wilner 3:16: Time may forget men, but Google does not.

02138, Harvard’s hotly anticipated alumni magazine, will soon embark on its maiden voyage. As IvyGate stands at the port, preparing to wave its kerchief bon voyage to the good ship Bradley, it spies on the dock a mysterious envelope. Could it be? A coveted media kit! We smuggled it home and gave it the old exegesis:

- The official New York launch party (Sept. 26, crash it with us!) will be at The Core Club on East 55th Street in Manhattan. Repeat, the Core Club. We’re guessing the Harvard Alumni Association wasn’t about to let these carpetbaggers sully the Harvard Club for a night, what with their not-quite-Crimson hue and their irreverent section headings.  

- We also found a minor typo in the spelling of a contributor’s name:

No big deal, though: this Peretz guy, whoever he is, isn’t even powerful enough to make the “Harvard 100″ (see below), let alone get a staffer fired for mistaking his gender. 

- 02138 claims a circulation of 50,000, and we believe them. Sort of. How they found all these names is a relevant question, considering the Alumni Association’s mother lion-like protection of its list.  

- The mag’s big conceit, and the cover of the inaugural issue, is “The Harvard 100″ — a running list of the school’s most influential alums. “Arbitrary power rankings” is our middle name, so naturally we love this, even though it’s described in the media kit in this baffling way: “What could make a magazine more readable for, and important to, this audience than one that is truly about them?” Trust us, it makes even less sense in context.

We’ll ignore for now the sections named “Gravitas” and “Vanitas” (“Harvard’s Page Six — with the facts straight.” Gag) to bring you 02138’s first Top 100 list, which has … um … 109 names. PR screwup, or brilliant plot to get everyone talking about who will get whittled down? Like we care! Binge away after the jump.

UPDATE 12:45 p.m.: 02138 writes in to tell us that the list of about 100 influential Harvard alumni on the cover is not the list of 100 influential Harvard alumni that will appear in its first cover story. Got that? We asked what the hell the point was, then; “to give potential advertisers a sense of our community and its diversity,” a spokesflack said. Thanks, 02138, for reminding us Natalie Portman went to Harvard.

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This incredible campus celebrity sighting made its way to us today from across the Internets:

“Today, making my way through Harvard Yard, who should I see but Lou Dobbs standing over a pile of fetid and discarded dorm-carpets, apparently being offered for resale to the parents of new freshmen, just arriving.  He looked puffy, greasy, and lumpy all at once.

“Several hours later, making my way back home, I ran upon Lou Dobbs again. By this point he had purchased, and was wearing, a terrible Harvard hat. He was lighting a cigarette as if it might be his last.  Does the man have a child starting school up here, or was he just creeping folks out on assignment?”

Outstanding. We’d like to take this opportunity to encourage all readers to hone their stalking skills by notifying us posthaste of any celebs — and we use the term loosely — appearing on campus. Especially those that look “puffy, greasy, and lumpy all at once.” Grade inflation awarded for cameraphone pics.

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.

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You know why everyone hates Harvard kids? Because they buy entire newspapers at 25 with trust fund money, the sick, too-handsome, pluto-chieving pricks!

Sorry, that’s not being entirely fair to Jared Kushner, Harvard ‘03, new majority owner of the New York Observer. According to the Times,

“Mr. Kushner said that the money he was investing was his own, earned while he was an undergraduate at Harvard. In between cramming for finals, he bought and sold nine residential buildings in Cambridge, Mass., with backing from a number of investors, including family members.”

Emphasis ours, clearly. During finals? Holy shit, the best thing we ever did during exam week was beat Super Mario World on a sweet emulator for the Mac. Getting really good on Text Twist is probably runner-up. [Ed.: Actually, half of us got a BJ in the stacks the night after finally turning in the last term paper of the semester, which was totally aweso--FUCK! We don't own a Manhattan newspaper!]

Sorry, back to our seething Kushner jealousy. We wish you the best, pal. The Observer is a terrific rag, and you seem to know what you don’t know. Keep an eye out for our resume come hiring time, you precocious publishing-magnate-in-diapers handjob, you.