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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Remember how we reserved the right to freak out if more dirt on Victoria Ilyinsky came to light? Well, looks like the Crimson has done it for us.

The Harvard daily fired Ilyinsky Thursday after learning that the senior had failed to cite sources in her column on misuse of the word "literally." In addition to one passage drawn from a Slate story, "two other parts of the opinion piece also do not meet The Crimson's standards for source citation, and it is on this basis that we have decided to retract the column," the editors wrote in a statement posted late Thursday.

They kind of had to. After pummeling Kaavya Viswanathan last year for plagiarism, the Crimson doesn't want to be seen protecting someone even remotely tainted by the p-word, even if it's a small infraction. And you just know the Romenesko-horny reporters smell blood in the water. As we type this, every Crimson newshound is Googling Ilyinsky's past columns sentence by sentence -- desperate, desperate, desperate to become the next David Zhou.

Evvvverybody, take a breath. A note and a retraction might have sufficed. The additional infractions that supposedly convinced the CrimEds to yank the column are no more grave than the first. Her two sources, "Literally, A Web Log" and Slate, are the first and third results of a Google search for "literally." As we said before, this isn't a high crime. (Unless other bogus columns surface!) It's laziness, and a failure to learn the first lesson of sloppy journalism: If you can Google a topic, so can your readers.

We'll see what happens next. (The Globe reports, weirdly, that the Crimson plans to pull the article offline. If they remove it, we've cached the article here.)

UPDATE 5:45 p.m.: The Crimson has officially yanked the piece from the website. You guys realize that's exactly the wrong move, right? Leave it up with a note attached for readers to make their own judgments.

Also, not that this is relevant, but we hear Victoria Ilyinsky is a princess. Literally. Like, descendant of the Romanov dynasty. We're kind of tempted to forgive everything.

The next Kaavya! The next Kaavya! That's the shrill-ish noise we're hearing from Cambridge, after the Crimson ran an editor's note yesterday apologizing for an Oct. 16 column by Victoria Ilyinsky '07. The column bore some similarities to a Slate piece on misuse of the word "literally." The relevant passages (via Steve Melendez '07 and his blog, Rabbits and Robots):

From Slate:

As is often the case, though, such "abuses" have a long and esteemed history in English. The ground was not especially sticky in Little Women when Louisa May Alcott wrote that "the land literally flowed with milk and honey," nor was Tom Sawyer turning somersaults on piles of money when Twain described him as "literally rolling in wealth," nor was Jay Gatsby shining when Fitzgerald wrote that "he literally glowed," nor were Bach and Beethoven squeezed into a fedora when Joyce wrote in Ulysses that a Mozart piece was "the acme of first class music as such, literally knocking everything else into a cocked hat."

From The Crimson:

Not only is "literally" one of many misleading terms, but it's also had multiple meanings for quite a while. The third aforementioned quote-"the land literally flowed with milk and honey"-comes straight from Louisa May Alcott's 1868 novel "Little Women." And who doesn't remember Fitzgerald's description of Jay Gatsby: "He literally glowed?" But neither was the town of Plumfield overrun with food-stuffs nor our favorite social climber actually luminescent.

Melendez notices how Ilyinsky makes the same points about "Janus words" and "contranyms" as the Slate writer and emerges unsympathetic: 

My conclusion is that Ilyinsky plagiarized [Slate's] Sheidlower; of course, she may not have started writing with that intent, but it looks like that's what happened.

Honestly, we're not so sure. Ilyinsky definitely ganked the Slate author's ideas with no attribution whatsoever. But there's a line between honest mistake and you'll-never-work-in-this-town-again plagiarism/fabulism. We say Ilyinsky falls, with a couple inches to spare, on the honest-mistake side. The bigger sin is lazily revisiting tired subject matter that's been treated in a classic David Cross routine, this blog, and every pop grammar book ever. (IvyGate reserves the right to flip out if more infractions come to light.)