Crimson Launches New Website

The Crimson has launched a new website and is making all 128 years of the newspaper’s content available in a searchable, online archive.

Forty to 50 years of articles will be accessible on the webpage today, and by the end of the year all of The Crimson’s volumes will be online both in searchable text form as well as via whole images of every printed page.

“This is the most exciting project that The Crimson has taken on since installing presses. It is an example of the ultimate use of the Internet,” said President C. Matthew MacInnis ’02, who noted that no other college newspapers are close to putting all of their content on the web.

Full Crimson text will be searchable by author, as well as subject and date.

The Crimson made the front page of the Boston Globe this summer when the paper hired two dozen Cambodian workers to typeset the 19th century issues of The Crimson. The workers were paid roughly 40 cents an hour, in U.S. dollars.

The hiring was at odds, some argued, with The Crimson’s endorsement this past spring of Harvard’s living wage campaign’s platform of a wage floor of $10.25 per hour for all Harvard employees. The Crimson typesetting was expected to employ 20 Cambodian typisis working two six-hour shifts a day on 10 computers for six months. The typists earn $50 a month, better than the $45 minimum wage paid in the garment sector, Cambodia’s biggest industry.

“We’re taking advantage of wage differentials,” MacInnis told the Globe in July, “but we have been assured that these salaries are not only fair, but excellent for the people doing this.”

The decision to update the website, the third incarnation of www.thecrimson.com, was reached last year as the old site, which was established in 1998, was becoming outdated in terms of design and technology. Several Crimson boards complained that the site was cluttered and lacked organization.

“The technology had been rewritten so many times that no one person was familiar with it,” MacInnis said.

The new website features a more streamlined flow of information.

The site allows for more articles on the front page and more flexibility to relay breaking news.

It can also be accessed in less time and by a greater variety of browsers. Thanks to the new system, the time it takes to load the website from a server like AOL has been cut back from five minutes to one.

The reworking of the site required not only new technology but also an increase in the system’s capacity.

Work began at the end of last school year, and staff members—including Online Chairs Joshua J. Forman ’03, Frank P. Siu ’03 and Design Chair Robin S. Lee ’03—worked throughout the summer from places as remote as Japan to rewrite and redesign the system, switching the technology from asp to asp.net, a new version of software that was released this summer.

The updated website also incorporates new multi-media features.

“On Air, ” the brainchild of Samuel R. Hornblower ’02, is a feature that provides video clips of campus events as well as clips that supplement Crimson print coverage, and the feature is specifically geared toward a Harvard audience.

“On Air is the perfect example of how the Crimson is dedicated to preserving its role as the main media outlet on campus. I see this project as part of the natural progression of the paper,” MacInnis said.

The Crimson website is accessed by 50,000 unique readers per month, about five times the paper’s print ciculation.