DOOR DROPPED: Blog Stands Up To The Crimson

Truth be told, Doordropped didn’t think we’d have to turn the mirror on ourselves this early in the game—but some hotshots on the blogosphere are accusing The Harvard Crimson of running a media monopoly, and that deserves a few words.

First, meet Andrew H. Golis ’06 and Chimaobi O. Amutah ’07, the agro-alchemists of the Cambridge Common protest blog (http://cambridgecommon.blogspot.com). Golis, veteran campus activist and former Crimson columnist, started the site late last year as an outlet for opinion and vitriol too hot for publication on this newspaper’s editorial pages. The effort floundered, and Golis decided to start anew this September. He brought Amutah on board, and in his words, “relaunched big time.”

One of the first articles posted this year was a nearly 800-word piece titled “End the Monopoly.” The piece charged this newspaper with irresponsibly setting the tone of campus discussion and monopolizing the media soapbox. “The Crimson controls student opinion. If the news board doesn’t cover something, it’s as if it didn’t happen,” Golis wrote. “When the Ed Board makes a decision…it defines the campus debate. Why? Because there is no alternative media.”

No mention of the site was made in The Crimson, and the blog received no coverage from the news board or the editorial page. Weird, though, that no other publication has picked up the story—after all, if Golis’s figures are accurate, 900 people read his manifesto last week, and if the site’s publicity campaign keeps going, that number will rise. It’s most certainly newsworthy, and you’d think The Crimson’s competitors would have jumped all over it.

As of press time, the Independent was not planning to write about it, and the Salient made no mention of it in last week’s issue. The only pickup it will receive, according to Golis, is in the Perspective, which has asked him to contribute a piece about the media monopoly to their upcoming issue, due out in late October.

Funny—last week, this column was celebrating Harvard’s media explosion. Today, we’re facing the realization that there aren’t that many venues out there for discussing campus issues like this.

The Independent, Golis claimed in the blog post, is “notoriously under-read,” and the Perspective, the campus’ liberal monthly, “no longer exists.” Perspective’s editors took issue with this claim, pointing to the six issues they released last year, but Golis maintains that six was not enough. “I wrote back saying that I’m a very active liberal political person on campus, and I hadn’t seen it,” Golis told Doordropped.

No publication on campus approaches The Crimson’s readership, Golis continued, and although papers like the Indy, the Salient, and Perspective do stay on their grind, they will forever remain at a disadvantage because The Crimson’s daily influence is so persistent.

But does Cambridge Common aspire to be an alternative news source in its own right, or just a think tank? Golis and Amutah don’t seem to have that figured out yet, but if they are really serious about cutting into The Crimson’s “monopoly,” they’re going to choose the former—and they’re going to have to work harder. They will need to do their own reporting and their own research instead of just posting links and opining. Furthermore, they’re going to need a stricter publication schedule, and their subject matter will have to be more focused.

Their standards, in sum, need to be as high as The Crimson’s—that’s how competition works. And if Cambridge Common blossoms, it will not only serve the Harvard community but improve The Crimson by giving it a much-needed jab in the ribs. Because more media means better media, and right now, there’s no battlefield better or bloodier than the internet. Take your pick, blog-doggies—shirts or skins?