Harvard Advocate Launches Website, Seeks $150K in Fund Drive

The Harvard Advocate—the College’s quarterly literary magazine—launched a redesigned website Friday as part of a larger initiative to increase its readership and social media presence. The undergraduate publication will also soon begin a $150,000 fundraising drive in honor of its 150th anniversary, which comes in 2016, according to its president Kiara F. Z. Barrow ’16.

The new website, the first redesign since 2010, features uploaded content from recent issues and information about the magazine’s submission process. According to Advocate Publisher Colton A. Valentine ’16, a Crimson magazine editor, members first conceived of the redesign in 2012, and collaboration between the design and technology boards began in earnest last semester.

The new website, along with a push to increase the Advocate’s presence on social media, will help bring the magazine from its primarily print readership to a broader digital audience, Valentine said.

“We’ve always produced really strong content, but it hasn’t necessarily gotten the readership or recognition that its quality deserves,” Valentine said. “We’ve been realizing it’s important to have a strong social media presence and a strong digital presence go hand in hand to make sure people are actually reading our content.”

In addition to the website, the group aims to digitize the magazine’s archives, publish an anthology, and unify the blog with the website for the 150th anniversary,said Barrow, who is an inactive Crimson magazine editor.

“The website will be a really great way to bring all these projects together and get the magazine more digitally integrated,” Barrow said. “The feature, design, and tech boards will work together to create new ways of reading the magazine and seeing the art that we publish.”

The website precedes the launch of the Advocate’s $150,000 capital campaign that Barrow says will finance four main priorities: a financial aid initiative, the digitization of all archives, physical building repairs, and fortification of the publication’s endowment.

—Staff writer Callie H. Gilbert can be reached at callie.gilbert@thecrimson.com. Follow her on twitter @calliegilbert95.

–Staff writer Caleb O. Shelburne can be reached at caleb.shelburne@thecrimson.com. Follow him on twitter @caleboshelburne.