Description
The Harvard Crimson is the student newspaper of Harvard University and was founded in 1873. Run entirely by Harvard College undergraduates, it served for many years as the only daily newspaper in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Beginning in the fall of 2022, the paper transitioned to a weekly publishing model.
Any student who volunteers and completes a series of requirements known as the "comp" is elected an editor of the newspaper. Thus, all staff members of The Crimson—including writers, business staff, photographers, and graphic designers—are technically "editors". (If an editor makes news, he or she is referred to in the paper's news article as a "Crimson editor", which, though important for transparency, also leads to characterizations such as "former President John F. Kennedy '40, who was also a Crimson editor, ended the Cuban Missile Crisis.") Editorial and financial decisions rest in a board of executives, collectively called a "guard", who are chosen for one-year terms each November by the outgoing guard. This process is referred to as the "turkey shoot" or the "shoot". The unsigned opinions of "The Crimson Staff" are decided at tri-weekly meetings that are open to any Crimson editor (except those editors who plan to write or edit a news story on the same topic in the future).
The Crimson is one of the only college newspapers in the U.S. that owns its own printing presses. At the beginning of 2004 The Crimson began publishing with a full-color front and back page, in conjunction with the launch of a major redesign. The Crimson no longer prints in-house but used to print over fifteen other publications on its presses.
The Crimson has a rivalry with the Harvard Lampoon, which it refers to in print as a "semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization that used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine." The two organizations occupy buildings within less than one block of each other; interaction between their staff has included pranks, vandalism, and romance.
Currently, The Crimson publishes two weekly additional sections in addition to its regular weekly paper: an Arts section on Tuesdays and a magazine called Fifteen Minutes on Thursdays. Issues of ``Fifteen Minutes`` come periodically in the form of glossies.
The Crimson is a nonprofit organization that is independent of the university. All decisions on the content and day-to-day operations of the newspaper are made by undergraduates. The student leaders of the newspaper employ several non-student staff, many of whom have stayed on for many years and have come to be thought of as family members by the students who run the paper.
The Crimson is composed of 10 boards: Arts, Business, News, Sports, Editorial, Flyby, Design, Fifteen Minutes, Multimedia, and Technology.
