Cambridge Common

Now, to be clear, Cambridge Common has no delusion that it will ever be able to hold the audience that the Crimson has. It's not only impossible, but it is in some ways a bad idea. Having a major newspaper with formal systems of comps and interviews and money and all that jazz is good. What's bad is when half a dozen people decide what the rest of us know and think. What Cambridge Common hopes to do is bug the crap out of them and encourages other people to do the same. A few hundred people read this site last spring before it had any major ambitions. If five hundred read it now, things will start to change: people will start blogs of their own, people will read the Crimson differently, the Crimson will occasionally have to suffer the embarrassment of being incredibly wrong, dishonest and/or stupid. That's why media monopolies are bad: because when the Crimson is wrong, no one is saying so.

And the Crimson is occasionally wrong, biased, dishonest and stupid. They have the dual problems of being disconnected from the politics they're trying to write about (because they rarely have time to do really intense reporting and fact-checking) as well as personally invested in the politics enough to have incredible biases and blind spots (as a result of friends, etc.). Add the fact that there is no building on campus that generates and regenerates the kind of mindless gossip that the Crimson does, and you've got yourself a problem.

For instance, did you know that more than anything, the Crimson Ed Board didn't endorse Senior Gift Plus because it didn't like Matt Mahan? Did you know that it did endorse Ian Nichols in large part because his roommate and best friend was a co-chair who held considerable sway and admitted as much explicitly? Did you know that coverage is increasingly driven by whatever the reporters find interesting because people are so busy and it's hard to motivate them to do real work? Did you know that the Crimson often misses large community events on campus (like ABHW's Celebration of Black Men last year) partially because there aren't that many black people in the building to begin with, so they didn't know it was even happening? Did you know that many staff editorials are essentially written by committee, and that often the last editor who gets their hands on it is able to bias the story in their direction, regardless of how the staff voted? Did you know that often the voting is incredibly contentious divided, but we usually only get one opinion (occassionally they run a dissent). Did you know that often times the Crimson is a major part of the story, i.e. manufacturing news/drama/controversy, but doesn’t write about themselves because they don’t have to. The list goes on, and we hope to document much of it here.

The Crimson is a fundamentally good newspaper. Some of the people I love the most in the world spend a majority of their time there and do great work. The staff of the Crimson works hard, they produce a lot of material in a short period of time, they mostly take their jobs very seriously and hold themselves to a high standard. But not always, and our community deserves to know when that is, why that is, who that is. We deserve more than one opinion and one concept of "news." So, read Cambridge Common. Start your own blog and link up. Comment here on what you think. We don't claim to be the solution, but you've got to start somewhere.