Mathews says a transition to publishing on the Internet was inevitable, but The Crimson dragged its feet in going online.
"We were just oblivious--The Crimson had too many damn Social Studies and Hist. and Lit. majors," says the former Social Studies graduate.
Moving into the Future
The changes have left some nostalgic for the past but have given others inspiration for further innovation.
"Lots of people have lost a certain level of basic skills," Walkowitz says. "When we first transferred over [to new computers in 1991] we all still knew how to paste up."
Today's outgoing business manager Matthew L. Kramer '98 agrees but has a different perspective."The art has changed. Instead of paste-up, now it's a different art, the art of [desktop publishing]."
Sorrento is an unabashed believer in the value of the traditional ways.
"I miss a lot of the old stuff," he says. "It's like working in a laboratory now. The real skill of putting it all together on a page is gone."
Still, The Crimson is moving steadily forward, and in the next year plans to revamp and upgrade its seven-year-old computer system. Each newsroom computer will have full access to e-mail, Lexis-Nexis, and the World Wide Web, which will enable reporters to take full advantage of the wealth of resources available to them.
Furthermore, The Crimson hopes to take advantage of these Internet advances to provide a new set of services to the Harvard community.
In recent months The Crimson has added a non-line calendar to which students can submit future events over the Web. Supplements to articles in the paper have also been published on-line, and certain important events, like Undergraduate Council elections, have been published over the Web before they have hit the newsstands.
These changes were unexpected to many of the Crimson's former editors.
"I doubt we would have ever anticipated a non-line version of our paper," says Candell. "I very much had my head down thinking about getting our print paper out, and I don't know that we would have thought along the lines of entirely new ways of getting the news to people."
The Crimson held its first on-line comp this past fall, and Jennifer 8. Lee '99, former on-line director and incoming vice-president predicts that the on-line board will grow to be the third-largest department of the paper behind news and business.
"The Crimson is growing beyond just the narrow scale of a newspaper. We aim to be an information broker for Harvard's campus," Lee says. "In the future, the Web site will be much more of an equal to the printed paper or even superior."
Kramer believes that the growth of the Web site is simply one more step in The Crimson's evolution from a newspaper printing organization to a more generalized source of news, delivered through many different channels.
"We've really pushed ourselves in the past year to be a content-provider," says Kramer.