Remember Mother Nature's April Fool's joke last year? Twenty-seven inches of snow in 11 hours. The Law School shut down for the day for the first time in 18 years. A hapless tutor's car was crushed by an uprooted tree in front of Eliot House. As undergraduates returning from the sunny climes of the Bahamas and Cancun groaned and grumbled, you could almost hear the old lady chuckling in anticipation of future pranks. Well, have no fear, she mistimed it this year--the last-gasp-of-winter blizzard came a week earlier this time, when we were safely away on break, and, in any case, it was only eight inches. So, welcome back to a delightful Cambridge spring--more sun, less clothing, more baseball and crew, less basketball and hockey, more flowers, more buskers in the square and even more work (if that's at all possible).

Hi, I am your new ombudsperson, or reader representative. "Ombudsperson" is one of those spanking new additions to the dictionary, teetering on the borderline of officially recognized English. The first appearance of an ombudsperson on an American newspaper was in 1967 on the Louisville Courier-Journal. The Crimson followed three decades later, appointing Rajath Shourie '95 the first reader representative on Feb. 2, 1994. An executive editor of The Crimson, Shourie was an established "insider," and his official job description "charged [him] with investigating reader concerns" and by implicit extension, providing justifications or excuses for Crimson policy. He, and his successor the following year, rather more represented The Crimson to its readers than the other way around.

With the appointment of Shawn E. Zeller '97, not a Crimson editor, as the first "outside" reader representative two years ago, the role began to be subtly redefined. It became an institutional forum for publicly voicing complaints from readers. Today, the job involves more censuring of The Crimson than apologizing for it. I certainly intend to represent grievances which are on principle constructively critical, on occasion irreverent and when necessary, even harsh.

To get a handle on what sorts of grievances are out there, I decided to ask around. I even e-mailed some friends. "What is your chief concern/comment about The Crimson?" Here are some selections from the responses I got, ranging from the somber to the aggravated to the disdainful:

From Peter S. Manasantivongs '99: "The Crimson misquotes people so often that I am wary of giving them quotes except on paper." Supplementing his concern, other complaints about mis-spellings, mis-namings, mis-clue-ing on the cross-word--and recently, a mis-labeling of a picture of Pforzheimer as "Cabot House"--got me thinking that there's at least the occasional expected slip-up in reporting and editing standards. Pavninder Singh '98 of Lowell House, in a complaint echoed by many Quadlings, said, "My main problem with the paper is that I don't get it every day." Well, I thought, distribution problems: every business enterprise has them.

There were others, like Eric D. Albert '98, who had more serious issues with the coverage of the alleged rape or the story on "solicitation" by orthodox Jews. Yet others felt there wasn't enough coverage of certain sports like golf or squash, of events happening on weekends because The Crimson doesn't publish on Saturday and Sunday, or of student group activities. These are certainly more fundamental concerns, less easy to brush aside. And then there were some that veered into the realm of the holistically uncomplimentary, the vitriolic and the profane. I received the following: "I never read The Crimson," "It's cheesy and juvenile," and, most succinctly, "It sucks!!."

Leaving those aside for the moment, the complaints fell into two broad categories. First, there were concerns about unwitting short-term errors. For the most part, I will pass these along to the editor concerned, and they will usually be rectified by printing a correction. I will be dealing mostly with the second category, the long-term concerns about directional changes that readers want to see in The Crimson's policy on certain issues or broad topics.

And on this front, there was some positive feedback as well. There were a fair number of readers who were generally happy with The Crimson. At the very least, there was widespread acknowledgment that The Crimson was changing for the better.

Students were especially pleased with the development of The Crimson Online, the new layout, the increased reflection of student life, the paper's efforts to liaise more actively with student groups and the efforts to foster diversity on the paper. The Crimson is certainly evolving, and some of the perceptions of The Crimson as an unresponsive, corporate monolith are changing.

In particular, there is a concerted effort at 14 Plympton to be more representative of the student community. With the free distribution of the newspaper to all undergraduates, The Crimson has gone from being primarily a faculty/administrative journal to one which needs to reflect student life closely through more direct interaction with the campus community. There have been a number of encouraging initiatives at The Crimson in this direction. This position of reader representative is but one of them.

There is also an active effort to institutionalize relationships with student groups--there are more frequent meetings between Crimson editors and the executives of major clubs, and a bi-annual cocktail party for leaders of all campus organizations at The Crimson. Did your group send anyone to these events? There is another one coming up within a month. Be sure to check it out. The Crimson is also increasingly attaching beat reporters to particular student groups, especially minority groups like the BSA and the AAA.

This last effort ties in with another major drive at The Crimson--the Diversity Task Force, first started in 1992, is an internal committee of newspaper executives responsible for efforts to make The Crimson more representative ethnically, socio-economically and intellectually. There has been noticeable success: Demographically, The Crimson is much more diverse today than six years ago. I counted at least 30 minority students among the 82 Crimson executives, including a female Asian-American vice president, an Asian-American managing editor and an African-American business manager.

The only position which has been white for all of The Crimson's 125 years of existence is that of the president. And that is liable to change. The Crimson also has a financial aid program, which provides three first-years (chosen based on need) a stipend to help cover their yearly work-study requirement. And even the english-economics-government-concentrator hegemony at The Crimson is loosening. The science/technology pages are attracting increasing numbers of techies and hard science majors, and, for some reason, the entire photography department seems to be pre-med. As Jennifer 8. Lee '99, Crimson vice president and chair of the task force, says, "In order for us to cover the community well, we need to represent all aspects of the community we serve."

There is, of course, still a lot to be done. In spite of their best efforts, glaring instances of institutional bias remain. A case in point is The Crimson's recent coverage of the Quad. No less than eight different pieces in the 10 days leading up to Spring Break splashed all over the paper--front page, opinions, FM--painted the Quad as a miserable back-of-beyond hellhole, which first-years should resort to voodoo rituals to avoid. There was not one article in defense of the Quad to balance this barrage. I am told that there are many (justifiably) outraged responses from Quadlings. More on that later, once I get a chance to delve into those letters and e-mails.

This column will appear bi-weekly. In the meantime, continue reading your paper critically, and be sure to let me, or someone at The Crimson, know about any problems or suggestions you have.

Kaustuv Sen '99 is an economics concentrator in Eliot House. He can be reached at readerrep@the-crimson.harvard.edu.