Whitaker, the son of academics, came to Harvard after an unhappy year at Swarthmore College. And while Alter, a Chicago native, may have found his future boss “intimidating,” the awe was mutual.

“John had gone to Andover and hung around the Crimson a great deal,” Whitaker says. “Almost from the very beginning, he was breaking stories...We were very intimidated.”

“The rest of us were laying out downstairs and paying our dues and John would just come in and bang out these big scoops like it was nothing.”

Whitaker particularly recalls one of Alter’s “scoops,” a story he broke about two MIT women, Roxanne Ritchie and Susan Gilbert, who had compiled a list—complete with starred ratings—ranking the performance of the 36 men with whom they had slept. Their article ran in the MIT’s alternative weekly under the headline, “The Consumer Guide to MIT Men.”

Alter heard about the story from a retired federal judge during lunch at the Signet Society.

“I got their names, and just went over to interview them with a Crimson photographer,” he remembers. Gilbert wasn’t home, but Ritchie was, so Alter interviewed her—“but didn’t stay afterwards,” he reports. “I did not mix Crimson business and pleasure on that occasion.”

Alter’s story on the scandal, “MIT: ‘Fear of Flying’ Now Playing,” first ran in 1979 in The Crimson—and later all over the world’s tabloids—with the lede: “Names, sex, newspapers. They don’t mix.”

Sex and pleasure might not mix with business and newspapers, but Alter and Whitaker definitely did.

And though Alter says that “most of us thought that Mark would become a professor like his parents,” both of them—along with Whitaker’s former roommate and current editor of the online edition of Newsweek, Joe Contreras—comped The Crimson at the same time, went into journalism shortly after college and never left the newsroom.

“Joe grew up in the Barrio in Los Angeles,” Alter remembers. “He showed up to The Crimson comp sessions with hair down the middle of his back, wearing a white t-shirt, a pack of cigarettes in one hand and in the other he’d be clutching a copy of The New Republic.”

The triumvirate has shared a number of experiences over the years, from The Crimson to Newsweek. Whitaker and Contreras even shared a girlfriend, Whitaker having “stolen” Contreras’ significant other.

Whitaker describes the friendship between the three of them today with laughter:

“Jon has a great sense of humor but he can be very earnest as well,” he says. “One of the necessary elements of being a columnist is that you need to believe that people can benefit from your opinion every week—Jon has that, he takes himself very seriously. But,” Whitaker adds, laughing, “There’s nobody in the world who deflates Alter like Contreras, and then Jon will dig himself even deeper, and Contreras will get even more irreverent.”

Those laughs began at The Crimson, where all three worked as avid reporters, but never took on leadership roles as top editors.

“The one thing that Mark, Joe and I all had in common on the Crimson is that we didn’t take major positions, which I think helped because we didn’t get burned out on journalism,” Alter adds. “At some point, I just didn’t want to be there every night,” Alter says.