The Harvard Crimson - About The Crimson

About The Crimson

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 news article as a "Crimson editor", which, though important for transparency, also leads to odd attributions 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 the only college newspaper 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 also prints 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 even romance.

Crimson alumni include Presidents John F. Kennedy of the Class of 1940 (who served as a business editor) and Franklin D. Roosevelt (who served as president of the newspaper), Class of 1904. Writer Cleveland Amory was president of The Crimson; when Katharine Hepburn's mother asked him what he planned to do after college, he says he replied teasingly that "once you had been president of The Harvard Crimson in your senior year at Harvard there was very little, in after life, for you."

Currently, The Crimson publishes three weekly pullout sections in addition to its regular daily paper: A Sports section on Mondays, an Arts section on Tuesdays, and a magazine called Fifteen Minutes on Thursdays.

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.