The Devil Wears Crimson
What is the most fair-and-balanced thing Fishbowl could have done when looking to cover the recent launch of two new magazines? Why, assign it to a Yalie, of course!
Fishtern Maureen Miller is on the case. There are some tangential links to New York, with the bonus of having a crack Fishtern on the scene who can shed a little more light on the story. Plus, readers of this blog, take a look around your office at the the juniors who make your life easier. The graduating classes of Harvard, Yale and the other Ivies are your assistants, copy editors, and fact-checkers. David Remnick, I’m talking to you.
Fishbowl: Tomorrow’s boldfaced names, today! Take it away Maureen.
In a front-page story from this Saturday’s Boston Globe, Irene Sege takes a glance at Harvard undergraduate media with “Harvard, glossed over” about the campus’s two newest glossies (double meaning alert!):
Scene and Freeze are the slick newcomers in a panoply of Harvard undergraduate publications that run from the poetry journal the Gamut to the Harvard Review of Philosophy to the racy H Bomb. Scene — a would-be Vanity Fair for 02138 Ivies, founded by a no-nonsense art history major who interned at YM in ninth grade — hit the Harvard campus Thursday morning. Freeze — a CosmoGIRL! for the Crimson coed, founded by a fast-talking government major who’s into romance novels and Audrey Hepburn — launches Dec. 9. Both mags are written, edited, photographed, and designed by Harvard undergraduates. Both are light reads, downtime diversions with columns on sex and clothes modeled by students.
But this post, written by a caustic history major who’s into black comedy and the Washington punditocracy, will have to argue that all this fuss is a little redundant.
Case in point: were they not informed that some fellow Harvardians, a few years removed from undergrad publication purgatory, are working on 02138, a monthly magazine exclusively for Harvard alums and explicitly styled after Vanity Fair? Come to think of it, looks like Sege wasn’t informed, either. (Ed. New York connection: 02138 Magazine is advertising for an Events Manager and an Advertising Director on our very own MB job listings…location: Boston or – yes – New York).
There’s something you have to understand about the place which might shed at least some forgiving light on this otherwise eyebrow-raising story. Niche magazines — yes, niche magazines, for undergraduate populations of around 5,000-6,000 — are hardly a unique phenomenon on high-powered, big-money campuses. Perhaps it says something that for Yale alone, I can name around 12 regularly published campus newspapers and magazines off the top of my head. (Oops, that was 14. But you get the point.) And it surely matters not that they are for the most part written and published by the same overlapping cliques of fifty or so individuals hoping an editorship will catapult them into real-life media elite stardom!
So, why care about what some Cantab kids are publishing (with a fee of $2.95 an issue, no less, because they couldn’t subsidize it enough to publish 3,500 for free, in the case of Freeze?). Perhaps it was because of this juicy New Yorkier-than-thou connection:
In May, [Scene founder and Harvard sophomore] Emily Washkowitz met with Vogue editor Anna Wintour, a friend of a friend, who advised her “to really flesh out an entire plan before I get going,” Washkowitz recalls, “and to get people who are as committed as I am.”
And that’s where Sege starts to get a little snarky:
But while Washkowitz, a fan of Vanity Fair and Vogue from Manhattan, uses words such as “couture” and “society” to describe Scene, [Harvard sophomore and Freeze founder] Thea Sebastian, a reader of Marie Claire and CosmoGIRL! from Falmouth, uses “fun” to characterize Freeze. Where Scene profiles “The 10 People on the Scene You Ought to Know,” Freeze lists “10 Hot Harvard Men.” Where Scene aims to appeal to men as well as women, Freeze is decidedly girl-talk, with an “Ask a Guy” column by the cornerback who made the biggest play at this year’s Harvard-Yale football game. While Freeze puts junior Annie Shawn, a cappella star, aspiring doctor, and daughter of writer Jamaica Kincaid, on its cover and reveals that Aladdin is her favorite Disney male, Scene includes her in its power 10 and reveals that she thinks Harvard students should relax.
“The idea, literally, is when you’re in the middle of all of your homework and all of your studies just freeze and relax. Chill out,” says Sebastian. “We’re designed to help people stay sane and stay healthy,” she elaborates via e-mail, “so that maybe after you’ve finished our article on sex and the university, you will be ready to solve world poverty.”
Incidentally, where Scene and Freeze both cover the campus social “scene,” Harvard already has a well-established publication that does just that—specifically, Fifteen Minutes, the tongue-in-cheek weekly magazine supplement to a little rag you might have heard of called the Harvard Crimson. And FM publishes a “power 10″ of its own — except in its case, it’s a power 15, the “Fifteen Most Intriguing Seniors” issue which comes out this week. (Yale does them one better, it must also be noted, as campus tabloid Rumpus annually publishes a People-like list of “Yale’s 50 Most Beautiful People.”)
But are we being too harsh? Maybe after this post on the frothy fun of these new women’s mags, you’ll be ready to solve the problems of world poverty from your real-life media desk. But we’re guessing it’s more likely that you’re wondering why you need to trump the fact that you graduated from college with friends-of-friends like the devilish Prada wearer herself.
Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online 
FishbowlNY Twitter feed loading...
