Los Angeles has Pink is the New Blog. New York has the slightly more urbane but no less sarcastic Gawker. Now the Ivy League has not one, but two blogs of its own. Founded over the summer, IvyGate and IvyLeak use the Internet as a medium to comment on life at Ivy League schools with a good deal of snarky intelligence and humor.
IvyLeak was started by "two former Ivy editors," according to the site, but the writers of IvyGate won't deign to even give the most basic description of themselves. Similar in tone as well as content, both blogs focus on covering the elements that, as IvyLeak phrases it, "the publications these two former Ivy editors used to run tagged ... as off-limits."
"We're here to take our beloved League to task where it's deserved, but to call out praise when warranted, too," the IvyLeak website reads. And though the bloggers only began their sites this past summer, they have found no shortage of material.
Some particularly creative entries: "Faculty Studs and Tenured Temptresses of the Ivy League" is Ivyate's search for the most attractive professors. In case anyone was wondering, a Princeton professor won in the "Temptress" category. Meanwhile, IvyLeak is currently holding a contest calling for photos of the worst off-campus housing in the Ivy League. Entries featuring and mocking those undergrads with famous parents or book deals are also frequent.
However, the websites also address more serious news in the academic world. IvyLeak, not bound by the U.S. News and World Report's request for a 24-hour prohibition on releasing its college rankings, posted the information a full day before any official media outlets or universities themselves. IvyGate responded to Harvard's decision to end early action with glee, calling the system "the grotesque province of hypercynical applicants bent on improving their own odds at the expense of the disadvantaged."
The headline concerning Princeton's decision to follow suit, by contrast, was "If Harvard Jumped Off A Bridge, Would Princeton Too?"
While these sites focus on Ivy League schools in general, mentioning particular colleges generally only when the juiciest news breaks, they have yet to address life at Princeton specifically. IvyLeak includes links to school-specific blogs at Yale, Dartmouth, Harvard and Cornell, and Columbia and Penn each have blogs hosted by on-campus publications. That leaves Princeton and Brown as the lone Ivy League schools without general, official gossip blogs. But some students do their best to fill in the gaps. One example is freshprince.us, created by Josh Weinstein '09 immediately after his graduation from high school.
Dear Diary
One hundred and sixty-seven is the lowest number of hits per day Weinstein has recorded this month for his blog. The site, which includes both a traditional blogging section he described as "an online diary" as well as a section for pictures and videos, often gets up to 300 unique hits a day.
"People really check out the site for the pictures," said Weinstein, who posted photos taken at Princeton sporting events, performances, parties and eating clubs once or twice a week throughout all of last year. Albums feature titles ranging from "Last night of partying before classes" to "Passover Week" to "Gauss, Colonial, TI; October 15."
Weinstein has maintained a blog of his daily life since his freshman year of high school. Friends comment sometimes, but he mostly writes for himself, he said.
"It can be really fun and funny to see how you change: how the writing style changes, or the vocabulary."
Weinstein said he regretted that his site has had to take something of a backseat recently due to schoolwork and other commitments.
"Freshman year, the site came first. I'd get pictures up as fast as I could. This year, it's fallen by the wayside a little, but it's still important," he said.
"Sometimes you miss a day, or you miss two days, but you do what you can."
Poets at the Keyboard
Beyond diary-style blogs, Princetonians are entering the blogsphere in a number of different ways.
Jason Harper '09 calls his blog "pseudo-poetry."
Sometimes it's in sonnet form, sometimes open verse. One entry concerns death, the next pizza delivered to a dorm room. Some end with turns of phrase or final food for thought, while others are unsigned.
"It helps me understand life better when it's written down," said Jason Harper '09, who belongs to the blog communities Xanga and Blogspot and updates weekly with musings and observations of his life at Princeton.
"It slows things down, like any art form. It's like photography or painting; it's about capturing life."
Harper, who has been blogging since his sophomore year of high school, encouraged his friend and fellow prospective English major Julio May-Gamboa '09 to follow him into the digital world last year. Gamboa now maintains his own poetry blog, where he posts both creative writing assignments and pieces he writes for pleasure.
"It started as a way to get used to other people reading my work," said May-Gamboa, who is currently taking CWR 201: Introduction to Poetry and is considering the creative writing track within the English department.
Harper, who hopes to be a published writer, agreed. "It really boosts your self-esteem to get comments on your entries."
In addition to family and friends from his home in Chicago and peers at Princeton, a number of strangers he "met through blogging" regularly read and comment on "J.M. Harper's Scribbles."
In fact, Harper so appreciates blog comments that he finds it "disheartening" when their numbers drop, which explains why he will sometimes comment on other bloggers' entries in hopes of eliciting a response.
"It's just common blog courtesy for them to comment back," he laughed.
May-Gamboa maintains a lower profile on the web. He listed only three friends he knew of who regularly read his site, all classmates at Princeton. In fact, much of his motivation for creating a blog stemmed not from the desire for feedback but from a "terrible incident" last year in which the work he had saved on his computer was almost erased.
"It really freaked me out," said May-Gamboa, whose site even features the subtitle, "at least this way things won't be lost if my computer crashes."
Still, May-Gamboa has had his peers approach him on the street to compliment poems they read on his blog, which he always enjoys.
"There are high points and low points with pursuing any art. There are times when you think it won't work," he said. "Hearing 'I like your stuff' every once in a while is great encouragement."
Beyond posting on his own blog and getting feedback from readers, Harper has become an active member of the blogging community, regularly reading a number of blogs from people all over the country.
"There's a lot of sludge out there, a lot of the ridiculousness of angsty kids talking about their boyfriends and girlfriends," he said.
"But some people are really intelligent — these kind of hipsters our age and older, mid-20s type folk who sit in cafes like this one," Harper added, leaning back in his chair at Cafe Vivian.
Harper explained his motivation for reading complete strangers' blogs as something beyond simple entertainment, though he did describe them as "really engaging."
"Hearing about people who are like you, see the same things as you, smell the same things as you, gives you a whole different perspective. Here they are, writing about it in a different way," he said.
May-Gamboa added, "It's in the same vein as reading a novel. A novel's an expression of things that influenced the author, and you don't know the author of a novel. Blogs of people you've never met are like that too," he said.
"And Jason's entries are really eloquent," May-Gamboa continued. His friend brushed off the comment with a modest wave.
"It's a more structured narrative than 'I did this, I did this,' " Harper admitted. "In a way, it's the poor man's novel," he said, making air quotes with his fingers. "It's a good medium for people who can't get published."
Unlike May-Gamboa, who views his blog as a steppingstone in terms of compiling enough work to be published, Harper made a distinction between his blogging and his writing.
"I write separately from my blog," he said. "The blog is like a retreat."
This Just In
Danny Shea '07 spent the summer as an intern blogger for The Huffington Post, a news website featuring links to other media sources and a variety of news blogs. He worked specifically for Eat the Press, a blog within The Huffington Post that focuses on coverage of the media itself and is geared toward a professional media demographic. Under the supervision of only one full-time staff blogger, he had an active role in researching and writing for the blog, which he describes as "meta media essentially covering coverage, how the media itself is covering the news."
Now, having returned to Princeton for his senior year, Shea continues to write for the site. He is also a columnist for The Daily Princetonian.
"It was Freshman Week, it was September 11th, and I had no class," Shea said. "I logged onto CNN's website, which was rebroadcasting the real time coverage of what happened five years ago. I thought how interesting it was, how shocking, a time capsule. So I emailed my editor and I posted about it."
Though he had a background in journalism, Shea had never had any experience with what he now calls "new media," a category in which he places blogs, social networking groups like MySpace and Facebook, and "anything on the web and instantaneous."
As a result of the immediate nature of blog news sources, in which stories are posted constantly and as they happen without the limitations of print or film, shocking scoops have pervaded the blogosphere in recent years. One of the first blogs to receive national attention, The Drudge Report, broke the news of the Monica Lewinsky affair, and TMZ reported Mel Gibson's DUI and anti-Semitic remarks this summer long before any newspaper or magazine.
Shea cautioned, however, that what makes many blogs so successful is also what prevents them from becoming entirely reliable news sources.
"People still don't trust blogs, and they shouldn't. Blogs get things first, but they don't always get them right," he said.
Nonetheless, he has faith in the power of this "new media."
"The media is changing," he said. "It hasn't fully happened yet, but it's going to very soon."
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