II: “The Next Big Thing”
In the waning months of 1995, a small publication called the Harvard Political Review had a major decision to make: to be online, or to not be online.
Jordan Singer ’97 remembered that decision well. “In 1994 and 1995, when the World Wide Web was really just starting, no one knew exactly what to make of it,” he said in an interview with the HPR.
But as 1995 came to an end, the editors reached a conclusion about this novel innovation. Twenty-six years later, Singer discussed the editors’ thought process: “This is going to be the next big thing,” they thought, and the publication “should appoint someone who can figure out how to give us some sort of a web presence,” he recalled.
And so Scott Tribble ’98 became the HPR’s first Online Editor.
As the first order of business, the publication attempted to “figure out how to put [their] articles up on the web somewhere, to [figure out] some sort of very primitive hyperlink,” Singer remembered. By the Spring 1996 issue, Tribble had figured out how to solve that problem, and the publication managed to put its first-ever website on the web.
“At a time when the internet is becoming a chief source of information for millions,” Andrei Cherny ’97 wrote in that issue’s editor’s note, “we believe that our new interactive web page will allow us to reach a far greater number of readers than we presently do.”
This article aims to track the HPR’s history past this seminal moment. Beyond exploring the HPR’s content, identity, and community in relation to both campus and national politics — topics that the previous article in this series explored — this article also aims to explore how the internet influenced the HPR on all three counts.
In short, the internet radically changed how the HPR operates in ways that Singer, Tribble, and Cherny could not have imagined, and in ways that mirror how the internet transformed the broader landscape of print journalism. As the internet grew, and as websites, blogs, and political analysis proliferated, the HPR struggled to define itself in relation to its competitors in the increasingly crowded online space. However, the HPR eventually embraced the internet and a niche that the internet allowed: longform journalism.
In doing so, this article contributes to a broader conversation on the intersections between media history and internet history. Relatively few publications have focused on this intersection, even as primary sources and contemporary ethnographies, sociologies, and economic analyses on the topic have proliferated. The HPR’s history, then, has two main lessons for this burgeoning field: that it takes time to adapt to new technology — and that online journalism does not have to be posting clickbait or breaking news. Publications can indeed find their niches with other genres beyond those two.
In short, the HPR’s history during the internet era shows the publication’s ability to adapt — a skill it began to exercise long before the advent of digital journalism.
“The Website Was Always an Afterthought” (1996-1999)
When Andrei Cherny decided to run for HPR editor-in-chief at the end of 1995, he felt the publication could go beyond its tried-and-true editorial philosophy. The publication was “oftentimes doing the same kind of thing over and over again,” Cherny said in an interview with the HPR, “and I wanted to break out of that a little bit.”
In the design arena, Cherny certainly took up Beth Johnston’s desire for an upgraded aesthetic for the magazine. “We had full color [covers] for the first time,” Cherny remembered. “For the first issue after I became editor, we put Madonna on the front cover, naked and wrapped in an American flag,” he continued. That cover “was pretty, pretty shocking to some people at the time.”
Of course, the HPR was not an outlier in inviting controversy with Madonna on the cover, nor was it particularly original: Anna Wintour put Madonna on Vogue’s cover in May 1989 — the first time a celebrity appeared on the cover — sparking a similar controversy. “I see the role of Vogue to reflect what’s going on in the culture,” Wintour said about the decision in 2020, and even though Madonna had become more institutionalized when she appeared on the HPR cover, the HPR’s decision to include her both reflected her prevalence and highlighted the fact that culture did not often appear as a serious subject for a political magazine.
Beyond the Madonna cover, Cherny took up the call to broaden the HPR’s reach. His plans certainly did not involve a Mendelson-era expansion; instead, he aimed to include more articles “that were a little bit more hard-hitting and that would get people talking more.”
That goal certainly succeeded. Jordan Singer, who served as Cherny’s managing editor, remembered the HPR as a space where students could “have passionate discussions about politics without them becoming personal.”
And in the broader political milieu, the HPR’s stories did have a major impact. For instance, Cherny wrote a column arguing that President Bill Clinton had proposed “new, innovative, common-sense solutions to the problems of modern America” that would allow more parental control over their children’s TV viewing and promote uniforms in public schools, for instance. Cherny would argue that these policies did not mark small thinking but rather a “new vision of governance” that focused on bread-and-butter issues.
More relevantly, though, Cherny wrote in the piece’s conclusion that “a child born in 1997 will grow up with no memory of the 20th century.” Clinton ended up using a similar phrase in his 1997 State of the Union address — and later offered Cherny a job as a speechwriter.
During Cherny’s term, the publication’s web presence started up — although it started up with a whimper, not a bang. As he wrote in the Spring 1996 editor’s note, the new HPR On-Line was only a “subsidiary magazine.” But “it was clear even then… how the internet was going to change all kinds of domestic and international issues,” Cherny said.
Finally, Cherny moved to create a new Board of Advisors for the HPR. The editorial board wanted to “harken back to create some more institutional memory,” Cherny said, so they invited HPR alumni such as E.J. Dionne as well as distinguished journalists including Walter Isaacson and Jonathan Alter. (Dionne, Isaacson, and Alter all nominally remain on the advisory board to this day.)
As Cherny’s term came to an end, John Paul Rollert ’00 recalled a story that demonstrated the publication’s lack of familiarity with its website — and the website’s distance from the HPR’s core product, which was still the physical magazine at the time.
As Rollert told the HPR, a “wonder kid in the class” ran for the online editor position and provided an “extraordinary rendering of what the HPR website could be” moving forward. “Just the intellectual property… would have made the HPR a very wealthy organization,” Rollert speculated. “He had just the biggest dreams and also, given who he was, he had the capacity for doing that.”
“I’ll never forget, he gets up and he’s giving this just absolutely expansive vision of what the HPR could be,” Rollert continued. But when the managing editor at the time, Selena Mayeri, signaled time for the candidate, this “wonder kid” waved Mayeri down.
“And it was like all the air left the room,” Rollert said. Mayeri again signaled for the candidate to wind his speech down, and the candidate again waved Mayeri down.
After the candidate finally stopped talking, the electorate sent the candidate and his opponent — a woman by the name of Ashika Singh — out of the room to discuss the dueling candidacies. “We all know that our website, when this guy is done with this, will absolutely shoot the lights out. But can we bear to work with him? And the answer at the end of the day was no,” Rollert concluded.
After the HPR rejected the wonder kid’s vision, the website’s languor continued. In a sense, “we got exactly what we ordered,” Rollert surmised, “but I also think it’s a reflection of the fact that the website, certainly early on, was something new and exotic. [It] was always an afterthought.”
Under Ilana Eisenstein’s tenure in 1998, the publication embarked on a risky stratagem to put the HPR’s magazines on the Delta Shuttle between Boston, Washington D.C., and New York’s LaGuardia Airport. “If we were going to put our magazine into the hands of any group of people, people taking the shuttle from D.C. to New York are a good group,” Rollert said to justify the publication’s ambitious venture.
But the attempt was “unsuccessful, the way that most things you dream up in college are,” Dan Baer ’00, the business manager at the time and a later Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, told the HPR. Delta did not ixnay the idea offhand, but the HPR could not produce enough publications to put them in every seatback pocket. Instead, it managed to place their magazines groundside, but it could not mount the production volume that Delta required and that other national-scale publications had.
In the end, according to Rollert, the largely failed plan created financial difficulties for the HPR, and other interviewees speculated that it worsened the relationship with the IOP. (Neither Rollert nor John Couriel ’00, Eisenstein’s successor, recalled a major rift with the IOP; Eisenstein did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Throughout 1998, Rollert and his fellow staffers played a part in battles over the HPR’s character as a publication. Unlike the battles over the HPR’s partisan identity during Jay Hamilton’s tenure, these battles took place over the way the HPR presented itself as a magazine. These debates boiled down to a single question, as Rollert remembered: “How much should our efforts be kind of hard, independent, well-researched journalism, and how much should it be kind of poppy in nature?”
According to Rollert, the magazine George — a contemporary publication founded by John F. Kennedy Jr. which presented itself as a magazine about the intersection of politics and culture — heavily influenced those debates. Given its founder’s connection with the IOP, many HPR members interned at George over the summer and in term time, and those experiences filtered down to the editorial debates in the magazine.
“To the 21-year-old male mind, there was something really cool about George magazine,” Rollert said, so Rollert’s colleagues Baer and Franklin Leonard ’00 had wondered, “Why couldn’t we do that in the HPR?”
“We were trying to figure out how to blow [the HPR] up and do fun, new, sexy things, whether it was the Delta Shuttle or fantasies about having it become a new, nice publication that would have a general audience beyond the Harvard community,” Baer remembered more than 20 years later.
As it turned out, the George acolytes lost out. “From my vantage point, clear heads prevailed,” Rollert continued. Baer ran for editor-in-chief in 1998, and he lost that election to John Couriel (now a justice on the Florida Supreme Court). “The challenge of trying to put together a thoughtful, well-edited, well-choreographed quarterly magazine with students really digging into politics as kind of politics and public policy as opposed to politics as pop culture is a worthy challenge unto itself,” Rollert concluded.
Having a “thoughtful” and “well-edited” magazine also necessitated having articles from both sides of the political aisle, and Couriel believed it certainly had achieved that goal. In an interview with the HPR, Couriel remembered the publication as a “forum for dissenting views.” “I think it’s necessary to the job of citizenship that there are places where thoughtful commentary on various sides of an issue can be gathered and available,” Couriel mused, “and I for one really enjoyed doing some of that work in college.”
Adam Lauridsen ’01, then the HPR’s features editor, offered an anecdote that illustrates Couriel’s points. Somebody had proposed burning a flag and then scanning it in for the cover to evoke “a dramatic image of protests,” Lauridsen said in an interview with the HPR.
“I remember that my conservative friend [John Couriel] was very worried that this would come back to haunt us at some point,” Lauridsen continued, in an era when the Republican Party proposed a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning. “He ended up begrudgingly going along with it.”
Couriel also inherited a website that continued to maintain its character as an “afterthought.” In that broader journalistic context, the HPR was no outlier. The web was “a frontier that each media outlet sort of had, but [it] wasn’t the heart and soul of any of these media outlets,” he said, echoing Rollert’s sentiments.
At the time, major newspapers had started to put their stories online. The New York Times, for instance, launched its online presence on Jan. 22, 1996, only a few months before the HPR did. It, too, worried about cannibalization, but it also reached the conclusion that it would have to put its entire newspaper online. “In fact, that’s what I think, probably, 99% of the people who would use The New York Times on the web would expect from it,” Martin Nisenholtz, who spearheaded the NYT’s digitization efforts, told the Riptide oral history project.
Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian newspaper, told a different story in his memoir “Breaking News.” At the turn of the century, “The media world was divided between those who still shrugged and those who were panicking.” The Guardian had not put its own website up until July 1998, but some editors still reacted to developments in newspaper websites “in horror.”
Both experiences confirm the idea that the internet was not at the forefront of news editors’ minds. Even if the NYT published its full print newspaper online, for instance, it never inaugurated any digital-only content, nor did it have any web-specific innovations.
That, of course, would soon change, and the number of people shrugging would begin to diminish. As journalism as a field started to get more serious about its web presence, the HPR did, too. And to do so, it would need to update its barebones website.
“Writing on a Blank Slate” (2000-2006)
Before that, though, the HPR would need to deal with a major financial crisis. Adam Lauridsen took over as editor-in-chief in 2000, and he remembers a starkly different financial picture than Couriel did.
“When I took over as editor-in-chief, we were in a significant amount of debt,” Lauridsen said. “I think I actually ended up putting a good chunk of the first publishing bill on my personal credit card in hopes that it would get funded later.” While Lauridsen did not mention the failed plan to put HPR magazines on the Delta Shuttle as a contributing factor, it makes sense that the Delta Shuttle plan’s ramifications would have lasted for several years.
As a result, Lauridsen and his business manager Martin Kurzweil ’02 put together a “bailout package” and took it to the IOP. They proposed a campaign to raise more money through advertising but with a concomitant financial injection from the IOP. Lauridsen pitched the idea that if the HPR were to remain the “magazine of record for political discussion here on campus, that’s going to take a certain amount of money if you want to do that as part of the IOP.” Of course, that argument drew upon the value that the HPR added to the IOP as a printed forum for student discussion, mirroring the JFK Jr. Forums the IOP held in person.
“We went back and forth, and fortunately, we were able to work something out,” Lauridsen remembered.
“There were checks that we put in place to make sure that they were comfortable with [the HPR’s expenditures], and we asked for more money than we ultimately got, but we learned to live with what we had,” Lauridsen continued. As a condition of this bailout, the HPR would not launch ambitious national expansion plans like it had in the past — for the time being.
The HPR might have gotten a sympathetic ear from the IOP because the IOP went through its own internal turmoil around the same time. In November 2000, newly inaugurated IOP Executive Director David Pryor unilaterally disbanded the Student Advisory Committee. Student leaders generally believed that Pryor saw students as “a thorn in his side” and wanted to exert more control over the IOP, while Pryor claimed he wanted to “broaden [the IOP’s] base and encourage participation by a larger and more diverse group of students.”
Of course, the move generated immense controversy, with op-eds and proposals floating around on both sides of the issue. The HPR, with its campaign to get out of debt, found itself in the crosshairs.
“We were aligned with SAC in their concerns about the student governance of the IOP, and I think staff may have given the HPR some money as a way to potentially calm the unrest on that front,” Lauridsen speculated.
While the HPR negotiated its financial difficulties, Lauridsen also spearheaded another initiative: sprucing up the HPR’s website. With the help of roommate Todd Plants ’01 (who later became the Chief Technology Officer at a political consulting firm), the HPR moved from its “primitive” site at hcs.harvard.edu to a new, independent domain: hpronline.org.
“It was great to be online. It allowed us to really have a broader reach, so thanks to his efforts, we had a presence,” Lauridsen said.
As Andrew Bradt ’02 settled into the assistant managing editor role the year after Lauridsen’s tenure, he remembered debates about the HPR’s website most clearly. “We were very much writing on a blank slate,” Bradt recalled in an interview with the HPR.
“Do we want to duplicate the content that’s in the magazine, or is that going to cannibalize our paid subscribers? What do we want to do about advertising on the website? Would we upload and publish extra material on the website that’s not going to be in the print edition? All of those were open questions in the early days of launching the website,” Bradt continued.
When Elizabeth Prasse (then known as Elizabeth Frieze) took over the HPR in 2003, the conversations that Bradt remembered had continued. “At the time, we were thinking about strategic ways we could get the magazine seen by people,” Prasse told the HPR, and that conversation included balancing the HPR’s web presence and its print edition.
During Prasse’s term, the HPR floated the idea of a blog. “I remember having a conversation when I was editor-in-chief with a young staff writer who said, ‘I have this great idea, there’s this thing called a blog,’” Prasse said, “but at the time, none of us had even heard of the word ‘blog.’” Although as early as 2001, Wired magazine had called blogs the “hottest publishing phenomenon on the internet,” the HPR did not start its own blog until 2007.
Financially, the Delta Shuttle’s aftereffects still lingered, and the HPR remained on budgetary thin ice with the IOP, so to speak, because of its previous financial issues. “We were trying to keep within our lane and not do anything fiscally irresponsible,” Prasse said in an interview with the HPR. “We didn’t want to do anything too crazy or too bold because we still were working within a limited budget.”
Beyond the financial relationship, Prasse said the HPR had a very cordial relationship with the IOP during her tenure (which coincided with Pete Buttigieg ’04’s term as SAC president). “It was an era of good feelings between the HPR and the IOP,” Prasse said.
John Jernigan ’06 concurred with that idea. In his view, Prasse fostered an environment with “people who are generally congenial, but also take [the magazine] seriously,” he told the HPR. “I think Liz really reflected that [ethos].”
Jernigan also respected Prasse’s successor, Eli Rosenbaum ’05. (Rosenbaum did not return a request for comment.) Rosenbaum was “inspirational because he was just so sharp and so quick and very insightful” with edits, Jernigan said.
During this time period, the HPR mostly kept to the pact that Lauridsen had brokered back in 2000, focusing on putting out quality articles rather than overextending itself too much. “I was just focused on putting out four good issues and trying to cover topics of the day in a thoughtful and insightful manner,” Jernigan said.
Since Jernigan mainly focused on putting out the magazine, he did not focus much on the website during his tenure to the point that he did not even remember if the HPR had a website at the time. (It did.) “It was certainly not something we paid a lot of attention to,” Jernigan concluded.
Within the next couple of years, though, the “blogosphere” and the increasing prominence of the web in journalism would become too big to ignore; the HPR would have to pay attention.
“A Quicker Fix on the News of the Day” (2007-2011)
On Apr. 19, 2007, the HPR published a new article on its website speculating whether Virginia’s Republican senator John Warner would retire. But this article represented a new animal for the publication: It was the first article that the HPR had published natively online, as well as the first article in the HPR blog.
Even though the blog started during their tenure, neither the HPR editor-in-chief nor the managing editor saw the blog as a critical arm of the magazine. As Alex Burns ’08, the HPR’s editor-in-chief during 2007 and now a political journalist at the New York Times, put it during an interview with the HPR, “I vaguely remember the existence of the blog, but I don’t remember it as an organizing project.”
But the blogosphere had reached its height during Rosenbaum and Jernigan’s tenure. Merriam-Webster declared “blog” the word of the year in 2004, and the late blogosphere scholar Aaron Barlow pointed to the 2004 elections as a turning point in the blogosphere. “Here, there was no attempt to provide balance between competing views… No agenda was hidden on the blogs.” With its tenets of well-sourced analysis yet no publication-wide editorial line, the HPR had not attempted to provide balance, nor did it maintain an agenda, at least for a campus audience. It would have to compete with the blogosphere.
At the time, though, the mainstream media — and the HPR — did not really know what to make of the blogosphere. “The notion of a blog as a truly separate platform with its own set of goals, culture, tone — that was still really in development at that time,” Burns said.
“I don’t want to make myself sound like a caveman here,” Burns added, but he helmed the HPR at a time when “even the biggest media outlets in the country were still not quite sure what they were doing online.”
Burns’s managing editor, Alex Chase-Levenson ’08, largely echoed those sentiments. “It still felt a little bit like the internet was just a kind of extra thing that was another medium for getting out articles,” he told the HPR. “I don’t think people saw themselves as journalists catering specifically to the internet as a medium.”
The HPR’s web presence before the launch of HPRgument reflected those perceptions and that broader journalistic landscape: It largely focused on the print magazine, putting those articles online every quarter while not really focusing on natively digital content. But with the launch of HPRgument in 2007, it now had followed in the footsteps of larger media organizations that had sensed the potential for political blogs to reach new audiences, especially after political blogs gained prominence in the 2004 elections.
Even while those changes were happening in the broader landscape, the HPR’s culture remained constant, and the publication remained secure in its niche. Chase-Levenson saw the HPR as a “less stressful” extracurricular activity than its counterparts in the IOP. He remembered several “particularly bitter IOP elections” with politicking that seemed “goofy” and “ridiculous” in retrospect, with more politically engaged students presumably wanting to jumpstart their political careers.
In contrast, the HPR felt more relaxed, given that he felt like “those who wanted to commit enough time to working in whatever position were going to get to be section editor or move higher up at some point.” This matched on with earlier HPR presidents like Andrew Buckser or Charlie Woo, both of whom remembered the IOP as a place for budding politicos and the HPR as a place for those who enjoyed politics but would prefer to remain on the sidelines.
In response to a senior IOP staffer “who seemed to regard the HPR as different from other IOP programs… and who was highly skeptical of the IOP cutting checks to this magazine,” Burns articulated a similar argument about the HPR’s niche in the IOP. The HPR reached “a set of people who might not show up for forums or become fellows liaisons,” Burns said he argued at the time.
“If the organizing goal of IOP is to make politics accessible to as many people as possible,” the argument continued, “why wouldn’t you want to reach people who are drawn to writing but don’t want to be a senator or the White House chief of staff, and who otherwise would probably do the Crimson?”
On the strength of this argument, Burns reported that the IOP never did cut the HPR’s funding, although he still felt that the HPR’s financial relationship with the IOP remained “precarious” (perhaps a lingering side-effect from the Delta Shuttle failure).
During the Great Recession, many other newspapers and magazines felt more precarious than the HPR. A LinkedIn study found that traditional news media shrank by more than 25% during the recession since classified advertising plummeted — and when it came back, Craigslist and other websites replaced it as a revenue source. Indeed, the financial crisis forced several longstanding magazines to close and led to further consolidation within the media industry.
Will Leiter ’10, the HPR’s president throughout 2009, felt that the HPR’s presence in the IOP insulated it from those broader journalistic trends. “It’s not like a magazine was needed to turn a profit or was turning a profit or anything,” Leiter told the HPR. And although it was “expensive” and “a lot of extra effort” to print a physical magazine, at least “the labor was free,” Leiter joked.
But the recession nonetheless impacted Leiter’s plans for his tenure. Because the magazine cost so much to print, Leiter realized that the publication “needed to do more stuff on the website, meaning we need to have more things that are maybe online only,” in addition to sprucing up the website more generally.
Concerns about a growing staff also motivated this decision to focus more on the website. Burns had noted the tensions between a growing staff and the limited number of spots available for printed articles two years earlier, and Leiter also dealt with that tension. For him, the internet allowed him to tell potential writers, “You can totally still do this, and people are still going to read it, and it’s still going to be a learning experience for you,” even if the physical magazine might not have space for new articles.
Even in the midst of the recession, the HPR’s 40th anniversary took place in 2009, and Zoey Orol ’10 (Leiter’s managing editor) took the helm on the celebrations. Orol helped to organize a “retrospective issue that excerpted articles on a variety of topics from across history,” as well as a JFK Jr. Forum panel on the intersection between media, politics, and public service. “It was unbelievable to me that, for the 40th anniversary celebration, we could simply call these people up and expect that they would show up at our forum. And then they did,” Orol said in an interview with the HPR.
At the forum, Orol mentioned the website in her introductory address. “We are dramatically expanding our online content at hpronline.org, and hope to continue to evolve as the mainstream media enters the digital age,” she said. Her statement is significant: Even two years prior, the HPR had not recognized the website as a primary outlet. Less than two years later, it had changed 180 degrees and recognized that the HPR had become part of the mainstream media.
As part of its broader transformation towards the internet, the HPR did something it had not done since 1995: appoint a publisher. And this time, unlike the walkout in 1986, the IOP had nothing to do with it.
At the time, Leiter described positions on the HPR’s “pub side” — non-editorial positions like circulation manager, business manager, and webmaster — as essentially “consolation prizes that fell to people who didn’t get the editorial jobs.” However, this had become a “pain point” for the magazine, especially given the importance of the HPR’s website to Leiter’s initiatives.
And so the HPR created the publisher position “to elevate the business functions and create a person like the editor-in-chief, but for the business side of the magazine,” Leiter said. Leiter had realized himself that the HPR needed to attract people who could manage the publication’s business side, even if they did not want to write articles, and the publisher position was an outgrowth of those efforts.
Cathy Sun ’11 assumed the first renewed publisher position for 2010, and she confirmed Leiter’s memory about the position’s origins. “There’s certainly a lot of students at Harvard who are interested in design and business, but [there] wasn’t kind of the natural draw to go to the HPR for that,” she said in an interview with the HPR. “I think by creating [the publisher] position and expanding it, it helped to create the structure to help recruit more people into those functions.”
Sun had two main initiatives during her tenure: revamping the HPR’s internet presence and redesigning the magazine itself.
On the internet, Sun moved to redesign the website, allowing writers to upload their own articles and implementing new techniques that we would call search engine optimization today. Sun also created a Facebook page for the HPR and encouraged writers to share their articles on the newly created social media platform. “It’s just not as exciting to feel like you’ve written something but you don’t have that community around it or people who are reading it and interacting with it,” Sun said to justify her efforts.
The Facebook page also allowed the HPR to collect more detailed readership statistics for the first time. Even though the HPR door dropped magazines, it did not get a good sense of who actually read the magazines and which articles proved most popular. Those readership counts “counted more than how many physical copies we printed,” Sun said, “because that meant people were actually reading specific articles” rather than having the cruder data on printed copies.
For the physical edition, Sun created the InDesign template that the publication still uses today for the most part. This went hand-in-hand with redesigning the website, creating a new logo for the magazine, and on the whole rebranding the HPR: “We just wanted to refresh the look of the magazine,” Sun explained. InDesign “was entirely self taught by myself and the other members of the design team. I think all of us had watched some YouTube tutorials, and I just grew up playing around with it.”
“Being a student organization, we just figured it out,” she added.
During the website redesign, the HPR blog took on a new character: HPRgument, which signified that the blog would become a more serious and institutionalized part of the HPR’s standard offerings rather than a side note or an afterthought.
Alex Kazam ’11 (then known as Alex Sherbany) described that shift in an interview with the HPR. “As a quarterly publication, [we] took a step back to a more in-depth look at long-term policy issues [instead of] being tied to day-to-day political events,” he said. The blog allowed the HPR to have its cake and eat it too, so to speak: “I think we wanted to maintain that identity and a more academic approach, but at the same time we wanted to have an outlet for people to have a quicker fix on the news of the day.”
Kazam also highlighted a new initiative that the HPR took on editorially: the Annual Report of the USA. The ARUSA had previously been hosted within the IOP as far back as 1995, although the HPR did not take on the project until 2010 thanks to an HPR alumnus, Meredith Bagby, who helmed an educational nonprofit named the American Educational Foundation. (The AEF’s only significant product appears to be the ARUSA series, and the foundation is defunct today as far as I can tell.)
“The United States federal government is in the midst of a budget crisis,” the editors of the first ARUSA wrote as an explanation for the series. “We at the HPR feel that citizens can only hold their leaders accountable when they understand the budget process itself — how we got into this mess, and what our options are going forward.”
As such, the ARUSA reports definitely intervened in longstanding policy debates about budgeting, and in its first year, the ARUSA even got some coverage on Fox News. It also reaffirmed the HPR’s commitment to timely and timeless journalism — while it certainly intervened in the discussions about the budget leading up to the 2011 debt ceiling crisis, its policy recommendations still remain relevant today as the U.S. heads towards yet another budgetary crisis involving the debt ceiling. (ARUSA died out after the 2013 issue due to internal discord about its future, according to HPR president Daniel Backman ’15.)
Nonetheless, the ARUSA project signaled a larger trend within the HPR: For the first time in at least a decade, it had engaged in a large editorial expansion. Along with the blog and the rising number of online-only articles, the HPR had finally begun to expand its editorial offerings at a time when the HPR’s staff had begun to move beyond the “skeleton crew” that Burns described.
After Kazam’s tenure, the HPR moved farther beyond the “skeleton crew” than it had ever done in the past, even as it had already started expanding.
And it all started with a dramatic presidential election in the fall of 2010. HPRgument played a major role in that election.
“Technologies and Processes That Scale” (2011-2014)
Throughout 2010, Max Novendstern ’12 had served as the HPR’s online editor. Every Sunday, he led writers in producing the HPRgument blog which had started under Burns and had become institutionalized under Sun.
“This became this competing power center in the magazine,” Novendstern described it in an interview with the HPR, because the magazine’s leadership consisted of “IOPers who thought that the structure of the organization should be a constitutional problem.”
“I thought the structure of the magazine should be like a tech company startup problem,” Novendstern said. (Novendstern certainly carried this tech startup ethos into his career as a co-founder of cryptocurrency startup Worldcoin.) “Every Sunday, I basically started this new magazine based around HPRgument that believed that [the magazine] should be run like a tech startup,” he continued. “We had metrics that were constantly being updated on the wall, and we would, like, binge drink.”
Essentially, the HPRgument site would produce entirely new content, divorced from the print magazine — and it would grow into a new power center in the HPR. As Novendstern described it, he “built a group of devoted freshmen” in these weekly HPRgument meetings. “On election day, I just had like, two dozen people whose interface with this magazine was me, come to the election. And so I became editor-in-chief.”
Given Novendstern’s anti-institutional tendencies, the relationship with the IOP had some “tension points,” as he described them. Naturally, those tension points surrounded the website. Novendstern framed the key questions in his mind like this: Would the website’s management adopt the IOP’s “cool, constitutionalist approach” or an approach with a group of people “mak[ing] choices as fast as they want”?
Novendstern obviously preferred the latter.
That philosophy also played out in Novendstern’s priorities for the HPR under his leadership. “The first core principle was to build technologies and processes that scale,” Novendstern said. “The second pillar was to build a community that was the most meaningful place for intellectuals on campus to come talk about the most ambitious things.”
As part of those initiatives, Novendstern spearheaded the creation of associate editor positions in each of the HPR’s three major sections — previously, the U.S., World, and Books & Arts section only had senior editors. Novendstern and his masthead had frequent conversations about “scaling the organization,” he told me, and they decided to “staff up” to better reach their goals of competing with the Crimson as a campus-wide publication. Indeed, in fall 2011, the HPR elected new associate editors in all three sections, and the new editors entered into their office in time for the 2012 masthead.
The Campus section also came about in 2012 as a result of those discussions as well. “The attempt was to try to cover some interesting stuff that was happening on campus that was politically related,” said Tom Gaudett ’14, the Campus section’s first senior editor. Beyond motivations to expand the magazine even further, the Campus section was an attempt to add “something that we noticed was kind of missing” from the magazine.
Initially, the section struggled, with competition both from the Crimson and from other sections within the HPR itself. As Gaudett described the disconnect, “People who want to write about campus events and go into that kind of journalism go to the Crimson, they don’t come to the Institute of Politics. People that are in the Institute of Politics want to do stuff on U.S. and world politics.”
During Gaudett’s tenure, at least one article did “blow up,” in his words: Students in the (in)famous Economics 10 course walked out in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the HPR published both the demonstrators’ open letter and a response that criticized the walkout. The subsequent media discussion brought significant exposure to the HPR.
The next year, the HPR took on another ambitious project that aimed to differentiate itself from other campus publications: the Literary Supplement. Although the HPR had always focused on more analytical journalism, it felt a need to carve out a niche on campus by focusing on longer-form journalism.
Eli Kozminsky ’14 made the case for the supplement in his editor’s note. “Long-form articles of this sort have become a burgeoning platform for journalism,” he wrote. “Harvard’s campus publications have saturated the features, blog, and literary platforms with spectacular student content. The HPR plans on extending this excellence to the arena of long-form, well-researched investigations.”
As the HPR worked on the Literary Supplement substantively, Gaudett took over as the magazine’s staff director, essentially responsible for recruitment. “I don’t just credit myself, because I had help, but it was probably one of the biggest years in terms of participation, especially among underclassmen… that we had ever seen,” he said. With a banner year in student participation, Novendstern’s strategy for expanding the magazine’s top brass looked more and more prescient.
During this period, the blog often looked chameleonic as it changed names and forms frequently. At the tail end of Novendstern’s term, short-form posts shifted to the section editors’ mantles, although a newsletter called Harvard Talks Politics collated the short-form entries together. HPRgument, meanwhile, persisted as multiple HPR writers discussed the same topic using short-form posts. Throughout 2012, the HPR blogs appeared disjointed as HPR writers opined under the titles of six “specialty blogs” on titles ranging from Double Helix on science to Metro for, well, happenings in Cambridge.
In 2013, the blog again changed names to The Short List and gained prominence on the HPR website again. The HPR’s editor-in-chief at the time, Andrew Seo ’14, wrote that the HPR was “returning to its online roots and bringing back shorter form blogging” in his editor’s note in Spring 2013, never mind that the HPR’s online presence started with republished content, never mind that it took more than a decade for the HPR to actually start short-form blogging, and never mind that short-form blogging had never disappeared. (Seo did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this article.)
2013 also brought a more lasting change to the HPR’s website: its URL slug changed from hpronline.org to harvardpolitics.com, perhaps in recognition that the HPR had focused more on its website and native digital content rather than just republishing the physical magazine online like it had in the early days.
“I think having hpronline.com didn’t make any sense,” exclaimed Gram Slattery ’15, then the HPR’s world editor and later associate managing editor, when I asked him about the change. “We wanted to attract a wider range of people with a catchier website, a more confident name,” he continued. In Slattery’s view, the name change signified that the HPR was a “magazine that can be enjoyed by anyone who enjoys reading about politics, rather than a specialized or perhaps really wonky publication.”
As Slattery ascended to the associate managing editor position, the incoming president, Daniel Backman ’15, emphasized the website in the magazine’s strategic plans. “It seemed drastic at the time,” Backman recalled in an interview for the HPR, but he had proposed reorganizing editorial cycles “as part of sort of a broader move away from orienting our whole operation around the print magazine … to a more continuous online-first approach” in his presidential campaign. (The HPR changed the name of the editor-in-chief to president at that time to reflect the work that pub side did for the magazine, emphasizing that it did not just serve as a home for budding political journalists but also budding business managers, designers, and webmasters.)
“The readership online was just so much greater than the readership of the print magazines by orders of magnitude,” Backman continued, “so the focus devoted to the print cycle seemed disproportionate to the importance of [the print cycle] for our readers.”
Consequently, Backman proposed an online-first production cycle: Writers and editors would not pay cycle deadlines any heed, and when it came time for the HPR to send a magazine off to the publishers, the editors would pick the best content to appear in the magazine. Not everybody liked this new approach, and the magazine did a “hybrid approach” for the first two issues.
The changes didn’t stick entirely — the HPR still maintained cycle deadlines for feature pieces up until it ceased printing a physical magazine during the COVID-19 pandemic — but Backman’s approach nonetheless signaled more commitment towards the HPR’s website, in an era when a publication’s online presence had become even more important. “It was sort of inevitable, but I like to think that what we did was help push [the HPR] in the direction of being more online first,” Backman said.
Slattery remembered two major themes during his tenure as associate managing editor. First, he and other HPR editors had frequent and spirited discussion about whether the HPR would be a “wonky political magazine” or a “general interest magazine,” a debate that seemed eerily similar to debates over the magazine’s identity during John Paul Rollert’s time in the HPR at the turn of the 21st century. The pendulum had seemingly swung toward the latter camp during this iteration, and Slattery pointed towards the Literary Supplement and a live blog of the 2014 midterm election as examples.
As part of that, Slattery remembered trying to change the HPR’s slogan. “A lot of us didn’t like the motto of ‘the premier undergraduate political quarterly,’” Slattery said, adopting a faux-snotty tone for the slogan, “because we thought it sounded like an academic journal.”
“Matt [Shuham, the managing editor] and I even toyed with changing the name to something that sounded more fluid,” Slattery added. “The Harvard Review was taken since that’s a fiction magazine, but [we wanted] something to that effect.”
Second, Slattery remembered “a lot of emphasis on Campus and the greater Metro area because a lot of people wanted stuff that was easier [to do] primary source reporting on.” Exemplifying both trends (an uptick in long-form reporting and an emphasis on local topics), Slattery himself wrote a long-form article diving into the Harvard Divest movement, back then a much less influential organization and far from achieving its goals. But it persisted, and Slattery chronicled the lead-up to a prominent 2014 sit-in with a skeptical yet engaging eye.
Despite improvements in the website, the relationship with the IOP had not improved much since Novendstern’s tenure. “There was some distrust for sure when I started, and some hesitance from the staff side in dealing with the HPR,” Backman said.
“I think there was an expectation set at some point earlier on that the HPR would be self financing, that the HPR would not need any money from the IOP” due to advertising and subscriptions, Backman continued. But the HPR felt like this was an unrealistic expectation from the IOP’s part: “There’s not really a lot of examples, even in the real world, of totally self-funded media operations, and certainly not for our little niche undergraduate political commentary publication,” he said, summarizing the media’s financial pressures during his time in office.
Those tensions came to a head at an IOP board meeting during Backman’s tenure. Backman proposed a budget increase for the HPR to fund a long-form reporting initiative and changes to the website, and one of the IOP board members asked him dismissively, “Are we still paying for this?”
“It was a little rough to hear,” Backman admitted with a sigh.
Fortunately for the HPR, the IOP’s executive board was far from unanimous in that sentiment, and Backman worked with Trey Grayson ’94, then the IOP’s director, to work out a deal. Even though Grayson left in the middle of Backman’s tenure, Backman recalled the HPR getting a funding package from the IOP.
Backman attributed “no shade” on the IOP staff at all. “I think it was just a matter of figuring out what the relationship really should be, both financially and also operationally,” he said.
“An Article Online Could Get Hundreds of Thousands of People” (2015-2019)
As the HPR’s relationship with the IOP evolved, so did its own content and editorial policies. For one, the HPR developed new ethical guidelines to ensure that HPR interviewers conduct interviews in a fairer manner, especially for vulnerable populations — a discussion that continues today.
“You running through the [double ask], ‘Once the recording starts, for the record, am I okay with this,’ [that] made me chuckle,” said Rachael Hanna ’16, the assistant managing editor under Priya Menon ’16. (Menon did not respond to a request for comment.) “Ethical concerns in journalism go far beyond how you conduct an interview, so bringing that into the magazine was something that I was very, very happy to be a part of, and it’s good to see [interviewer conduct guidelines] continuing.”
Menon’s managing editor Matthew Disler ’16 pushed for more narrative journalism following the Slattery model at the HPR. “We have this opportunity with online [journalism] to do things that are a lot more ambitious, a lot longer and in many different types of formats,” Disler said in an interview with the HPR.
Despite the push for more long-form journalism, the HPR published the last issue of the Literary Supplement — which had aimed to promote more investigative journalism — in 2015. Disler remembered that the Literary Supplement’s final issue came as the workhorse culture editor retired for personal reasons. “If you don’t have an… editorial team and a staff writer team that is sufficiently large and sufficiently motivated to produce it, it’s harder to get it out at regular intervals,” Disler said. Consequently, the Literary Supplement simply lost momentum.
Disler then segued into the HPR’s broader conversations about the Books & Arts section and the role it would play in the magazine. “We were the only people doing U.S. politics for the most part… and we were pretty much the only people doing [student writing on] international affairs,” Disler said. With the Books & Arts section, however, it became “a little bit more blurred to figure out what the niche is versus other magazines.”
Hanna said that the magazine talked about ways to increase recruitment for the session. “Books & Arts was a little bit more restrictive than the full scope of the content that the section was hoping to cover,” she recalled. So the HPR rebranded the Books & Arts section as the Culture section.
“It’s easier to work with Culture, that gives you a little bit more flexibility and suggests to writers that they can write something more than book reviews,” Disler said.
Under Joe Choe ’17, the HPR would work to deepen the publication’s presence online.
“For us, the main innovation was using YouTube,” Choe said in an interview with the HPR. The publication began embedding “accompanying YouTube videos where we would interview like article editors and ask them about their opinions [and] ask people on campus what their opinions were.”
“We also started incorporating infographics into our articles,” he continued. “They were very basic, like graphs and pie charts that we made, but having those on our articles was pretty unique at the time.”
Some of Backman’s changes regarding the publication cycle had also stuck. “There was more output” on the website, Choe noted, “and it was more regular. In fact, I think when we were doing it, the print drew from the online, like [an article] was usually posted first online and then we would publish it later in print.”
Finally, the HPR no longer would worry whether online articles would cannibalize print articles; the publication had finally switched from a print-focused magazine with a website tacked on to a website with a print magazine tacked on.
This inflection point also figured into the HPR’s relationship with the IOP. Choe remembered the IOP fighting to cut the HPR’s print production, given the internet’s primacy: “There were maybe 1,000 magazines going out into the public, versus an article online could get hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of minutes,” Choe remembered. “I just liked having a physical copy for memorabilia’s sake.”
Despite tension with the IOP under Backman, Novendstern, and Seo, and despite disagreements over the future of print, Choe said the relationship between the IOP and the HPR was relatively “cordial.” He offered two conjectures for that improved relationship. First, he noted that he had been an IOP member before he ascended to the top rank in the HPR. “That was a distinction that made me different from my predecessors, and my direct successor,” he said. Choe also indicated that he understood the IOP’s concerns more than other presidents might have, so it seems likely that these interactions made compromise more likely.
Choe also believed the IOP was simply “exhausted” from the “contentious” relationship in the previous couple of years. “I think they were just relieved that I wasn’t pushing the envelope as much as my predecessors.”
For the time being, the HPR’s print production would continue, even as publisher Drew Pendergrass ’20 compared “pub side” to the movie “Howl’s Moving Castle” in which the titular castle is a “labyrinth just sort of like falling forwards constantly.”
“I feel like that’s the metaphor for the HPR, a very chaotic organization,” Pendergrass said in an interview with the HPR. “But that was always the fun part.”
Pendergrass did note that “there just weren’t enough people to have the professional workflows that you might have in a media organization,” said Pendergrass. The IOP’s subsidy also obviated “a lot of the need for a very formal sort of infrastructure,” he added.
Despite those issues, the HPR finalized its major online initiative for long-form journalism throughout Pendergrass’s term in 2018. The Red Line Fellowship would provide writers with an institutional support system. While the HPR had started to focus on long-form journalism over the preceding few years, those projects often took an ad-hoc basis or depended on a particular section. However, a Managing Editor would take over the Red Line program, giving it more institutional cachet within the HPR.
Pendergrass gave credit to Russell Reed ’20, then an associate managing editor. “That was Russell’s baby,” Pendergrass said.
“But the idea was basically to support longer-form journalism, which we thought was the thing that we could do that made us different,” Pendergrass continued. “We can’t break news. We can write opinion pieces, but those are a dime a dozen. And you can write more in-depth articles and that’s good, but the thing that’s really nice is long-form, in-depth articles.”
As the HPR finalized the project, a minor debate erupted: Would the initiative’s name resemble redlining — which allowed banks to deny loans to Black potential homeowners — too much? Ultimately, the publication decided to reference the subway line more clearly, and the HPR published the first Red Line pieces on Aug. 14, 2018.
The Red Line fellowship represented both a culmination of efforts that Disler had started several years earlier and the primacy of the online publication: Red Line pieces would not appear in print. In this case, online publication meant that writers could delve into their investigations for several months; they did not need to adhere to print cycles. As the internet made other publications lean into breaking news, the HPR felt that the internet allowed it to lean the other way.
Several months later, the HPR would celebrate its 50th anniversary in April 2019.
For reasons unknown to me, the HPR did not hold its 50th anniversary celebrations until Oct. 28, 2019, about six months after the true 50th anniversary. They were understated, too, especially compared to the pomp and circumstance of the 40th anniversary. Mark Gearan, the director of the IOP, hosted HPR masthead, staffers, and alumni in the Winthrop faculty dean’s residence for hors-d’oeuvres and canapes. At some point, we toasted to the HPR’s next 50 years.
The HPR’s first 50 years did not close with a bang, but in a way, the celebrations were appropriate. Just like the HPR’s founders, and just like every group of HPR editors and writers in its history, we got together and talked about politics. Who could ask for more?
Epilogue: “The Biggest, Unruliest Group Project” (2019-present)
On Nov. 13, 2019 — only two weeks after the 50th anniversary celebrations — the HPR’s managing editor Chimaoge Ibenwuku ’20 resigned.
Resignations happened from time to time throughout HPR history, usually when an editor feels too overwhelmed to continue their work. But Ibenwuku’s resignation happened for a different reason: He cited “longstanding organizational problems relating to race and racism” that had been “swept under the rug to our collective detriment.”
For Ibenwuku, the last straw was an article entitled “A Renaissance for Rwanda’s Dogs.” Ibenwuku drafted a document explaining why the article “trafficked heavily in anti-Black and anti-African tropes and false narratives,” but the then-president of the HPR, Russell Reed, overruled those concerns, and the article got published. Ibenwuku attached several tags — such as “colonialism” and “xenophobia” — to the article when loading it to WordPress, which led to Reed and other members of the Executive Board shutting Ibenwuku out.
“It seemed that the Exec members’ anger was based upon their own irrational feelings, as well as discomfort with the mere mention of race issues due to their own white guilt and fragility,” Ibenwuku concluded.
Reed sent a message on Slack later that same day that did not explicitly deny the allegations, instead writing that “I think it’s been clear to many of you that our internal culture on exec has not been positive, and the reasons for this are complicated and sensitive.”
“Ultimately, disagreements like this are the reason we have worked to create institutional procedures and mechanisms like the Commissions,” he added.
Reed and the Executive Board adopted a strategy based on direction from the Institute of Politics which would attempt to minimize public reaction. They asked masthead members to refrain from commenting to the Crimson, and they did not mount a detailed public defense. “While we disagree with the account presented on social media, we believe it is inappropriate to publicly discuss internal editorial or staffing disagreements,” their statement read.
Ibenwuku most definitely had a point. I asked most of my interviewees about their experiences with diversity in the magazine, and most people commented on ideological diversity rather than diversity along other lines. It seems to me that issues of race and gender did not play a major role in discussions about the magazine’s future.
Some former HPR editors commented more explicitly on this theme. I asked Will Leiter, editor-in-chief during 2009, about the HPR’s diversity during his tenure. “Oh, wow,” he responded. “My first thought is, that’s not a thing that we were tracking at all at the time.”
John Jernigan, editor-in-chief during 2004, commented on the HPR’s election procedures. “Elections were done by discussion,” he recalled — and they still are done the same way today. “I think that’s probably not great for diversity and things like that,” he opined.
If Ibenwuku’s resignation did not spark a long-overdue HPR-wide reckoning on race, though, the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020 probably did. Although the Commission on Race and Ethnicity had existed since mid-2019, the Floyd protests catalyzed its efforts. Beyond the HPR’s public-facing statement of solidarity — which has disappeared from its website — the HPR also implemented a new style guide for writing about race. And in November 2020, the HPR elected its first Black female president, Marian Bothner ’22.
In the Winter 2019 magazine, Pendergrass wrote an endpaper about his experience as publisher. Pendergrass didn’t know it at the time, but his endpaper would be the very last article in the very last printed HPR magazine. The COVID-19 pandemic drove the final nail into the print magazine’s coffin, and every article now appears online first, and online only.
Nonetheless, Pendergrass’s endpaper exemplified the spirit of the HPR: a magazine where all perspectives can coexist, bound together by hard work and — as he argues — strict deadlines. “People have an incredible capacity to resolve passionate disagreements if they need to send a magazine to the printer in the next 12 hours,” Pendergrass wrote.
The HPR was the “the biggest, unruliest group project I have had the privilege to join,” Pendergrass continued. “I can think of no other organization on campus that collects everyone from socialists to Tea Party conservatives, much less one that asks them to produce around 200 color pages per year and mail them around the world. Yet the HPR works, the same way that a bumblebee mysteriously manages to fly with a tiny pair of wings.”
The endpaper was a fitting end to fifty-and-a-half years of print publication. Despite fits and starts, periods of expansion and periods where presidents have sought to just keep the trains running on time, the HPR has worked to produce quality political commentary and a quality political community.
Gary Meisel, one of the HPR’s first editors-in-chief, put this sentiment best. “We had no idea if we could create something thriving,” Meisel said, “and it’s nice to know that we have.”
