When New York Herald Tribune sports writer Stanley Woodward penned the phrase "ivy colleges" to describe an intercollegiate football league in 1933, he could not have known what the league would later represent.
"The Ivy League has come to mean the path of the future leaders of tomorrow," a co-creator and editor of Ivygateblog.com, who wished to remain anonymous, recently told The Herald. "But you can't take it that seriously. God, it's like a ripe balloon waiting to be popped."
Those keen on the latest news in the Ivy League can now add blogs like IvyGate and its rival Ivyleak.com to the list of media sources that previously included only mainstream media coverage and the colleges' own newspapers. This academic year, current, former and prospective students - as well as curious outsiders - can turn to the two new blogs that purport to cover all things Ivy League.
Despite the already extensive coverage of Ivy schools, the blogs' creators hope the flexibility of Internet content will allow them to succeed where the existing sources fall short because of deadlines or style limitations.
"We realized that there are constraints on what you can do at an Ivy paper - what you're allowed to cover, what you're allowed to report on," said IvyLeak's creator and editor, a man who wished to remain anonymous and refused to divulge his Ivy alma mater.
Rival site IvyGate, founded in July by two recent Columbia University alums, claims to cover the league's "news, gossip, sex, sports and more." The site features a roundup of the schools' daily newspapers and often lampoons happenings throughout the league. It recently introduced "Faculty Studs and Tenured Temptresses" - a poll that pits professors' photos against each other in a competition to determine who are the hottest Ivy League dons.
"I think the biggest compliment we were paid was by Wonkette," IvyGate's other co-creator and editor said. "They said, 'either (IvyGate is) for or against the Ivies, we're not sure.' I don't think our goal is to do either."
"We certainly break a lot of news that we've been getting credit for," he added. "Part of that is that the daily papers are slow, so we can scoop them."
IvyLeak's creator likened his site to the New York Post and said the blog seeks to "entertain and to provide something that we think the Ivy papers aren't."
"We want to be an alternative source, not only for news but for gossip, for distant commentary - a different perspective," he said.
Nathan Lovejoy '06, an editor at Lime Wire and an art semiotics concentrator whose honors thesis focused in part on blogging, told The Herald that blogs' low cost and quick turnaround allow bloggers to sometimes scoop mainstream media sources.
Jeff Greenwald, executive editor of the University of Pennsylvania's Daily Pennsylvanian newspaper told The Herald that neither IvyGate nor IvyLeak offer new material.
"They're not going to scoop anything," he said. "They're looking at the Ivy League papers and sifting through for things that people would find most interesting and posting them on their blog."
But, he added, "I'm not going to lie, it is fun to read."
"Granted, I do think they are providing a service to people who are following the Ivy League in general," Greenwald said. "If you want to find dirt that's where you go."
But the creators of IvyGate said that despite their playful tone, they know when to be serious. "We try not to be flippant about stuff that requires serious attention," one said.
In an e-mail to The Herald, IvyLeak's editor wrote: "The idea behind our faux-snotty tone is to turn Ivy elitism back on itself," he wrote. He added that his site's style is in the vein of a "yellow-journalism tabloid."
One IvyGate editor said while some expected the site to mirror the Onion, he thinks the blog is actually closer to media gossip site Gawker.com. Like Gawker, IvyGate not only reports its own brand of news but also closely covers and critiques other media sources.
An Aug. 25 IvyGate post entitled, "Cornellgasm Continues Apace: The Sun's New Look Bombs" assailed the Cornell Daily Sun's recent Web site re-design.
Erica Fink, the Sun's editor in chief and a self-proclaimed IvyGate reader, said, "We were disappointed that being familiar with the challenges (of a Web site) they themselves face, they were so critical of the job the Daily Sun is doing."
"Generally I think that their humor is pretty tasteful. They're harsh but not in terrible taste," Fink said.
The blogs' content may occasionally traverse the fine line between good and bad taste. A Sept. 21 post on IvyGate titled "Faculty Stud Nominee: Timothy Bewes," included an e-mail from a Brown alum - identified only as "Jaime '04" - about her crush on Assistant Professor of English Timothy Bewes. "Jaime" went on to divulge her secret hopes for office hours in the English department building with Bewes.
Bewes declined to comment for this article.
Gossipy posts like this one may fuel unsubstantiated rumors, but they are contributing to unexpectedly high traffic on the Ivy blogs. IvyGate's creators said their site's advertising revenues already outweigh production costs.
According to Technorati.com, a Web site that ranks 55 million blogs worldwide according to how many other blogs link to them, IvyGate ranks at 51,603 with 128 links from 53 blogs. IvyLeak is ranked 1,169,289 with three links from two blogs.
Though Technorati rankings are not the definitive word on a site's popularity, "it helps people understand in what esteem they are held by their fellow bloggers," said Technorati spokesman Derek Gordon.
One IvyGate creator said the site's readership is primarily Ivy League students. "It's basically all of these Ivy kids that are discovering the site and trying to escape a bad reality."
IvyGate editors told The Herald they recently received an uncorroborated, but particularly scandalous tip, about experimental drug use on Brown's campus. "It turned out the tip could never be sourced, but we had a great headline for it - 'look what happened when you let kids design their own (curriculum).'"
