‘Operation Ivy League’ was great news for Columbia’s student press corps

Eliza Shapiro, a 20-year-old junior at Columbia University, woke up around 10 a.m. Tuesday morning to find a tip waiting in her email inbox.

Shapiro is the editor-in-chief of Bwog, the preciously named blog of Columbia's monthly undergraduate student magazine, The Blue & White. Around 6:30 a.m., a tipster, perhaps heading home from an all-night cram session during finals season, had written in to let Bwog know of a curious police presence on frat row. Shapiro sent an email to a public-safety officer to see if she could confirm what was happening. He replied with links to the earliest reports on "Operation Ivy League," an undercover police sting that culminated in the arrest of five students from three fraternities accused of dealing cocaine, marijuana, LSD and Adderall on campus.

Shapiro, who has journalism in her blood -- her parents are Susan Chira, the New York Times' foreign editor, and Michael Shapiro, a professor at Columbia's graduate j-school -- sprung into action. She had planned on devoting her day to the 55 pages' worth of essays due before the semester wraps up in another week. Instead, she spent the next five hours holed up in her dorm room reporting, blogging, editing and managing a team of fellow Bwog journalists who had volunteered to help cover what was snowballing into a massive event.

"Everything happened incredibly quickly," she said Thursday morning, in between classes.

Over the past few days, city and national news outlets have swarmed all over the Columbia drug-bust story, which has traveled at least as far as Australia. But as with all major news breaks that originate on college campuses -- the outing last month of California State University, Fresnos's student-body president as an illegal immigrant; the September suicide of a gay Rutgers college Freshman; the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre -- Operation Ivy League has thrust Columbia's student press corps into the spotlight. There, it can show off its chops.

"It's been really big for us," said Shapiro.

How big? Bwog.com's page views, usually around 4,500 daily, skyrocketed to more than 100,000 over the course of two days, said Shapiro, and more than 1,300 comments have been registered on the half-dozen Operation Ivy League items Bwog has produced so far. (More than 400 were left on Bwog's initial piece, which was updated throughout the day Tuesday; on a normal Tuesday, 10 or 20 comments would seem like a lot.) And there have been micro-scoops, too -- Bwog was the first to report that two of the accused had been released on bail, Shapiro said. Meanwhile, Bwog's coverage has been picked up by Gawker, Daily Intel, Gothamist and others, and the staff has been approached by the New York Times and the New York Post for comment.

"It's the most-read stuff we've ever had," said Shapiro.

Columbia's daily student newspaper, The Spectator, has been similarly inundated as a result of the scandal. Twelve reporters have produced as many items since news of the drug bust erupted. (Professional bloggers might scoff at that level of output, but remember that these are busy college kids!) Its coverage ranges from an online slideshow of NYPD Narcotics Unit photos to a deeply reported next-day cover story. Like Bwog, the paper's reporting has been picked up by Gawker and Gothamist, as well as Huffington Post and Ivy Gate. Web traffic has spiked to more than 50,000 daily page views, and The Spectator broke news Wednesday night that the three fraternities involved had been placed on suspension, said Ben Cotton, the paper's editor-in-chief.

"It's a challenge," said Cotton, a 21-year-old senior. "When something like this happens and national media rushes in, they have a tendency to play into the Ivy League stereotype, or the Columbia stereotype. You'll see reporters on campus, sort of just running around trying to grab random students. But they don't have the same level of knowledge about the campus and what's going on here. That's understandable, but that means that we feel an extra responsibility to get it right."

A university spokesman declined to comment on the media coverage of Operation Ivy League.

But Sree Sreenivasan, dean of student affairs at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism -- some of whose students also reported on the drug bust, at least in practice -- said the mainstream media now has better access into the lives of college students than ever before, even when reporting far from campus.

"For decades, student journalists on campuses all over the country have been front-line reporters on stories that draw national and international attention," said Sreenivasan, in an email. "New technologies have served to make the pace, scope and reach of such stories infinitely greater. At the same time, as regular students use social networking and other tools in a more open --- and less thoughtful -- manner, things that used to stay on campus no longer do and it's easier for all kinds of media outlets to cover them from far away."

Indeed, all kinds of media outlets were still covering Operation Ivy League as of Thursday afternoon. The New York Post had picked up on the fraternity suspensions. The Daily News was reporting that one of the accused had remarked from jail that the whole affair had "been blown up to the umpteenth." Gothamist was offering a "Photo Tour of the Columbia University Drug Dens."

And Shapiro was sitting in a Civil War and Reconstruction class thinking about what Bwog's next items would consist of.

"We're basically focusing on where these kids are going to be the next few days. Also on the fate of Greek Life at Columbia," she wrote in an email. "We'll have coverage for a while."

(Photo of NY1 news truck outside Columbia University on Tuesday courtesy of Bwog.com)