The Harvard Voice launches

I am a few days late on this review, but being home in New Jersey had the Thursday launch of The Harvard Voice, the new student multimedia publication at Harvard University, slip my mind.

My first reaction to the new Web site and subsequent publication is, Wow. I love the colors and the sleek design of the print version (I am making my observations based of the .pdf, which is available for download through the Web site). I am particularly impressed with the photography (I assume it's by Laurel Tainsh, who is listed as the photographer, but the individual photographs aren't attributed.) and the design, especially of the lead feature story with four page inside spread. I also like the used of the "I-button" as a device throughout the print publication to clue readers into the interactive features available on the Web site.

But the real gem of this new publication is its online version. Rife with photos, video content, comment and rating features, the potential for user created content and RSS news aggregators, the Web site is looking good.

The individual stories like this "investigative feature," Transfer Students Debacle: Without Even Taking A Look, Harvard Is Saying 'No', are easy to read on the site and I love seeing the video embedded in the story. HRTV and The Voice partnered to create this students man-on-the-street package about Harvard halting its acceptance of transfer students.

The video is a little rough and could have benefited from some more interviews and some more polished editing, but it is a great start.

I think some of the highlights of the Web site are the "Photos of the Week" section on the front page, which features some of the best photographs including some taken with the handy iPhone. The "Voices" section has some of the strongest and most interesting writing and is made up of columns and blog posts from the various contributors to the site. I found the note from Publisher Steven Duque particularly inspiring, Publisher's Notes: Making it heard: We've only just begun. The registration for the site is also appropriately simple.

This is just the beginning of The Voice and I hope to see it continue to grow and expand its content and the different platforms for how to present information. I'd love to see more video, maybe even a weekly round-up of the top news stories and more feature, package videos to accompany stories. Story tagging also needs some improvement, for example the Transfer feature was only tagged "stories." When more content is being added to the site, more specific tagging is going to be crucial. I also don't see a search feature available, which will also be important as more content is published online.



The home page (above) is the one area that I see needs the most work as far as cleaning it up. Currently it feels too busy, with headlines often repeating themselves in several areas. The set-up for the feature article is a bit confusing because the headline is under the photograph, and the font of the latest story headlines is proportionally too small. I'd rather see less stories featured more predominately in that area. The automatic playing of the video also gets a little annoying if you are jumping around the site.

But really I am just nitpicking. If you have your own opinion of the new Harvard Voice share that in my comments or by clicking here.