Can Alexander Heffner scoop the media jackpot?

He’s only 19, but Alexander Heffner’s online magazine Scoop44 could redefine the face of American journalism

LAST UPDATED 2:30 PM, MARCH 3, 2009

Is Alexander Heffner destined to be the man to reboot America's Fourth Estate? He is just 19 years old and a first-year undergraduate at Harvard, but he is already positioning himself as a sort of Walter Cronkite-meets-William-Randolph Hearst for his generation.

He crashed into the national media consciousness a year ago as the presidential elections began in earnest and he managed to parlay a school radio show and student newspaper into a web magazine called Scoop08.

Exclusively written by 18-to-25 year olds, its mission was to bring a new generation to politics just as those politics underwent a generational change of their own, and the genius of the idea lay in its timing. It became a national student online newspaper and caught the wave that carried Obama all the way to the White House.

Last time a Harvard student enterprise got this much attention it was Facebook

"It was a confluence of forces that culminated in Scoop's arrival on the national landscape," Heffner explains. "It was a result of the scope of the concerns facing the up-and-coming generation, and the advent of new technologies."

Quite. Heffner, who broadcasts The Political Arena with Alexander Heffner on Harvard's own radio station WHRB 95.3 every Sunday, as well as editing and running Scoop, really does talk like that. Just as he had the chutzpah to haul two former US senators and several eminent journalists onto Scoop08's advisory board.

Now he is reinventing Scoop08, the election blog, as Scoop44, a daily online magazine staking a permanent place in the new media of the blogosphere. The reception is rapturous: Heffner has written a manifesto currently running on The Huffington Post, the grandmother of American online magazines, and has been onscreen for CNN, CBS, C-Span, the BBC and even Fox.

Heffner has been named Young Person Who Rocks by CNN

The last time a Harvard student enterprise got this much attention it was called Facebook, and it changed the nature of 'social networking' while making its founders into potential billionaires. Can Scoop do the same for Heffner? Already he has been named a Young Person Who Rocks by CNN.

Whether or not he rocks, Heffner has preppy good looks and a terrific background at the heart of the Wasp establishment: the Phillips Academy boarding school, where he started Scoop at 17,

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I just had to laugh at this "This sounds new to the young because the American press lost its credibility by kowtowing to the Dubya Bush administration" The mainstream press in the USA is one of the most liberal/leftwing there is, the idea of them kowtowing to Bush is laughable. Why else is the MSM and Democrats trying to ressurect a fairness doctrine to limit talk radio. Its the only opposition to the liberal media in the US.

Posted by Gary O'Brien at 11:46am on March 3, 2009