Three weeks ago, Harvard junior Zachary Seward got kicked out of school for a year; his gig covering President Larry Summers for the Harvard Crimson had so occupied him that he failed a class. Last Tuesday, his obsessiveness stopped looking so self-destructive when he co-wrote the Wall Street Journal story breaking news of Summers’s impending resignation. Seward says that he’d been working “40 to 50 hours a week” on the Summers beat, experience that made him the go-to stringer for the Journal’s temporarily short-staffed Boston bureau last week (he’d already landed a Journal summer internship). Three days later, he and co-writer Dan Golden nailed down the story, beating out the Times, the Boston Globe—and his Crimson pals. Seward, whose suspension forced him to quit after only two weeks as Crimson managing editor, said he didn’t feel very guilty competing with his ex-colleagues: “Isn’t the media a big Ivy League reunion anyway?”

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