Alli Katz is the editor-in-chief for The Grape, Oberlin’s alternative student newspaper. She is a College junior majoring in politics.

First off, can you give us any background on the history of The Grape? Who created it? How did it come into being?

Way back in 1998, John Byrne and Jesse Kanson-Benanav decided to start a paper. Byrne, who also spent some time as Review editor-in-chief, named it after his high school paper, the Concord Grape. We were originally founded to cover campus and world news, but also to place an emphasis on student opinion. The rather eclectic group of writers the paper ended up attracting influenced its evolution, creating the wonderful publication we have today. John and Jesse went on to found TheRawStory.com. Other former editors have gone on to lucrative careers in the food service industry. I like to look at it as a training ground for future elite.

How and why did you first get involved in writing for The Grape? What excited and interested you about it?

Freshman year, my pal Dre convinced me to go to the open house. They gave me beer, so I figured they must be good to work for. I proceeded to draw a single comic and write no articles my first semester, so they promoted me to arts editor. During my tenure as arts editor, my band played at a number of parties sponsored by one of the former editors-in-chief. I think we helped the house turn a profit (occasionally), so I got a promotion. I’m what you’d call a real go-getter.

The Grape has a reputation for sometimes being a little controversial. Has any article ever gotten you into particular trouble?

Except for the time that a former editor-in-chief was almost fired for being a liability because of naked photos we printed of him, we haven’t had much trouble with the administration. Stuff on campus with individuals and groups is an entirely different matter — we’ve crossed the line a couple of times, and some of the articles we’ve printed have pissed off some, or a lot of, people. An amazing amount of people were mad at us when we printed a negative review of a student play. I thought that was pretty surprising — I generally assume people are grown up enough to take criticism with a grain of salt. Oh, and there was that time that someone wrote in to tell us that we had miscategorized a drug dealer — he handled crack, not coke. There’s always talk that The Grape and the Review appeal to completely separate audiences. 

Do you think that’s the case, or is it more that both publications respond to different sentiments and serve different purposes?

Most students pick up copies of both papers and while some may have a preference overall, both provide the campus with different kinds of information. For instance, when Janie wants to find out the budget allocation for Concert Board next semester, she reads the Review. When she wants to know about Gil Mantera’s favorite mixed beverage she looks to The Grape. It’s not always quite that exclusive; we’ve printed some serious in-depth features and the Review occasionally prints an interesting concert review.

Finally, who was the mastermind behind the Grape’s expose on the “substance abuse problem” of our former editor-in-chief, Douglass Dowty? 

“Mastermind” is such a horrible word. It was a news story like any other news story — there was a scoop, information was exchanged, the article was written. I’ll just say that I trusted my sources to be honest since I believed them to have the utmost journalistic integrity. We’ll leave it at that.—