Most people love to give back to their alma maters. But few people get to do it on the front page of a big-time New York broadsheet. Seth Mnookin, who like much of the Sun spent his college years hanging around Harvard Square, pens today's upper-left hand piece about a shuttered bus service between Manhattan and Harvard Law School. The story, in fact, is nothing less than a shout out to the Harvard Crimson, previous home to ME Ira Stoll and writer Rachel Kovner; "Bus Regulators Grounding Low-Cost Line to Harvard," is a rehash of a story that ran in yesterday's Crimson. The Sun gives credit to the Crimson; on the other hand, it doesn't give much added meat to the story. Writer Seth Mnookin quotes the same people as the Crimson, save a man-on-the-street comment from a guy whose girlfriend is a grad student at Harvard. Where's the New York angle? How many people actually used this service, let alone care? Numbers man, numbers!

In fact, the Crimson's version is better than the Sun's — writer Peter Hopkins discusses the regulatory process and the hurdles the companies face in getting back in business. Mnookin spends so much time smokescreening the fact that this story has zero relevance to New York that he misses what is really interesting about it. May Smarternysun suggest that Seth and Ira start scouting Mr. Hopkins for next year's Ivy-League journalism draft? If it works anything like a sports league, the Sun will have first dibs.

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Smarternysun realizes that when you're only running 12 pages, ad space has got to be at a premium. But we wonder why, given the Sun's big business backing, it can't muster up more and better advertising than it usually runs. Today's paper contains, outside of a half-page of classifieds, one full-page ad from the Wall Street Journal (kudos), a half-page ad for the Sun (doesn't count), two 1/9-page ads for a rental management firm and a varicose vein clinic (eeewww) and a 1/6-page (or so) ad for the web-host Treespan. But this last one doesn't count either, because Treespan just happens to be the Sun's host. Where's the cash? We hope the Sun is reeling in the subscriptions, because if they keep at it, ad revenue alone won't keep this puppy afloat.

WIRE WATCH: An entire front page, full of Sun originals. Cool beans. But it's a Potemkin village, because inside sit 22 wire stories. That means the Sun's news efforts count for less than 20 percent of the total coverage. Couldn't Seth and Ira have passed on the cute little Sun display stands and hired an extra reporter? Or do they think there just isn't enough news in the city to justify more than five original articles a day?