If you are an avid reader of the Navigator, you may know of our “quizzes” section. The staff’s newest and most favorite quiz, created by Georgia Biever ‘26, is the “Which Newman Administrator Are You?” quiz. While compiling articles, quizzes, and games for the upcoming fall semester print edition of the Navigator, technology coordinator Nick Rezza ‘25 came across an interesting image on the quiz’s page. After a quick check, it was confirmed that the logo was present on all of the website’s pages with a quiz.
The image is the Navigator’s traditional logo, with the phrase underneath “It’s not copying if the founder used to teach at your school.” Given that no one on the Navigator’s current staff was present when the website was created and the logo was added, we were all oblivious to its cryptic meaning. Therefore, it was time to put my internet sleuthing skills to the test, and by internet sleuthing, I mean inputting one or two search terms into Google and letting the algorithm do the hard work for me.
The striking similarity of the “Quizzes” part of the logo and Buzzfeed’s logo was my first hint to this image’s mysterious origin.
As you can see, the red and white arrow portion of both logos seem extremely similar. Infact, the only difference is that the arrow is flipped upside down on the Navigator logo from its orientation on the Buzzfeed logo.
Therefore, the first word of my extremely complex search phrase was “Buzzfeed”. Pulling in the text at the bottom of the logo, my second search term was “founder”.
The phrase “Buzzfeed founder” resulted in thousands of hits, the top being a Wikipedia page on Jonah Peretti. To confirm my suspicions, I searched “Jonah Peretti Isidore Newman School” to determine if the founder of the famous media company used to work at Newman. In fact, the first result, an article from nola.com, verified that Jonah Peretti’s first job was as a computer science teacher at Isidore Newman school.
We spoke to Mr. Malis, Ms. O’Brien, and Mrs. Nicholson about Jonah. Mr. Malis started teaching at Newman around the same time as him, Ms. O’Brien was in Mr. Peretti’s computer class, and Mrs. Nicholson remembered his lecture in 2015. While Mr. Malis and Ms. O’Brien did not remember Jonah well, Mrs. Nicholson had a vivid memory of his 2015 Bernard Hirsch Hermann memorial lecture.
In addition, we interviewed Mr. Smith about Jonah. During the time Jonah taught Computer Science at Newman, Mr. Smith was the Chair of the Computer Science Department. Mr. Smith commented that while Jonah did not have much experience, he was a phenomenal teacher and students loved his class. He transmuted his love for technology unto his students. Mr. Smith also described Mr. Peretti as creative, talented, charismatic, and personable. According to Mr. Smith, Mr. Peretti loved the essence and creativity of New Orleans.
When Jonah Peretti founded Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post, he was on the cutting edge of a huge shift in journalism. At the time, many people were comparing Buzzfeed to publications like the New York Times, and there was a debate about whether journalists should publish for clicks or for importance and value. This was a major topic of Jonah’s 2015 lecture at Newman.
Will the Navigator unearth any more secrets about Newman’s history? Check the website weekly and read our new articles to find out!
If you would like to learn more about Jonah Peretti and his history teaching at Newman, see the following sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah_Peretti
However interesting the logo may be, we would like to include a disclaimer on behalf of the Navigator staff that all content published on the Navigator is student-created and none of our content, including our quizzes, is copied from external media sources.
