I’ve spent 3 years being a part of The Gryphon and benefitting from the wonderful opportunities it provides for contributors and would love the chance to give back to the community.

By serving as a writer, photographer, Music editor, and Head of Marketing, I’ve gained a broad understanding of all aspects of The Gryphon and appreciate the importance of everyone’s role in delivering a newspaper that holds our university to account and reflects the diverse interests that exist amongst our readership. I want to continue this legacy and improve it to further boost the newspaper’s popularity.

I firstly want to increase the overall diversity amongst our team, but specifically focus on working-class and international students. These students make up an increasing proportion of our student body, so it’s vital The Gryphon reflects this in its content, whether that be bringing alternative perspectives to our coverage or raising issues that may otherwise go amiss.

Although The Gryphon’s role in the market is to highlight university-specific and local news, the increasingly globalized nature of our society can’t be avoided and necessitates us to be mindful of issues affecting our international students. This includes full-time international and exchange students, as well as those who have lived abroad prior to university or have been brought up experiencing more than one culture.

Secondly, I want our contributors to have better training opportunities, regardless of how they wish to be involved in The Gryphon. I, therefore, would train our editors to run section-specific workshops for written content, whilst also holding photography, illustration, design, and social media workshops. These would be held at the start of each semester and will include PDF guides to take home.

I would also ask our editors to run drop-in feedback sessions, for students to gain feedback on their work. This training will be optimized for both print and how to tailor content for an online audience. Thirdly, I propose that we improve our digital strategy to be more engaging and beat our competitors.

Rather than just using social media to promote existing content, I argue that we should be using Facebook and Instagram Lives to report directly from the scene of sports matches, protests, and strikes. As begun during my time as Music Editor, I believe that we should increase in-house photography across all sections and additionally increase our production of original illustrations.

We can reach out to our art & design departments and Leeds Arts University to showcase the creative talents of Leeds. Additionally, we should increase our social media and digital team to increase the effort we put into this point of my manifesto.

Finally, our beloved paper cannot exist without its vital funds. Our current team has only three people working on our finances, advertising, and marketing- this is not enough for such a huge responsibility. Here is a valuable opportunity from our world-class business school to improve their financial and marketing skills with The Gryphon, working to increase online advertising and create a complete marketing plan.

I am the only candidate who has studied Journalism at Leeds. I have 4 years of skills development and industry knowledge that I can use to bring The Gryphon up-to-date with our competitors and stay relevant to its audience.

Through the university’s brilliant study abroad opportunities I’ve met countless people from many backgrounds different to my own and learned the valuable perspectives they have. From this and my experience as a subwarden, I’ve become good at communicating with and relating to the experiences of students from a wide range of backgrounds.

I want to use this to foster an open, friendly environment for our contributors, where students can feel free to try out the many different aspects on offer in print and online journalism.

As the first person in my family to attend University, I understand that The Gryphon can feel daunting to join and have experienced imposter syndrome back when I was a Fresher. I want all students to feel comfortable to approach us with stories and to get involved with the paper. Essentially, I believe I have the industry knowledge, communication skills, leadership qualities, and dedication to get the job done, and to do it well.