Pulp Interviews: Bloom, 2021 Honi Soit Editors
By Jossie Warnant
Bloom, the provisionally elected 2021 Honi Soit editorial team, came to power in an uncontested election, devoid of the usual drama that has followed Honi elections in previous years.
The team will consist of Shania O’Brien, Vivienne Guo, Claire Ollivain, Jeffrey Khoo, Deaundre Espejo, Marlow Hurst, Juliette Marchant, Max Shanahan, Alice Trenoweth-Cresswell and Will Solomon, who have all written for the paper.
Bloom’s vision for 2021 consists of broadening both the Honi Soit readership and contributors and emphasising visual and cultural elements. They plan to expand the readership of the paper by “getting it in people's faces”, says Max Shanahan.
Shanahan says that Bloom will not simply rely on students to passively pick up the paper but will work to raise student awareness of Honi Soit. This will be achieved by lecture bashing, placing Honi stands in different areas on campus and attempting to reach students that would otherwise not read the paper. Whilst broadening reach and readership of the paper is a common goal of Honi editorial tickets, the strategies provided to achieve this goal do not offer any particularly innovative methods to successfully reach groups who have consistently remained disinterested in the publication.
The ticket also wants to broaden the number of contributors and ensure that they are from diverse academic backgrounds.
“We're hoping to get a number of more international students involved and people that have potentially more diverse perspectives than those that are already writing,” says Juliette Marchant.
They plan to reach out to new networks directly through clubs and societies, a strategy that could have more success than simply lecture bashing.
The team is keen to increase multimedia content, specifically on Instagram, but don’t plan on committing to a regular schedule of video or audio content, saying that “it's more a case of using those sort of forms when it's appropriate.” This is a marked difference from tickets in past years, such as Fit who campaigned to reintroduce the Honi podcast.
Bloom plans to continue the “news legacy that Fit has left” but wants to emphasise visual and cultural elements moving forward.
“We acknowledge that not everyone on campus wants to read news or wants to read stupol stuff,” says Marchant.
In terms of their news coverage, Marchant says that they will be “slightly more politically progressive paper” and that they will work to write stories that may not be published in mainstream media.
The team also wants to focus on investigative journalism, listing their experience in covering issues such as fascism on campus, fossil fuel ties, casual job cuts and campus protests. They are keen to upskill writers and provide them with writing workshops to develop skills in investigative reporting.
While some of the finer details of Bloom’s plans for their 2021 editorial term are yet to be fleshed out, the team is highly experienced and are likely to take the paper in a similar direction to its previous editorial team.