By the Editors ’19 

The Questions with Seniors video series is undoubtedly one of Gryphon Gazette’s most popular features. Published weekly, our Vogue-style interviews are filmed on one-take rambles across the upper school campus. Asking the interviewee one question per member of the senior grade, our editors uncover that student’s talents and quirks in an organic, minimally-processed manner.

As Crystal’s most active news source, Gryphon Gazette is committed to modeling school values of inclusion and diversity. We strive to ensure our material is accessible and enjoyable for all members of the Crystal community and beyond. In fact, our past interviews emphasize viewer engagement: modeled after Vogue, they are often satirical or oriented towards the interests of the interviewee. This 1) highlights our seniors’ authentic voices, 2) maintains a consistent theme throughout, and 3) incorporates humor and pop culture references, allowing our teenage target audience to relate to our interviewees. Our questions are selected by both our editors and our interviewees, and we feel their scope strikes a balance between monotony and randomness. Although we do screen interviewee responses before filming, we avoid censoring or adjusting their words.

However, we have recently received feedback that our published segments have portrayed students as shallow, showy, or the wrong impression of what a Crystal student should be.  We sincerely apologize for offending anyone with our segments—this was not at all our intention. Going forward we will produce our series with greater sensitivity and attention to possibly alienating topics. Nonetheless, we never meant to show “what a Crystal student should be,” nor to handle weighty intellectual topics—one task is impossible and the other well-addressed by our written articles. In our Questions with Seniors series, we hope only to spotlight, in an entertaining and lighthearted manner, some of the characters who keep Crystal vibrant. Thus, going forward, we hope to portray Crystal seniors as authentically as possible. They are not saints or ideals to be emulated, but role models in their own way—human, flawed, idiosyncratic, and brilliantly individual.

Finally, we encourage all viewers—Crystal student, parent, faculty member or otherwise—to directly contact Gryphon Gazette if they have objections to any feature, not just our Questions with Seniors series. We can be reached through our comments (leave one below!), by email at gryphongazette@crystal.csus.org, or through the feedback form under the Contact tab on our site menu.

Sincerely,

Amy Zhang, Sarina Deb, and Ella Rehman(Your Editors)