About Us

The Independent Florida Alligator is an award-winning, student-run newspaper covering the University of Florida and the greater Gainesville area. Its daily reporting covers news, sports, art and culture, investigations and a Spanish-language section, El Caimán. It is the largest student-run newspaper in the United States, with a daily circulation of 14,000 and a readership of more than 21,000. About 100 students from the University of Florida and Santa Fe College serve on The Alligator's staff each semester. The Alligator prints on a weekly basis, with free copies distributed every Monday to newsracks on campus and around Gainesville.

Founded in 1906 as The University News, The Alligator has been financially and editorially independent from UF since 1973. Its alumni include multiple Pulitzer Prize winners and journalists in newsrooms across the nation, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, POLITICO, Miami Herald, Tampa Bay Times, Orlando Sentinel, Sun Sentinel and more. Alligator alumni have also gone on to be professors, photojournalists, executives, business owners, attorneys, authors, educators and public servants. In 2025, The Alligator became the first student newspaper to receive the Al Neuharth Award for Excellence in the Media. Its work has also been recognized by the Associated Collegiate Press, the Society for Professional Journalists, the Hearst Journalism Awards Program and Press Forward.

The Alligator is owned by Campus Communications Inc., a 501(c)3 nonprofit funded through donations and advertising. See our board of directors.

How you can get involved

The Alligator hires a new staff for each semester at the end of the preceding one. Our staff is composed of editors, reporters, photographers, videographers, graphic and data designers, game designers, web developers, social media content creators and copy editors. To read about staff positions and the application process, check out our most recent hiring call here.

To submit a news article as a contributing writer, see our section on submitting a story below.

To submit an op-ed or letter to the editor, click here.

Advertising Representative or Intern

If you're looking for real-world experience in selling advertising, developing relationships with customers, laying out ads, working on digital promotion, or social media management, consider applying for an advertising rep or internship position in The Alligator's advertising department. The advertising department is critical to The Alligator because the paper runs solely on ad revenue.

We ask that you make a two-semester commitment if you decide to apply for an internship in advertising. Working between eight and 15 hours a week, reps and interns attend training sessions. Interns are paired with a sales representative to learn the basics of Alligator advertising for a semester. With this preparation, interns may go on to become paid sales representatives.

Email your interest to the Advertising Department: advertising@alligator.org.

Submitting a Story

Interested in publishing your news article with The Alligator as a contributing writer? Pitch your story ideas to our senior news director at pthai@alligator.org. Want to pick up stories our staff doesn't have time to cover? Join our contributing writers list for (semi-)weekly emails of pitches you can take on.

Communication is key! If circumstances change, if you're abandoning a story or if you need more support while reporting and writing, let the senior news director know. We're here to help you grow as a reporter. We can’t do that if we don't know what's going on.

You'll get more detailed instructions and guidelines once your pitch is accepted, but here's some starting tips to keep in mind:

Pitch your story as early as possible. Not the day you go out to report, not when you've already written the article and not during finals week as a last resort for extra credit. As soon as you've thought of a story, pitch it and mention any time constraints. If you pitch too late, we can't help you effectively report or get multimedia. The story may also lose timeliness if we aren't expecting it and don't budget time for editing. That can doom an otherwise great article.
Include a newsworthy angle for your story. Remember the factors of newsworthiness: impact, timeliness, prominence, proximity, conflict, weirdness and human interest. We write primarily for UF students, but our audience also includes the wider Gainesville area community. If a topic has already been covered by The Alligator, what makes your coverage of it different? Why would this story be interesting to our readership? Convince us.
Include potential sources — the more specific, the better. All stories need at least three human sources, and press releases don't count as a human source. Be mindful of conflicts of interest; you can't interview your relatives, friends, fraternity brothers/sorority sisters, coworkers, etc. Interviews must be held in person or over the phone, not via text or email (with rare exceptions), and they must be recorded with the source's consent and identifying information.
Include ideas for multimedia. All stories need to have a multimedia element, whether that's a photo, video, graphic or data visualization. What do you envision for your article's multimedia? Is there an event or location a photographer should attend?
We write and edit with Google Docs. Don't share your story as a Word doc or PDF, as you won't get notifications about edits if we convert it to a Google Doc for you. Include a headline, subhead and your contact information (email, phone number, Twitter/X handle if applicable) at the top of the doc.
The editing process. Before it's published, your story will be edited two to three times by the senior news director, once by each of our three managing editors and once by a copy editor for fact-checking and style. Read edits carefully as you accept them, and ask questions if you have them. Address edits promptly; time-sensitive stories may need to be fully edited just hours after an event.