Education Week - August 5, 2015 - 14

Line Between News and Advocacy
Could Blur for Some Online Sites
By Mark Walsh
While many of the new generation of online sites dedicating resources to education reporting are bona fide news
operations, others arguably blur the line between news
and advocacy.
One of the newest, The Seventy Four, co-founded by former CNN anchor Campbell Brown, immediately stoked
that debate, in part because Ms. Brown is already a bit
of a lightning rod for her backing of legal efforts to end
teacher tenure in New York state.
When The Seventy Four (named for the country's
74 million children under the age of 18) was launched in
July, Ms. Brown wrote an essay arguing that advocacy
and straight-news journalism are not incompatible.
"I have learned that not every story has two sides," Ms.
Brown said in the essay. "We will fiercely challenge those
forces within the education establishment who impede
innovation in our schools and who protect and defend inequality and institutional failure."
In an interview, Ms. Brown said she views The Seventy Four as a news site, with a handful of young reporters writing news and features, while opinion has
its own section.
"This isn't a vanity project," said Ms. Brown, who is the
editor-in-chief of The Seventy Four. "I think what people
need to do is separate me from the news site."
LynNell Hancock, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, said the site must
prove itself as an independent, unbiased news organization.
Ms. Brown's "own well-financed advocacy work so far
has been narrowly focused more or less around a single
issue-dismantling contract protections for teachers,"
Ms. Hancock said. "It's natural to expect this venture will
be used to promote her views. So we'll all be reading with
interest to see if the coverage here will rise above."

Writing With a 'Bit of Glee'
Some sites are offshoots of policy organizations.
The liberal Center for American Progress is behind
ThinkProgress, which has an education reporter writing about the reauthorization of the main federal K-12
education law and other topics, from a decidedly progressive perspective.
On the political right, meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation has The Daily Signal, with news and commentary
pieces that also highlight education topics.
The Daily Caller, a news site widely read by conservatives, is harder to place.
The site was founded in 2010 by the commentator
Tucker Carlson. Eric Owens, the site's education editor,
said he strives for a mix of stories that includes "serious
reporting, outrage reporting, and fun reporting."
"I like writing with a little bit of glee," said Mr. Owens,
who previously worked as a writer for the test-prep organization Princeton Review. He scours local education news
outlets for stories that can be rewritten with that sense of
outrage or irony, the target frequently being what progres-

sives are doing in public schools and higher education.
"I feel like writing without a perspective is pointless," he
said. "I feel a lot of [education journalism] is really boring
and not fun to read."

Heavyweight Opinions
At least one prominent new education site has positioned itself as a place for opinion.
Last fall, Peter Cunningham, a former communications chief for U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan,
launched Education Post, chiefly a commentary site that
favors school choice and rigorous education standards,
among other policy measures.
"I think what we're seeing is more and more competition to define the narrative," Mr. Cunningham said.
His site doesn't claim to be a news organization, only to
promote "better conversation, better education."
Among the features is the Red Pen Page, where Mr.
Cunningham and others take aim at "myths and falsehoods" in news stories and other platforms. Their "corrections" are made to look as if they were written in the
margins with a red pen.
"For better or worse, all this attention is going to make
education more relevant in the civic debate, and that's
good in a lot of ways," Mr. Cunningham said.
The Seventy Four, Ms. Brown's site, is also aiming to
elevate education as a national topic, specifically in the
2016 presidential race.
The site has announced plans to co-sponsor presidential-candidate forums in New Hampshire and Iowa on
K-12 policy. The first event, set for Aug. 19 in New Hampshire, quickly gained commitments to speak from several
Republican candidates, including former Gov. Jeb Bush of
Florida and Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin.
Ms. Brown thinks this coming election is ripe for a
higher profile for education because of such factors as the
debate over the Common Core State Standards and the
education records of some candidates.
Meanwhile, Ms. Brown hopes to bring her extensive
television experience to bear on the site in the form of
greater use of video.
"Video works really well for stories about education because the issue has such a human face," she said.

Education Journalism
Gains Increased Profile
In Digital-Media World
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

sociation that publishes the Kappan
magazine and the annual PDK/Gallup
Poll on education.

Disruption Yields New Titles
The "digital disruption" of the news
business-which involves huge financial challenges for "legacy" news
organizations but also an explosion of
online outlets-has so far "been pretty
good for education reporting," said
LynNell Hancock, a professor at the
Columbia University Graduate School
of Journalism.
"There are far more places now that
are doing serious, long-form education
reporting," said Ms. Hancock, who directs the Spencer Fellowship Program
for midcareer education journalists
and who covered education for News-

There are far more
places now that are
doing serious, longform education
reporting."
LYNELL HANCOCK
Columbia University Graduate
School of Journalism

True Independence?
Some observers believe it is easy enough to tell where
some of the new education sites are coming from, but others watching the trend are more troubled.
"The question is where do you draw the line between
an independent news organization and an advocacy site?"
said Caroline Hendrie, the executive director of the Education Writers Association and a former editor for Education Week. The group has strict rules for granting full
membership to bona fide journalists; it offers an auxiliary
form of membership for advocates and public relations
professionals.
"What constitutes true independence?" Ms. Hendrie
said. "News consumers can be forgiven for being confused."

week. "And there are more places for
reporters to do this kind of work than
ever before."
The new sites are diverse in scope
as well as in business model or funding status. While several are for-profit
ventures or part of larger companies,
many are nonprofits supported by
various philanthropies.
In addition to all the titles on
Mr. Starr's daily reading list, the new
online outlets include such educationspecific ones as Chalkbeat, which

Chalkbeat's Model Extends Local Ed. News Via Web
By Mark Walsh
Two years ago, Scott Elliott was an
education reporter at The Indianapolis Star, where he focused on education
improvement at the state policy level
as well as in local schools. But he had
become dispirited by trends buffeting
the newspaper industry, including
newsroom layoffs and belt-tightening
for those able to keep their jobs.
"Newspapers have become a pretty
difficult place to work," said Mr. Elliott. "When things have to be cut back
all the time, there is less and less focus
on a specialty beat like education."

He began a conversation with
Elizabeth Green, the New York
City-based founder of an online
news site called GothamSchools,
which by 2013 was expanding into
a multi-city network under a new
identity-Chalkbeat.
In New York, the nonprofit Chalkbeat scraps with any number of oldschool competitors (including three
daily newspapers and a public radio
station with an education-focused
blog), as well as one major online
competitor, Capital Education,
which is owned by Politico.
Chalkbeat had also merged with a

14 | EDUCATION WEEK | August 5, 2015 | www.edweek.org

site in Denver called EdNews Colorado and was building bureaus from
scratch in Memphis and Indianapolis.

New Wrinkle
Such local online education sites are
the next-generation iterations of education-specific print publications that
have been around in years in a few cities, such as Catalyst Chicago and The
Philadelphia Public School Notebook.
Other local online sites include LA
School Report, which has no shortage of meaty stories to report about
the Los Angeles school system, and

Idaho Education News.
Mr. Elliott weighed a job offer to
take over the new Chalkbeat Indiana site. A key concern for the now47-year-old father of three was not
only leaving an established news
organization for what is essentially
an Internet startup, but whether
Chalkbeat would be a place he could
spend 20 more years or so in his career and then retire.
"She convinced me," he said of
Ms. Green.
Ms. Green said in an interview that
Mr. Elliott brought the right level
of talent and experience to head up

has bureaus covering state and local
education news in New York state,
Tennessee, Indiana, and Colorado; LA
School Report, which covers the Los
Angeles district; and IdahoEdNews, a
new effort covering school matters in
that state.
Some of the newest educationfocused sites include Bright, a more
feature-oriented outlet; and The
Seventy Four, co-founded by the
former NBC News and CNN anchor
Campbell Brown. That site, whose
name refers to the 74 million U.S.
children under age 18, builds on Ms.
Brown's more ideologically tinged
efforts to challenge teacher tenure
in New York state.
"I read the headlines and the daily
stories from any of the education sites
out there, and I want to go deeper,"
Ms. Brown said in an interview.
Meanwhile, general sites devoting
resources to education-some new,
some launched in recent years-include ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative news site; Vox, which specializes in explanatory journalism; and
FiveThirtyEight, a numbers- and
data-oriented site.
Some general sites that regularly
cover education are viewed as quasijournalistic outlets or ones with a particular ideological bent, such as The
Daily Caller, a conservative-leaning
news site; ThinkProgress, a site affiliated with the liberal Center for American Progress; and The Daily Signal,
a site launched by the conservative
Heritage Foundation.
The so-called legacy media-general newspapers, magazines, and
broadcast outlets-have had Web versions for many years, and a few major
news organizations have recently
added education-focused sites. Among
them are the education "channel" of
The Atlantic magazine's website and
NPR Ed, a website from National
Public Radio. Education Week, which
began publishing a weekly print edition in 1981, launched edweek.org in
1996.
Also jostling for spots on the landscape are innumerable blogs, some

one of Chalkbeat's first two expansion sites two years ago. (The other
brand-new site was Memphis, while
the existing sites in Denver and New
York City also took on the Chalkbeat
brand.)

Tracking 'Change Efforts'
"We want to be on the ground in
places where there are a lot of interesting educational change efforts,"
Ms. Green said, and Indianapolis and
Memphis fit the bill. For now, the nonprofit organization, which is backed by
a broad array of philanthropic donors,
is focusing on the four sites, but it
hopes to expand in the future.
After establishing the Chalkbeat
Indiana bureau, the next job for

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Education Week - August 5, 2015

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