Education Week - August 5, 2015 - 15

Aggregators and Social Media
While such titles may or may not
have earned a following in their
own right, changes in the way the
news is consumed are also altering
the picture.
Michael Lubelfeld, the superintendent of the 3,000-student
Deerfield district in suburban Chicago, also considers himself a news
junkie. While he has taken note of
some of the new online sites, those
sources and others tend to come
his way via news-aggregation sites.
Those sites include the ones offered by his professional groups,
such as AASA, the School Superintendents Association, which push
out daily collections of links to news
stories and other content of interest
to their members, as well as a few
independent aggregators.
"I think it is wonderful that the
aggregators are going through picking up the high points," said Mr.
Lubelfeld. "We can then dig deeper
if we choose to do so."
Andrew J. Rotherham, an education consultant and former aide to
President Bill Clinton, last year
helped found Real Clear Education, a sort of super-aggregator.
It aims to pick the top education
news and opinion articles, as well
as some original content, and is
published twice a day under the
umbrella of its older sibling, Real
Clear Politics.
An editor decides which news outlet has the best story on national
test scores on a given day, for example, versus "who just phoned it in,"
said Mr. Rotherham, who also writes
the Eduwonk blog.
"If you are in the media business,
it's good to get blasted around on ag-

Mr. Elliott was to convince The Indianapolis Star and other news outlets in the city that the new Chalkbeat Indiana bureau was not a pure
competitor, but that it wanted to
partner with them to more widely
disseminate good journalism about
education.
"We're not going after their advertisers, and we're not trying to get
their page views," Mr. Elliott said.
In April, Chalkbeat Indiana teamed
up with The Star and WFYI, the public
radio and TV broadcaster in Indianapolis, on an eight-part package of
stories about English-language learners. Mr. Elliott and other Chalkbeat
journalists wrote six of the stories,
while the newspaper and the public
broadcaster each wrote one. Each out-

gregation sites," he said. "The downside is that news consumers can just
look for news that confirms their
own interests and biases."
Mr. Lubelfeld of the Deerfield district said he seeks a wide range of
sources. And in another trend, he
isn't reading his daily diet of education news in print versions or even
while sitting at his desktop computer as often as before.
"I've become more prone to reading on the go, on a tablet or other
device," he said.
Few of the new Internet-based
outlets covering education have
bothered with old-fashioned, deadtree editions. They tend to have
versions optimized for the Web,
for tablets, and for mobile phones.
Those options point to another
trend: Instead of directing their
Web browsers to particular sites,
or relying on aggregators' pushing
out lists of stories, many news consumers are relying on social media.
Morgan Polikoff, a 30-year-old assistant professor of education at the University of Southern California, says he
gets most of his education news from
a particular social-media site, though
it isn't Facebook.
"My media diet is completely dictated by Twitter," Mr. Polikoff said.
"I don't have the time or interest to
scroll through a bunch of websites.
Pretty much if something appears in
my Twitter feed, that's how I find out
about it."
Education news can end up in a feed
on the popular micro-blogging site if
someone subscribes to a particular
news outlet or reporter, or if a story is
retweeted by a user. Mr. Polikoff is active in tweeting his own observations
and retweeting news articles and
other material.
"I think there is more quality
journalism about education than
when I started doing this a decade
ago," he said.

Local, Regional Focus
Mr. Polikoff has noticed the rise of
local or regionally focused education
sites. Among them are Chalkbeat's
four-state, four-bureau operation; LA
School Report, the site devoted to the
Los Angeles school system; and EdSource News, which covers education
throughout California.
EdSource was founded in 1977 as
a provider of research and analysis on education issues. Four years

let published all eight stories.
"After our series, the state legislature decided to double the amount of
funding for ELLs in the state," Mr. Elliott said. "That was a great example
of the power of collaboration."
Alvie Lindsay, the news and investigations director at The Star,
said that the newspaper's familiarity with Mr. Elliott meant "that we
know he's going to do great work
and that it's going to be up to the
standards that our readers expect."
Besides collaborating with Chalkbeat on larger projects like the
English-language-learner series,
Mr. Lindsay said, the newspaper
has even begun to pick up some
school board meeting coverage from
the online site.

ago, Louis Freedberg, a former San
Francisco Chronicle education reporter who also had experience
with several nonprofit journalism
organizations, launched EdSource
Today, a more journalistic effort to
cover education policy in the mostpopulous state.
Mr. Freedberg said an older generation of nonprofit news organizations,
such as the Pacific News Service and
the Center for Investigative Reporting, were seen as "islands of innovation" but also an "add on" to traditional news outlets.
"Some may have viewed them in a
condescending way, as not necessarily
central to news coverage," he said. But
with a sea change in the traditional
media that includes fewer reporters
and other resources, he added, "people
are now looking to nonprofit media to
cover things that the for-profit media
are no longer covering, and to do it in
an innovative way."

Is More Better?
The sprouting of so many online
education news sites raises an almost philosophical question: Is
more better?
That is, if more decent journalism about the schools is being produced-highlighting programs that
work or shining a light on problems-does that lead to improvement of the system?
"When it comes to education, I
believe, yes, more is better," said
Ms. Brown of The Seventy Four. "In
my view, there can't be enough good
coverage of this issue."
Alexander Russo, a blogger who
writes about school policy generally
in This Week in Education and media
coverage of education in particular in
The Grade, said that the growth of education journalism is probably leaving
some people overwhelmed.
While policy wonks and other
hard-core readers may be taking it
all in, "regular educators and parents can't spend all day hunting and
pecking through all these things,"
said Mr. Russo.
And Mr. Freedberg of EdSource
noted that the recent rise of online
education news sites has been counterweighted by the struggles and
downsizing of older media.
"Even if there ever was a golden
age of journalism," he said, "was
there ever really adequate coverage
of education?"

"That frees up our education reporter" to pursue enterprise stories,
he said. "We're not ceding our education coverage. We see this as an opportunity to augment our coverage."
Caitlin Hannon, an Indianapolis school board member, said that
Chalkbeat has brought a greater
level of nuance to coverage of policy
issues in the district and the state.
"The level of detail they are able
to provide is incredibly helpful
to me as a board member," said
Ms. Hannon, who also deals with
education policy in her full-time job,
as the executive director of Teach
Plus, a teacher-advocacy group.
"But they have told some pretty
tough stories, too, that aren't always
easy things to hear," she said."

RETWEET: A SAMPLER
OF EDUCATION NEWS ONLINE
A growing number of websites cover education,
including those focused primarily on school policy and
general sites devoting resources to the education beat.
Some are new, some are long-established, like Education Week's
edweek.org. Some strive for traditional journalistic objectivity,
others have an unvarnished point of view. The common
characteristic: These outlets deliver their content digitally.
Here's a sampler, presented in the style of the micro-blogging
site Twitter, which is a popular platform for online news.
(Note: We cheated a little on Twitter's 140-character limit
per "tweet" by not counting spaces.)
EDUCATION-SPECIFIC SITES
Bright @Medium
This site on the Medium platform offers colorful feature
stories, none too policy oriented, such as "I Spent Spring
Break Teaching Girls to Code."
Chalkbeat @Chalkbeat
GothamSchools in New York City merged with a Denver site
two years ago, then launched education news sites in Indiana
and Tennessee, all under the Chalkbeat banner.
EdCircuit @EdCircuit
Former cable news producer Donna Krache hopes
to use commentary and video on her site to advance
the education story.
Education Post @edu_post
This commentary site from Peter Cunningham, Arne Duncan's
former communications chief, backs accountability and aims
to advance the debate in a "nontoxic" way.
EdSource Today @EdSource
Founded in 1977 to conduct research on California
education issues, EdSource launched a journalism site four
years ago that claims the most ed reporters in the state.
The Hechinger Report @hechingerreport
This site grew out of the Hechinger Center on Education and
the Media at Columbia University. Partners with
@NBCNews, @educationweek, others.
Idaho Education News @idahoednews
If New York City and Los Angeles can have specialized
education news sites, why not Boise? This site launched two
years ago, and now has nine reporters!
LA School Report @LASchoolReport
Since 2012, this site has focused on politics and education
in Los Angeles. There is no shortage of either in the nation's
second-largest school district.
Politico Pro Education @POLITICOPro
Politico in 2013 launched a free morning newsletter on
education, with more detailed content available for a fee.
Its New York cousin is called Capital Education.
Real Clear Education @RealClearEd
News aggregator RealClearPolitics partnered with consultants
Bellwether Education Partners on a site with carefully selected
links to education stories.
The Seventy Four @The74
Activist and ex-CNN anchor Campbell Brown just launched
this well-funded education news site, whose only agenda,
she says, is to put children first.
This Week in Education @alexanderrusso
Blogger Alexander Russo now has twice the daily outlets
to provide his take on school trends and media coverage
of education. Besides TWIE, there's The Grade.
SOURCE: Education Week

EDUCATION WEEK | August 5, 2015 | www.edweek.org | 15

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by local teachers, others by such
prominent figures and players in
the field as the education historian
Diane Ravitch and the Thomas B.
Fordham Institute, with its Flypaper blog.
"We're seeing a shift from legacy
journalism to new-media journalism" in education coverage, said
Rebecca A. Goldstein, an education professor at Montclair State
University in New Jersey, who is
researching a book about media
coverage of education.
"I can't keep up with all of this," she
said. "There is kind of an information
overload."

http://www.edweek.org http://www.edweek.org

Education Week - August 5, 2015

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