Newsworthiness versus Schools
The Casey Lartigue Show! does Seoul: Is Our Education Reporters Learning?.
With everybody out on break, it’s a slow time in education land, but the above post raises a good question in my mind. If you aren’t in the teaching business, what kinds of education stories (if any) would you want to see reported on in the media? Sure, there’s plenty of budget issues, sports reporting, and the occasional feel good story, but does the public WANT to know what goes on in schools. I posted the following on the above site:
I suppose the next question is: What do we want them[journalists] to be covering. As a teacher, I feel that there are issues and occurrences in a school that could be newsworthy that aren’t covered….. while I understand a journalist’s mistrust [from being invited] I have to think that some of them would simply be curious about exactly what goes on in some of these schools. I think a series profiling the school climates of an inner city school, a middle-class school, and affluent school, and an inner city charter could provide great discussion.
4 Responses to 'Newsworthiness versus Schools'
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on December 20th, 2009 at 7:58 am
That’s a fine idea, but a “series” sounds too serious. In addition to points I’ve already made about readers not really being interested in such topics and reporters not showing up where they’ve been invited:
1) Been there, covered that: I’m sure every newspaper can cite such a series that has previously been done. It could have been 10 or 20 years ago, but if they’ve done such a series and anyone at the paper with institutional memory argues that no one read it then, either, then they won’t see the need to do another. Plus, haven’t there already been books done by researchers and reporters visiting schools? Overall, such books praise those schools while adding some caveats. Which leads back to the point about reporters not showing up where they’ve been invited.
2) Who’s gonna pay for it? In an age of declining revenues and subscribers, newspapers don’t seem to be that interested in a long series that take reporters off the daily beat.
3) Reverse the relationship: Educators need to understand reporters. How do newspapers make decisions about what to cover? That seems to be a mystery to educators (and, I’ll add, probably a lot of reporters, too). A lot of educators and researchers, including those at the Brookings discussion that got this conversation started, seem to think that reporters and newspapers write stories based on the public interest and what it is that people want or need to read. Seems to make sense to outsiders, but what do the people working for newspapers think about that as they are putting out a daily paper?
on December 20th, 2009 at 9:50 am
@Casey Lartigue, First off, thanks for visiting the blog.
I agree with you that educators need to make our daily work more reporter-friendly, but with the news industry on decline, I have to think that education has to fit somewhere in broader local news coverage. Frankly, I think the industry, especially the local newspapers, need to shake up what they are doing in these days. I’m less interested in picking up a newspaper and seeing what I can get on an Internet news aggregate website than original coverage of a “local” topic. Sure, i realize that there may not be enough readers like me, but this should be a place where newspapers are going to have to be more nimble.
In Tennessee, our four largest newspapers have combined much of their reporting this year allowing other reporters to be freed up to focus on different beats–shouldn’t education be in that conversation when they look for new investigative reporting? True, I may be alone here, but I know that where I live the “school” section of the local community weeklies is the widest-read section of these small papers and the larger papers have tried to imitate that in weekly community-targeted inserts. This shows me that there is a market for school news if it can be personalized enough. I can’t help but think that there are talented reporters who could make the “teaching” world real to the everyday person.
on December 31st, 2009 at 1:35 am
I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Alena
http://grantsforeducation.info
on December 31st, 2009 at 10:09 pm
@Alena: Thanks for visiting; glad to have you here. Feel free to comment anytime.