education writers association awards

education writers association awards

Exploring the Impact of Education Writers Association Awards on Journalism and Education

1. Introduction to Education Writers Association (EWA) Awards

This report is the first of three that seek to document and understand the effects of the Education Writers Association’s annual awards for education, solutions of the institution: policy advice and the abiding politics of education reform. We’re particularly interested in the impact of an EWA award on two types of organizations: the news organization affiliated with the award-winning journalist and the educational organization associated with the report or series of reports. This focus allows us to begin to assess the broader impact of an EWA association more than a specific story on a journalist, organization, or school.

Education Writers Association (EWA) is an organization that recognizes and supports the important role of education journalism in America’s public sphere. Each year, it hosts an annual conference and awards prizes for outstanding journalism in thirteen categories. This study looks at the impact of winning and being nominated for these awards on journalists as well as on education organizations. This allows us to assess the causal effects of receiving a national award, as opposed to the correlates of award-winning journalism. Our goal is to better understand how associations, conferences, and awards in journalism more broadly can shape journalistic markets and practice.

2. Significance of EWA Awards in Recognizing Excellence in Education Journalism

These awards have set high standards for the field as a whole. With the evidence, we believe educational journalists and their media leaders across the USA will consider submitting their best work for EWA Awards – and others who support the field financially understand the benefits of rewarding outstanding coverage. However, the EWA Awards and similar journalism contests also allow education journalists to rebrand themselves as serious professionals. In a field where few reporters, editors/directors, and producers have specifically covered education for an extended time, the Awards – in a profession filled with impressive and deep prizewinners – mark the journalism we at EWA and UAB strive to support and promote.

This report aims to offer greater insight into the EWA Awards’ significance in the education and journalism communities. In collaboration with the EWA, we collected data (including a survey of more than 2,000 education journalists) and conducted interviews to better understand the effect of these awards and what aspects of them matter most to the winners and finalists. We also dissected the finalists’ journalism, digging deep to learn to identify coverage with significant impact and those nominated that broke new ground in content, audience engagement, or business model.

For over a decade, the EWA has been celebrating and highlighting transformative educational journalism, including through the National Awards for Education Reporting and their talented finalists. This shows our profession that we insist on high standards of reporting – and we also offer a window for good reporting to grab a broader audience and attract funding.

3. Impact of EWA Awards on Journalism Practices and Standards

A close look at these EWA awards and the journalism they honor suggests the impact is likely to be deep but slow. This is because the awards tether a contested and debated underlying journalistic practice and aesthetics to ideas about practical impact, which my research shows is what sets the winning work apart – its practical impact and influence effects. Contestants do the hard work of paying attention to what draws attention, and transferring that attention to underlying obscuring issues. As a result, the awards appear to change the practice of journalism, the technical part of journalism. Across three forms of journalism – small specialty publications, mainstream newspapers and outlets, and broadcast journalism – the awards change what the journalism is about and how it is reported. The awards give journalism about education certain standards, and all actors converge around those. The result is high-quality journalism executed under high standards.

A key question regarding journalistic awards is whether they matter for journalism and society. Previous studies on the EWA Awards have confirmed that winners are perceived to produce higher-quality journalism than similarly strong entries and non-winners. The information research gaps I aim to address in this paper is why the EWA Awards improve quality as experienced by fellow journalists, and how the EWA Awards effect is distributed among journalism’s varied functions. This paper aims to answer two key questions: Do journalism awards like those given by the EWA improve the quality of the journalism they honor, as fellow professionals perceive? And if they do, in what way does the quality of the journalism improve? To answer these questions, I rely on a survey of the views of the rejected (but still very good) entries to the Education Writers Association 2014 awards and a follow-up survey of expert judges seen as authorities in the journalism field.

4. EWA Awards’ Influence on Education Policy and Practice

Because of their agenda setting, EWA Award-winning stories become authority sources. By virtue of their recognition, they help set the conversation on current education issues and also help shape and inform education policy and practice. While the value of EWA award-winning stories goes beyond informing journalism, we have also observed that the award serves other audiences within and beyond the journalists. The EWA Awards are widely and deeply respected in education reporting. Why is that? Journalists who responded to our 2012 survey indicated that EWA Awards matter because they are highly competitive. Other comments suggest prestigious because of the high quality of awardees; money and travel they represent thoughtful, thorough, and substantive education journalism; and coverage of broad variety of issues.

We are often asked about the impact of Education Writers Association Awards. Reporters want to know if winning stories change the “education conversation.” Advocates hope stories will move policymakers to care more about their issue. Foundation leaders want to understand how media shaped policy or practice change. Policymakers seek stories that effectively address public misperceptions about their work. Our study seeks to answer those questions. We want to know to what extent and in what ways EWA award-winning stories intersect with education journalism and ultimately influence education practice. One powerful way EWA award-winning projects are used by educators and education policy organizations in their communication strategies.

5. Conclusion and Future Implications of EWA Awards

In many respects, education is the leading area where citizen attentions are focused, as children attend school and public attentions around education issues are high in most parts of the world. As a result, professional journalism about education is a growing area of journalism, and the journalism industry is, in part, being reshaped around the demands of this particular beat. Additionally, journalists endowed with an expertise about education are emerging as specialist journalists whose work is consumed by the profession itself, and these professionals are important players in shaping the public’s understanding of meritorious investigations, exposing malpractices, and advancing the collective standards of the labor and education of their field. The further development of the EWA Awards opens up possibilities for further analysis of the implications of journalism awards for the profession and the field, particularly with a social and technological focus. Ultimately, EWA Awards have the potential to offer a critical focus on those who watch over these premises and issues concerning the profession-that-is-education, wherein the role of the stockholder and company/department magazine might give way to other organizations like guilds, agencies, professional bodies, or training bodies who may also have an educational remit.

Future implications

We began by examining previous research on journalism awards. We discussed the selection process of the EWA Awards and offered details about the awards, including the characteristics of winners. We then discussed the impact of the EWA Awards in two ways: quantitatively, by analyzing the professional activities of journalists before and after they won the award, and qualitatively, by implicating the views of the professionals who submitted the application materials, and depicting the descriptions of their work they offered. We found that all of these winners had produced relatively prestigious and widely read work. Our key conclusion is that a major field of journalism and prizes is higher education, and the EWA awards, because they operate in more or less the same field, do not have the same kind of career-improving impact that mainstream journalism awards do. Our findings show that if it is easier for journalists in the education beat to win acclaim through the EWA awards rather than by catching the attention of mainstream journalism award programs, it may pay for them to enter the EWA award competition. Furthermore, it is worth noting that these awards have the potential to spur competition and thus increase the prestige of the profession at both the individual and organizational levels.

This study attempts to answer the question of what a prestigious award can do for a field—specifically, an award in a journalistic profession covering education. Because recent years have seen a revival of interest in comprehensively evaluating journalism awards as well as an increased emphasis on journalism, education, and journalism about education, we used the Education Writers Association’s (EWA) Awards to explore its impact on journalists, news organizations, and the field of education.

Conclusion