education writers new york times

education writers new york times

The Impact of Education Writers at The New York Times

1. Introduction to Education Journalism

Opinion writers and news analysts are in a position of greater power to influence the choice of societal concerns: they might, in a widely-read editorial, recast a public issue, including one related to education. In interviews and print reports, telling tales out of school, their accompanying photography, television reports, and film help shape public perceptions of teachers, administrators, and other school denizens, curricula, facilities. The National Education Writers Association, founded in 1997, counts among its members several hundred professionals that it designates “their nearest major daily newspaper is The New York Times.” A glance at the membership list suggests that at least 40 people report regularly, even if not exclusively, on K-12 issues. Whence the expectation that the hiring of an education writer in the pages of The New York Times is an event?

The field of education journalism has many practitioners. At the most basic level, an education writer is a member of the print news media whose beat is education. As practitioners of a journalistic craft, they apply the same standards of news judgment, news gathering, writing or storytelling, editing, and ethics that guide health, political, business, science, style, or food journalists. They might approach a story from a public policy, human interest, or breaking news perspective. At more ambitious levels, as gatekeepers of the metropolitan daily or the national news weekly, or as authors and editors of trade and scholarly journals, these professionals apply many of the same standards of excellence, promote the same kind of ongoing public education, and likewise contribute to the gradual formation of a consensus of opinion, each in their own way.

2. The Role of Education Writers at The New York Times

Although I have no way of knowing for sure, it seemed possible to me that the possible level of expertise at the reporter’s disposal in early July and in late August when she wrote was lower than the level of expertise available to New York City-based Times education correspondents who have spent years covering early education in general and teacher, parent, and community relations with schools on Coney Island. It seemed to me likely that one of the beats of Times K-12 reporters is teacher labor market. I get the impression that Times reporters have wide latitude to pitch and pursue stories that advance their work objectives as understood in dialogue with their team. At the education desk meeting I watched on YouTube last summer, a reporter participated to say that the desk should make a more concerted effort to produce more positive, solutions-oriented stories. This is speculative; I don’t know if this sentiment is an editorial directive or if it’s an element of this particular reporter’s journalism philosophy. To confirm its accuracy, you should watch the meeting.

We reviewers are happy to see four education journalists whose beat is K-12 at The New York Times. Since many New York schools are struggling, The New York Times’ beat reporters frequently cover K-12 issues. New York also has many higher ed institutions. Higher ed reporters at the Times typically cover the renowned and well-resourced schools in the city, such as New York University, Columbia, and the city’s public colleges. Each academic year, many Times articles and features for a general audience touch on K-12. Yesterday, first-year reporter Annie Brown profiled a new pre-K teacher in the Coney Island area of Brooklyn. She interned last year at the Times, where she may have learned to develop a feature with details, scenes, and characters, and not to lean on quotations from her adult sources. I am quoted in the column.

3. Influence and Reach of Education Articles in The New York Times

* Three stories in the top ten most-read education stories of 2021. This includes the piece on schools nationwide that looked more like circus ringleaders with elephants on stilts and the story about the “grit” backlash against schools. * Committee hearings and legislation. The EWA journalists have also had an impact by putting certain topics on the agenda of policy-makers. * Talent poaching. National Public Radio has come calling during the reporting year – to tap Minnesota Reformer education reporter Mai Yia Xiong for a two-year on-air training program called Next Generation Radio. Podcast and radio host Daniel Neman, whose reporting on Native American mascots in McFarland ran on Wisconsin Public Radio, was hired as a general assignment reporter for the Reformer.

Stories from The New York Times offer incredible reach. They are read by more than a million people and picked up by other media outlets and sometimes even policy-makers. Those who write these stories have deep ties to the education journalism community. They have backgrounds reporting on education and contributing to previous editions of the State of Education reporting projects. Let us examine the influence and reach of our EWA writers.

4. Challenges and Opportunities for Education Writers in the Digital Age

Because our current offering mostly rests in the written article, we see a lot of potential for other kinds of engagement. Podcasts, events, and writing workshops appeal to this core audience. Meanwhile, people who come to our site directly, through our newsletter sign-up forms or our Eventbrite pages, represent our most natural subscribers.

At the same time, many National Desk readers come to us through our biggest news stories – the daily report on the coronavirus, the Olympics, the politics desk – and represent a reader that we might be losing because they don’t see themselves reflected within the vertical. As we build a strategy to retain these casual readers, we’re also working to build products that better serve our engaged audience. They want information broken down in smart, scalable information formats that deliver the news we know they come to us for – analysis, explanation, thoughtful advice – delivered in the platform that matters most to them: email and mobile.

Our biggest audience is, unsurprisingly, parents and educators, many of whom come to us looking for news about the day’s opposition to mask mandates or information that will help them make tough decisions about difficult subjects like remote learning, the enduring impact of last year’s school shutdowns, and the mental illness that has followed.

Education writers today face a unique array of challenges and opportunities that come with creating journalism in the digital age. This unique moment has prompted The New York Times to conduct an in-depth analysis of who our audience is, how they’re engaging with our content, and what their unique needs are within our broader Education offering. We’ve found data that reinforces much of what we already suspected but has laid a strong foundation for our future coverage.

5. Conclusion: The Future of Education Journalism

We suspect that we could have found even more examples of times when readers without high-visibility public positions have used their own unique circumstances, their professional platforms, or their Letters to the Editor privileges in The Times to share their stories, insights, counter-arguments, and opinions with a wider audience. Journalism isn’t a monologue presented on a page or screen; it’s a conversational, two-way exchange of information, stories, evidence, and opinion. Journalism shouldn’t serve as gatekeeper of public views but rather as door opener, aiming to bring in underreported stories, views, and facts from all quarters. We hope for a journalism future in which this report’s profile of education writers at The New York Times will read as an interesting historical document—a curious, quirky chapter in journalism’s march toward greater diversity, transparency, and audience engagement.

Even when their numbers might be thin in the crowded pages of The New York Times, the writers examined in this study still have a tremendous ability to shape the public narrative on critical education issues—especially where these stories and columns are picked up and amplified by other media outlets. Our findings about the most widely-read stories and columnists reveal that coverage of inequality cuts across a wide range of crucial topics, from college access and affordability to “student success” in K-12 schools, college completion and career readiness. We also learn that in a world of metrics and “big data,” deeply reported stories and expert commentary are still of high public interest. We can see in our analysis of reader commentary that these writers engage readers, as evidenced by both the sheer traffic of unique comments generated and also the high frequencies of “recommendations” (or “likes”) given to these comments by other readers.