education writers association twitter

education writers association twitter

The Impact of the Education Writers Association on Twitter Discourse

1. Introduction to the Education Writers Association (EWA)

The association’s commitment to high-quality journalism is fully evident in its social media presence. EWA is very active on Twitter, which members know and sometimes leverage, often by adding the handle @EdWriters to tweets that they hope EWA amplifies by retweeting them to its large following. As we have watched and participated in EWA’s online engagement through Twitter, it has found themselves wondering about the impact of EWA’s use of Twitter on public discourse. Each month, EWA’s Twitter feed is seen an average of 109,081 times. By tracking Twitter data, it is possible to see the number of times users actively engage with the tweet material. Up to 12,000 likes, 5,000 retweets, and 2,500 clicks on a link occur each month on the EWA Twitter. As such, EWA wields considerable influence in the Twitter education world by curating content.

The Education Writers Association was formed in 1947 and is a professional organization of education journalists. EWA plays three primary roles: it provides training programs, it convenes conferences and seminars, and it operates a website and a listserv that members use to exchange news and information with one another. They also provide a variety of services designed to support education journalism. Underlying all of EWA’s efforts is the conviction that high-quality coverage of education issues will represent a crucial lever for improving systems and outcomes in the United States.

2. The Role of Twitter in Education Journalism

Twitter incites conversation; Twitter creates news. “The town square of the 21st century’s digital cities” not only reports what happened, it sways public opinion by telling followers what to emphasize in themselves and others. A 2017 New York Times study of 4,123 Breitbart fans and 3,436 of their political opposites found that 10 percent of influencers who tweet the most drive 80 percent of all tweets. Journalists, educators, and spokespeople use Twitter to spin a story before it becomes old news. In case you missed it, a 2019 study of Twitter usage in the field of journalism by Emily K. Vraga and her colleagues reported that “most of the influential Twitter accounts pointing to online news articles are held by either journalists, editors, or news organizations.”

Twitter’s daily paper serves as a platform for journalists who cover the nation’s P-16 system, and as a forum for spokespersons and pundits who dabble in education. If the readers of this webpage did not have time to peruse the most recent tweets or even your Twitter feed from yesterday, the following will give you an idea of the content, length, and general tenor of our recent collection. For the most part, Twitter links back to newspaper, establishment, and government stories that have been published in the last 24 to 48 hours. Occasionally, Twitter refers to older material that pundit-authors hope gets a new look. Twitter feeds tend to be short; it takes more time to read a story summarized in 260 characters than the typical 140-character dissemination. Humor is rare. Our collection is largely about the spread of larger social trends, like how media might use fact checks most effectively in the age of “fake news.” If you are linked in, you will recognize our stories as part of much older topic threads about the state and purpose of American schooling.

“The rapid pace at which stories break on Twitter is amazing, and sometimes maddening,” Education Week staffer Arianna Prothero tweeted in February 2017. Her two remarks, capturing how education journalists both respect the platform and grow frustrated with it, serve as an apt précis of what Twitter has done to the world in general and to journalism in particular.

3. EWA’s Presence and Influence on Twitter

Twitter has become a popular platform for spreading media-related research as many journalists turn to and use it as a news aggregator. Here, I analyze the organization’s use of Twitter as a marker of its performance. Though EWA maintains multiple accounts, their affiliated account @EdWriters has the largest following and is the most active. I analyze and categorize the mentions garnered by EWA’s tweets, emphasizing both those by Twitter accounts closely related to the non-profit that might indicate a community reiterating resentment of their exclusion. For public posts, the highest tweet volume, 366 impressions, was generated when citing support of criticism against campus security reports was used to appeal to “individuals who viewed our sessions”, suggesting public-facing EWA statements ought to proffer conflict or confront readers. Retweet-heavy mentions and cite-heavy mentions remained the EWA “echo chamber” of discussion. “Warth” was the only journalist mentioned who both tweeted and was mentioned in a response.

So why Twitter? As the biggest and most active social media application for journalists, this part now directly addresses the commonly identified limits mentioned above: a low overall volume of mentions made by EWA, a poor performance of EWA tweets making the Twitter feed of potential members, another failing for myself as a relatively expert follower that incites assistant analysis of a false handling of a categorical meme, and that Gary Warth is the staff writer with the newspaper with the highest EWA tweet “impact”. My final result is to provide a constructive recommendation to the non-profit Education Writers Association on how it may improve its marketing to maintain and increase membership by analyzing patterns of success. The 9,600 journalists in the organization teach regular curricula in the United States.

The impact and importance of the Education Writers Association on Twitter

4. Case Studies: Successful Twitter Campaigns by EWA

2) When the Waukesha, Wisconsin school board blocked the student newspaper from publishing a story on a teacher’s past, EWA editorial staff tweeted a link to its relevant resources and reached out via Twitter to the Washington Post reporter who was covering the controversy. Our efforts were successful in helping the students gain national attention. More than 30 EWA members started using the #ewa19 hashtag. Among those tweeting using the hashtag was the Washington Post reporter who was covering the situation. In our tweets, the EWA staff member congratulated the students for being student journalists and promised to send them buttons.

1) Less than two weeks into the U.S. Education Department drawing notice for releasing illegible reports on education data, and right before the U.S. House of Representatives was to hold a hearing on the problems, EWA tweeted to the journalist covering the matter for the Washington Post. Our tweet claimed that the Post was indebted to EWA for alerting it to the situation. Consequently, 50 members and others started tweeting using the #ewa19 hashtag. As a result, the Washington Post was finally able to print legible school achievement data in “No, they didn’t flash back: U.S. Senate finally learns its ABCs.”

Ewa can shape the dialogue by joining Twitter discussions as an active participant. Below are some representative case studies of successful Twitter campaigns on specific topics undertaken by the Education Writers Association.

5. Future Directions and Recommendations for EWA’s Twitter Strategy

2. From the beginning, EWA seemed wary of the risk of creating an uninhabitable, performance-heralding echo chamber, where a tweet was sent out and there was no followership – only other participants performing for themselves. EWA seems to be most energized by the idea of leveraging social media towards this and other (also best) practices. In that regard, a topic or interest might become “trendy” through a hashtag, pointing to the tenors of this publication’s discussion of the phenomenon and how it may be applied, modified, or resisted in Twitter and in education. Even if EWA consciously resists trends, it is good not to forget or belittle the power of the user to contribute to or set a trend. All of this advice is to suggest that EWA can ask – and be worth asking – hard questions about its practice, as well as about the limits and constraints of the platform where the practice occurs.

1. As Robert Faris, of Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University writes, “The content of the tweet may be the most important factor to increase retweets” (1). The value of a good tweet might consist purely in what it says (also influencing whether it gets retweeted) but it could be significant that the part of the EWA website that sends viewers away the fastest is the ‘Follow EWA on Twitter’ link. This suggests that EWA should not approach social media with content-reproduction or -promotion as its primary goal but must attend to the ways tweeters/grassroots users find value in the act of retweeting, of participating in the network constituted by that activity. If they are already encouraging retweets – ‘RT!’ – then as Faris writes, “it stands to reason that many detached individuals will observe it” and respond. It is important (to understand): How does a tweet become significant in a retweeting/repurposing practice?

Growth Points: Best Practices for Moving Forward

Certainly, this communication is but a first glimpse of how EWA is “doing” visibility and engaging with the public. It is also likely that EWA has much that it can teach those interested in education – that teachers, parents, and students are engaged with their work is a promising starting point for EWA’s strategy. As the strength of focus groups, interviews, and surveys – as well as the two larger papers on the content of the EWA Twitter, and on the history and impact of hashtags – have shown, EWA is already doing a lot that is effective in drawing attention to its work. However, there are places where there might be more occurring where that set of interactions might occur “better.”