emily richmond education writers association

emily richmond education writers association

The Impact of Emily Richmond and the Education Writers Association on Education Journalism

1. Introduction to Emily Richmond and the Education Writers Association

In journalism, education reporters have come to recognize themselves as media mediators who link all the institutions that constitute what journalists call the “journalism of the public” and the public calls “public education.” The work of journalists, like that of scholars, is conditioned by their professional institutions as much as it is directed by any individual. So we begin with the interlocking stories of a person and an institution that together did and do have an influence over education reporting. If you understand who Emily Richmond is and what kind of journalism the EWA prizes and teaches, you understand much about the problems and potentials regarding the way we report education in this country.

For more than two decades, Emily Richmond has been a major force in the lives of journalists who cover education. Almost as influential has been the organization she worked for for twelve years: the Education Writers Association. In this document, we enlist journalists who have worked with Richmond or the EWA to describe their influence, the point of view they brought to the news, and the conflicts they faced. They tell us about the people and institutions that continue to have the most influence over how schools are covered. And they share their hopes and fears for the future with our own attention to the long and recent history of journalism that calls itself “public” or “service” or even “civic” journalism. School reporters’ claims on the affections of this public are compelling because education is often linked to the daily lives of citizens.

2. The Evolution of Education Journalism

Although these are broad, non-specific, and tend to disproportionately paint two generational boomer-led periods as reductive and lacking, it feels important to note that the cyclical nature of these ages that seem to transmute every 15-20 years is more a reflection of the education press’s coverage than the educators themselves. Even so, a journalist in these fields will be writing almost a generation at a time examining how schools and educators should theoretically be working as part of a greater American endeavor.

Education journalism, often associated with covering school board meetings and police reports, has been steadily evolving since the professional field first took root in the years following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling. The remnants of that fixation on schools as establishment-endorsed centers of reason give today’s beat reporter a clear mandate: demonstrate moderate improvement or moderate shortcoming in reading and math skills at specific grade levels through a series of quantifiable metrics that take up the bulk of newsroom coverage. In the 72 years since, events ranging from the 1957 Soviet launch of Sputnik and the tuition-free Fox Comprehensive High School opening in the Bronx to the 2012 “education recession” and the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting help paint a picture of the terrain education journalists have been asked to traverse to keep readers informed and aware of the important happenings within the cogs of the American school system. These jarring flashpoints loosely create the basis for three major epochs in the evolution of education journalism: The Age of Theory, the Age of Innovation, and the Age of Performativity.

3. Key Contributions of Emily Richmond and the EWA

The specific contributions of Emily Richmond and the EWA to education journalism are significant. Richmond, as a person, and the EWA, as a group working largely through the intercession of journalists, have changed the nature and content of professional education reporting and its audiences. Both Richmond and the EWA aim to construct education discourse in public spaces through information. They engage important audiences or institutions beyond and in addition to those primarily affected by their work. Though their MIPS reports are brief, the response to them is broad and deep, much larger than the response to other ed-journalism reports. The MIPS reports and their interviews with the grantees have rewritten a narrative that is of significant interest to general readers. As EWA is interested in the level of public-interest stories required by newsrooms, the “good” coverage of their events is too limited an effect to be of most interest to the organizations.

Since 2003, Emily Richmond has worked for the Education Writers Association (EWA), an organization of journalists and news organizations. Since joining EWA, Richmond has held at least sixteen influential positions in the organization, including her current post as the Public Editor, her previous position as Executive Director, and her role as a member of the Board of Directors. Some of the innovations and initiatives Richmond has led from her various roles within the organization include the first State-by-State Assessment of the Press’s Ability to Hold Facebook-Funded School Districts Accountable, the “Diving into Data” series training events, the Latino Ed Beat blog, and many others. Prior to working for EWA, Richmond worked for several education news organizations including the L.A. Times, the Modesto Bee, and NHK, a Japanese news organization.

4. Challenges and Opportunities in Education Journalism Today

There is certainly immense room for growth. While audiences want to support the idea of a functioning Fourth Estate, they are often cynical about its capacity to help reveal the truth. Currently, there is a host of free courses in journalism available to any comers. Newsrooms are looking for college collaborations; there is an increasing hunger in the academy to provide material that could expand the traditional set of internships. As fewer and fewer private firms have any local investment, educational, it often seems, and civic institutions are entering the gap with the kind of support in human capital and dollars general interest stories now require to be noticed.

It is both a challenging and a compelling time to be a journalist in 2022. For someone covering education, there are layers of complexity in being sure to get the story right. You have to understand the policy and the political dynamics. You have to see the challenge and take stock of the opportunity. You have to try to see 360 degrees around the news so you can begin to anticipate how your everyday reader is going to look at it. On a more personal level, if education coverage has, at its best, always been a beat of empathy, you have to locate the human stories that explain why all this background is worth understanding.

5. Conclusion: The Future of Education Reporting

We invite our readers to speculate with us about the future. What might the prevailing assumptions, values, standards, or aspirations of education reporting be in a post-Emily era? What directions and purposes might most fruitfully characterize great works by skilled writers in the field for the decades to come? In the years to come, in very part the shape of Emily’s tenure at the Education Writers Association will set the expectations and standards for much of the field. We began by noting that while media have changed radically, the issues confronting public education and the act of writing about them and the activities and aspirations of young (and older) education journalists—have not. Those teachers, students, principals, superintendents, and advocates—all of the sources and readers mentioned above—are of course the best answer, that a journalism of learning can be sustained.

Over the years, Emily Richmond and the Education Writers Association have transformed how education journalism is done and have supported scores of that field’s best practitioners. When, a decade ago, a team at this institution decided to offer for the first time a master’s degree in education journalism, we did so in the context of the opportunity offered by the EWA and the importance of Richmond’s contributions. While we are very pleased that she was able to join our faculty earlier this year, this deep neuroanatomy of an educational journalist—what she does, how she does it, and why—likely fails to capture some of the less tangible but more profound effects of what Emily Richmond and the organization she edits have accomplished. This communication with you is the best that we can offer in understanding why and how the field has been changed during their tenures.