Post a comment about the budget cuts at your school on our interactive comment map. more »
GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools
back story
February 27, 2009
From Philly to San Diego, new efforts to cover local schools
The news about the news profession is pretty depressing these days, and the news about local news is especially dismal. (Goodbye, Rocky Mountain News.) But I’m happy to report that education reporters are not letting the school news disappear without a fight.
Here’s a run-down of some relatively new efforts to keep local school journalism alive in the new media atmosphere:
- In Dayton, editorial writer Scott Elliott has won awards for his Get on the Bus ed blog.
- Kent Fischer of Dallas innovates with his Dallas ISD blog, whose readers helped him dig up big scoops.
- Emily Alpert of the new online-only, donation-funded Voice of San Diego writes great in-depth stories.
- The long-running site about the Philadelphia schools, The Notebook, has started a blog.
- Catalyst Chicago has a blog, and Russo’s Chicago schools blog is going strong. So is Catalyst Ohio.
- L.A. Times reporters give regular updates on the schools at a blog called L.A. Now.
- The Journal News, a lower-upstate New York paper, has a Hall Monitor education blog.
- The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a blog called Get Schooled.
- A live-blog of a superintendent search was the recent topic at The Houston Chronicle’s School Zone.
- A D.C. writer has started a chronicle of school news there.
The new reporting format certainly has its problems. But innovation will be the only way for good journalism about schools to survive, and the only way to keep the new efforts up to par is to keep track of “best practices.” Please keep up the critiques of our coverage, and please send more good local education news sites that I missed. Or lay it all out in the comments.
-
February 27th, 2009 10:45 am
My husband is a San Francisco Chronicle reporter, and his employer is teetering on the brink too (along with our family’s financial security).
I do a blog (for a tiny amount of money per thousand page views) on www dot examiner dot com — on San Francisco schools, but with reasonable freedom to write about what I want. examiner dot com has a number of bloggers (they call them examiners, not bloggers) covering education in various specialties. I suspect that some of them may be getting *a little* additional money for it from the charter school industry — there’s a lot of puffery going on in some of those blogs, and that sector of the economy seems to be booming still. There really aren’t any rules in this part of the blog world, so it wouldn’t NOT be legit to take that kind of money.
Since we have no idea which of the “examiners” are getting that kind of outside money, it’s just something to wonder about as we read their coverage.
-
February 27th, 2009 10:46 am
(And, by the way, I also co-blog as an unpaid volunteer at www dot sfschools dot com, which has been around for several years now.)
-
February 27th, 2009 11:22 am
Thanks, Caroline. I should have added your site. I’ll put it on my running list. And best of luck to the Chronicle. I know what it feels like to be at a struggling newspaper. Not good!!!
-
February 27th, 2009 12:09 pm
Thanks for the props. This is also a really cool education blog that may become even more vital after today’s closure of the Denver Rocky News: http://ednewscolorado.org/
-
February 27th, 2009 3:35 pm
Thanks for the mention in the post. One note, however. The DC Education Blog has been around for about 5 years now.
Keep up the great work. I love the coverage you guys give the NYC education scene.
-
February 27th, 2009 4:12 pm
Five years still counts as RELATIVELY new right?
Leave a Reply
Mapping the Budget Cuts
6 Comments
Subscribe to comments with RSS or TrackBack