Interesting event at??Brookings yesterday afternoon about media coverage of education. The focus was a paper by Russ Whitehurst, E.J. Dionne and Darrell West that found in the first nine months of 2009 just 1.4 percent of national news coverage from television, newspapers, news Web sites and radio dealt with education.
Breaking down the education coverage that did occur, the most popular topics were school finance/budgets, politics (including the hub-bub over President Obama's back-to-school speech), H1N1 flu/health and the economic stimulus package. Those are all important. But topics like technology in schools, charter schools and education research were much less popular (each garnered less than 2 percent of education stories). And those are important too.
According to the report it seems local outlets are more likely to cover the substance of school policy than national media. Not surprising since parents particularly care about what's happening in their kids' school/district.
The report noted that obviously the tough economic times and the newspaper industry's struggle with buy-outs and lay-offs has created a very challenging, new environment. Meanwhile blogs and other citizen-initiated reporting have grown in popularity.
I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that Fordham's Mike Petrilli has already tackled this topic quite well in Disappearing Ink, a piece he wrote this fall for Education Next and Fordham's??Gadfly newsletter.??Please check out Mike's article.
The Brookings paper makes several recommendations, including urging reporters to draw on education research like health care reporters use medical research, integrating more blogs/citizen journalism into press outlets and encouraging foundations/non-profits to develop alternative forms of education coverage both locally and nationally.
A few other interesting tidbits: Panelist Dale Mezzacappa, president of the Education Writers Association, wisely noted that it would also help the situation if reporters had more access to schools themselves. She said it's still pretty difficult to get the access needed do the in-depth coverage. And blogger Andy Rotherham, who also was a panelist,??said he doesn't think blogs are the answer. He said they're great for debate, harnessing the wisdom of crowds, spreading the word about research, etc., but they're not a replacement to newspaper coverage.
All in all a good discussion about an important issue.
-Amy Fagan