EducationPR

Always remember these things when working with reporters.

If a reporter doesn’t answer your email, follow up by phone.
If a reporter doesn’t answer your email, do not follow up by phone.

When you email a reporter, always CC: the reporter’s editor.
When you email a reporter, do not CC: the reporter’s editor.

Embargoed press releases help reporters do their job.
Embargoed press releases frustrate and offend reporters.

Reporters have favorite topics that they track.
Reporters do not have favorite topics; they are generalists.

If you leave a message, the reporter will get back to you.
If you leave a message, the reporter will not get back to you.

That’s according to a panel of three education reporters at an afternoon EWA session today.

Seriously, the panel did agree on a few things.

There is no more ‘news cycle.’ Everything is Always On.

There is no longer “A Story”: it will be repackaged and used in different versions in different media.

Today’s panel included Kit Lively (Dallas Morning News), Stephanie Banchero (Chicago Tribune), and Greg Toppo (USA Today). They offered the following tips:

If you’re a PR person, education communicator, or public information officer who wants to see your story featured in a newspaper, you should do your homework first. Keep in mind that reporters are overwhelmed with information.

Everyone wants reporters to tell their story.

Reporters have long lists of stories they already want to do.

Many education reporters are the youngest and least experienced in the newsroom so sometimes you’ll be dealing with someone who knows little about education.

Know the reporter’s audience and context. A story pitch that works for a reporter in City A very well may not work for a reporter in City B. Example: If you’re pitching a story about vouchers, make sure the reporter’s state indeed uses vouchers.

Do not argue with reporters if they say they can’t use your idea.

Besides head shots, reporters will not use photos you send, and will not use videos you send.

Reporters do read blogs and news feeds in addition to major national dailies (the online version)

Newsroom email systems cannot handle large video files or PDF files. Send the reporter a link instead.

When reporters use your web site, they want navigability, a search function, and fact sheets. If material is really important, don’t make them click through 90 pages.

When searching for experts, reporters do not use PR News Wire. They use their own network of resources.

Reporters do not have time to attend press conferences. Offer a conference call or webcast instead.

Reporters appreciate having your experts’ cell phone numbers.

Reporters do not use “new media press releases” and don’t know what they are.

Do not expect a reporter to write a feature about your product because you pitch it as “educational.”

Do not pitch your school safety product by pegging it to a recent school shooting or a natural disaster.

If a reporter is not a columnist, do not say “I love your column.”

Reporters do not need any more experts on Testing.

Following the conference theme “Asking the right questions, dispelling the myths,” U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings tonight addressed and challenged some of the myths surrounding the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).
Speaking to a roomful of reporters and other educational communicators at the Education Writers Association annual meeting, Spellings said, “We are making progress. We have made more progress with young readers in last 5 years than previous 20 years. And people often don’t realize that 70% of our schools are meeting NCLB targets.”

Challenging some of the misperceptions about NCLB, she said:
NCLB is not an unfunded mandate. It is not a mandate; it is a compact. If states want the federal resources, then the Education Department expects certain results. She added that education funding is up 50% since 2001.
NCLB is not a ‘one size fits all,’ federal system. It actually allows states quite a bit of flexibility. After all, the Federal government funds only about nine percent of public school costs and can’t expect to exert absolute control.
NCLB is not just about ‘teaching to the test.’ If and when standards are clear, and standards align with assessments, then there is nothing wrong with teaching to the test.
NCLB does not label schools as ‘failing’ and then provide ‘sanctions.’ The law never talks about ‘failing’; it says ‘in need of improvement.’ And there are things that need improvement. And there are consequences. We make some people squirm, and we should, she said.
So, given what we have learned in five and a half years of NCLB, we now can be more nuanced in our accountability system, Spellings said. We can be smarter about how we measure progress. Five states have been granted waivers to experiment with new growth models. We can now track cohorts and individual students.
NCLB is largely gades 3 through 8, but now we need to power up on high schools, Spellings said. “That will be an issue this year. We need to prepare more students to succeed in higher education. One third of the U.S. adult population have a BA degree, but 2/3s should have.”
She then took questions from the audience, including John Merrow of PBS; Kathy Baron, KQED Radio; Alexander Russo, This Week in Education; Tanya Schevitz of the San Francisco Chronicle, and Greg Toppo of USA Today, among others. Read about those interchanges in their publications.

Many communicators in higher education are still asking very basic questions about new communication technologies including blogs, news feeds, tagging, and social networking. At least that’s the impression I get at the EWA conference this week.
And there’s some misunderstanding about what the new communication tools are for. For example, one communicator asked about setting up a password protected blog or a password protected RSS feed, so they could control their message. Well, sorry, but phrases like password protection and controlling the message cannot logically be uttered in the same sentence as terms like RSS feeds and blogs. They start from different basic assumptions. But that’s just me.
And technology aside, I’m hearing some weird ideas about basic communication philosophy in a Web 2.0 world. One attendee at an afternoon session today wanted to know whether RSS feeds were a good way to ‘force feed’ information to reporters. I have to admit I’ve never heard a reporter say she wanted to be force fed anything.
So it’s good that Mindshare’s Colin Moffett was here at EWA this afternoon to provide some pointers on taking advantage of the new internet.
Being creative means cutting through the clutter, he said, and then demonstrated some ways Mindshare does that for clients, including American Rivers and Strong American Schools.
Moffett showed how communicators are using video clips, social media environments including Second Life, Facebook, and MySpace, using social tagging and bookmarking with tools including Delicious.com, and using search technology offered by services like Technorati and Google Alerts.
Be viral, he said. Make your content portable and digestible.

The most compelling story an organizational communicator can tell is an example of how has one life been turned around by our work.
But as communicators for educational organizations, we have a problem. We have good stories, but we don’t tell them well. We burden stories with jargon and they are unrecognizable as stories.
Andy Goodman’s presentation at EWA this afternoon provided some examples of very effective storytelling.
Goodman is an author and a consultant to nonprofit organizations.
Communicators should not think of storytelling as a sidebar, but rather as a Best Practice. It is a first thing, Goodman says. It’s the foremost way humans communicate.
His presentation addressed the questions:
Why is narrative so powerful?
What makes a good story?
How do I build a lasting storytelling culture?
Storytelling is an integral part of our history, identities, and culture, and key to how we remember. As a species we tell stories for tens of thousands of generations, Goodman said. Our brain his evolved with mechanisms that look for elements of story.
We all have personal stories and sharing them allows us to tell our personal mythology.
We have culture-specific stories in our brains as natural result of growing up in our culture.
When you have facts you want people to remember its mch more likely they will remember them if they’re part of a story.
What makes a good story? It delivers what we seek: meaning. It uses a time tested structure. It engages our emotions.

Here in sunny Los Angeles I’m among the 200-plus folks attending this year’s conference of the Education Writers Association.

EWA is the national professional organization of more than 1,000 print and broadcast education reporters in the United States and Canada. Associate members include school and college public information officers and writers who work for educational institutions and organizations.

Tonight we’ll hear U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. During the conference topics will range from college readiness to English Language Learners, from charter schools to community colleges, and from desegregation to the future of NCLB. At a Saturday evening ceremony 10 reporters will receive national awards for education reporting in 2006.

As a communicator embedded in a research organization like WCER it’s great for me to meet reporters from newspapers from across the country as well as communicators in other education-related organizations. As I begin my work with the AERA Outreach and Communications Committee this kind of networking is doubly important.

Looking forward to the Education Writers Association’s annual meeting, set for May 3-5 in Los Angeles. U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings is scheduled to speak, and I expect some very spirited NCLB-related questions to follow, especially since that theme appears again and again throughout conference session titles. A workshop on ‘new media’ will cover blogging and writing for the web; how to visualize a story for the web; using online databases, and narrative writing. A seminar for associate members will cover storytelling as best practice and using ‘new media’ for communications.

The Broad Foundation’s Eli Broad will speak about education reform, and Arthur Levine, Linda Darling Hammond, and Deborah Loewenberg Ball will discuss teacher quality and the teachers college accountability.