With bureaus in eight cities across the United States, the education news website and network Chalkbeat is doing its part to replace or support educational reporting at a time when newsrooms might not have the bandwidth to dedicate a person to the school board beat.
But what really differentiates Chalkbeat as a news organization is how it tracks and measures its impact as an outlet by allowing reporters and editors to keep a running list of what it calls informed debate and informed action.
Instead of only watching how many clicks a story gets or the open rates on newsletters, which Chalkbeat does still care about, the organization believes it gets a more complete picture of the impact of the reporters’ work by looking at these two forms of impact, explains Carrie Melago, Chalkbeat’s managing editor for local news.
“Informed debate is reporting that spurs conversation, and then there’s informed action, so that’s literally people taking action based on what we’ve written,” she says. “We developed a system called MORI, which stands for measures of our reporting’s influence. It’s literally a spreadsheet that is fed by a typeform that people fill out, but it’s open to anyone at the organization to pull up and see how many of these impacts we had, broken down by bureau and type. Reporters and editors input the results and impact of their work into this form. It’s really inspiring. This calendar year we’ve had, across Chalkbeat, 192 informed debates and 18 informed actions.”
Informed actions can include things like appearing as a panelist during a political debate, going on TV or radio shows to discuss a story or research, or appearing on podcasts. “There’s also the gold standard, which is informed action, which is the New York City Department of Education reinstating popular school lunch items after we wrote about how they cut them during budget cuts, or writing about students in Newark not having bus service and it being fixed, or a lawsuit being filed, or being mentioned in city council testimony. When you stop and sit and look at the impact of your work, it’s really inspiring.”
As a philanthropically funded nonprofit, Chalkbeat works closely both across its bureaus and with partner news organizations.
“Our stories are free to republish from any news outlet. We have a lot of really hearty partnerships where the legacy publication runs our education coverage either to supplement their own or, if they’ve shrunk to the point where they don’t regularly cover it, they might just run our coverage,” says Melago, whose parents were both public school teachers. “We really do believe a strong press is vital to making sure children get the education they deserve. We’re fiercely independent; we don’t take a position on the best path to achieving equity, but we cover the different efforts in these school districts to reach that goal.”
Chalkbeat’s audience is across the education system, including parents, teachers and students.
“During the pandemic, there was more attention by the general public into incremental education coverage,” Melago says. “We want to cover districts day-to-day, because I think some of the best enterprise (reporting) can come from following the inner workings of a school board and becoming an expert on your beat. … It’s also pointing out larger problems, stepping back and writing enterprise pieces, looking at and getting tips from principals and teachers in our markets about on the ground, what is happening in their schools. We have fun too, we write stories we hope are inspiring about schools. We have some regular features about schools, the lived experience of teachers, students and administrators.”
Carrie Melago discusses how Chalkbeat, the education-focused, local newsroom, tracks impact rather than just chasing clicks.
