Will New York City schools ever reopen? Better coverage might help us find out.

Two ways to improve New York City schools coverage – before it’s too late.

By Alexander Russo

Across New York City, city, state, and teachers union staffers are likely trying to figure out how to agree on a school reopening plan, which Mayor Bill de Blasio has promised to announce this week. And local New York City education reporters are – or should be – trying to figure out who’s proposing what, and what the various approaches would mean.

Some questions they may be asking:

Will the reopening plan be citywide, targeted, or community-based?

What, if any, new safety measures will be adopted?

How will parents’ priorities be addressed?

However, based on past experience, we’ll probably learn about the plan in a rush of breaking news close to when the plan is released.

That would be a shame, but it wouldn’t be the first time.

Despite all efforts and many talented individuals, as well as the relatively strong media ecosystem in New York, the coverage of the school reopening roller coaster this fall has not generally been up to what is clearly an enormous task.

However, there are at least two obvious ways to ameliorate the problem, if editors and reporters were willing to reconsider their current habits and practices.

Despite the relatively abundant education coverage in the city, it’s not set up in a way that’s producing the kind of reporting required by a story this big, with national implications.

Thanks to industry downsizing, education reporters are often solo operators without dedicated editing support. And with fast-moving stories like this, the focus is often too much on writing breaking news and not enough on reporting it.

Last week, for example, the 300,000-student hybrid learning program was shut down citywide when the key parties weren’t able to come up with an alternative.

Local education journalists uniformly jumped on the confused and contentious announcement, the largely negative response, and the uncertainties of what comes next.

However, despite at least five days during which the shutdown was looming, the ultimately failed negotiations between the city and the state weren’t really reported until the day after the announcement. And we still don’t really know how much, if any, haggling there was between the mayor and the teachers union, whose approval is key.

The situation in NYC is not unique. When a story blows up the way this one has, undersized education teams are often overwhelmed by the size and pace of what’s going on, forced to play catch-up with new sources and unfamiliar dynamics, and to continue to operate in fierce, if friendly, competition.

Reason No. 1 is that education reporters and teams are smaller than they once were, even at places like the New York Times. Metro and state reporters are helping out as best they can, where and when available, but they aren’t likely to keep on the story very long. It’s not really their beat.

Reason No. 2 is that most journalists believe they’re essentially competing against each other, constantly refreshing Twitter to make sure they don’t get scooped. With this kind of breaking news mindset, they believe they can’t afford to go into the weeds.

“Unfortunately,” The City NY’s Terry Parris Jr. tweeted recently, journalism is “still living in the ‘who has it first’ world.”

There are two basic fixes that I can think of to improve the coverage:

PAIRING UP

The first option would be for local newsrooms to assign a second reporter to the story on an ongoing basis, for the time being at least. Even if it’s only for a few months, having a second pair of hands dedicated to the story would create enormous opportunities for deepening and improving the coverage.

We’ve seen what great work a good pair of local reporters covering education issues can do at the Baltimore Sun and other places, or in the past at places like WNYC and the Times, which until very recently used to have two reporters, Kate Taylor and Elizabeth Harris, on the local beat where now there is one.

BANDING TOGETHER

The second option is for the existing teams covering the story to band together across outlets, formally or otherwise, and to divvy up the story into more manageable slices that can be reported more deeply.

Imagine something like “The Queen’s Gambit,” a Netflix miniseries about high-level chess competition, in which cooperation plays a big role along with individual talent. What education teams might lose in page views or ego gratification they would almost certainly gain in providing deeper and more comprehensive coverage of district, teacher, and parent priorities.

There are other options worth considering, including the WBEZ Chicago strategy, in which the education team lets go of a focus on breaking news to produce deeper coverage, or the “handoff” strategy, in which editors hand off the political storyline to City Hall reporters who are more familiar with political ambitions and fundraising imperative. Vox cofounder Matt Yglesias recently noted the important role of political journalists, especially when it comes to highly polarized issues.

And you may have your own ideas. Maybe you think that reporters’ ideological leanings are the real problem, or the narrow set of topics they seem to cover, or the fact they’re overwhelmingly white and don’t stay on the beat as long as might be ideal. Maybe you think the real problems are lack of access and transparency on the part of the school district.

In any case, there’s still time to reflect on the coverage that we’ve been getting and consider ways it might be improved.

Different possible reopening scenarios are very much under discussion in New York City right now.

The more the public knows about how these plans are shaping up, the better.