Five months into the pandemic, education journalists have adopted several new strategies to report great stories.

By Colleen Connolly

While reporting a story on inequities in remote learning, Boston Globe education reporter Bianca Vázquez Toness almost lost touch with a key source, a Spanish-speaking student without a functioning computer or cell phone. So Vázquez Toness went to his home and — with permission — spoke to him there.

She detailed his trouble in getting a new computer and his home environment, painting a more complete picture of his challenges: “A pile of bicycles — the family’s main mode of transportation to the restaurant jobs they once had in Harvard Square — rested under the stairwell.”

“I just learned a lot just by being at his home,” Vázquez Toness told The Grade via phone.

This past spring, education reporters had to quickly adjust to remote work, just as their sources did. Five months into the pandemic, journalists are figuring out what kinds of reporting are possible and what they’ll do differently in the fall when school is back in session.

This includes trying their best to get those in-person interviews when possible, finding new ways to connect with sources online, relying on teamwork, and scouring data for story ideas that don’t rely on face-to-face meetings. Not all stories can be told through phone and Zoom interviews.

“I initially felt really limited by this notion that we shouldn’t go out [into the field], and initially felt frustrated by it and thought this is going to be impossible, we’re not going to be able to tell authentic stories,” Vázquez Toness said. “But I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much I feel like I have been able to do.”

#LESSON 1: NEW WAYS TO DO IN-PERSON REPORTING

It’s true that, generally speaking, nothing beats the in-person interview. At the beginning of the pandemic, amid the uncertainty, many reporters found in-person reporting impossible. But now, some are venturing out to make those face-to-face connections again.

For WBEZ Chicago public radio education reporter Susie An, getting in-person interviews doesn’t just result in good information, it makes for better audio, too. For a recent story, An found kids outdoors where she could interview them and gather sound, as well as socially distance: summer camp.

She took precautions, wearing a mask and using a shotgun mic so she could interview people several feet away. She could have interviewed people by phone or Zoom, she said, but it wouldn’t have captured the alternate universe of the happy normalcy of summer camp amid a pandemic. Counselors shout “Good morning, campers!” and kids echo it back in muffled unison. “Good morning!”

In her story, you can actually hear how camp is different this year. “It paints a better picture when I can get sound of kids singing a camp song through masks,” she said. “I think there’s also something to be said about seeing how well the kids took to the new rules. It seemed routine to them.”

At the EWA conference last month, Sarah Carr, leader of the Boston Globe’s Great Divide team, suggested looking for students and families at bus stops and fostering relationships with sources using tech tools such as GroundSource, an app that connects journalists to underserved communities via text messaging.

Dylan McCoy, a reporter for Chalkbeat, discussed finding sources at fast-food restaurants, in parks and in front of housing complexes to report on Indiana’s hidden dropouts.

Not all reporters feel comfortable talking to sources in person, however. The Texas Tribune’s Aliyya Swaby, who has asthma, is working entirely remotely. To fill in the gaps from phone reporting, she has leaned on colleagues who are willing to go out.

That’s how she reported on high school student Viky Cruz, who beat the odds to graduate after a rocky year that ended with the pandemic. Swaby spoke to Viky on the phone but found that it wasn’t enough. “We had a photographer go out and take photos of her throughout the graduation,” Swaby said. “The photographer then was able to relay to me some of the details of the graduation and through the photos we were able to build a story.”

That enabled Swaby to describe how each graduate had to walk alone to their assigned seat — with chairs six feet apart — instead of in the usual procession, an image that symbolized the isolation of graduating against the odds in a pandemic.

#LESSON 2: USING FACEBOOK GROUPS & VIDEO OBSERVATION

Phone interviews are easy for most reporters, who were used to doing them well before the pandemic. But without being able to follow up with an in-person meeting, reporters have found other ways to get creative with technology.

USA Today national education reporter Erin Richards, based in Milwaukee and used to traveling frequently for her work, relies more on social media than in the past. In particular, she has found Facebook useful in reaching parents.

In one case, where she interviewed a Spanish-speaking mother for a story about English-language learners and remote learning, it allowed her to do even more than she might have in person. “My Spanish is pretty rudimentary, but I can keep up pretty well on a Facebook chat,” Richards said. “So just typing questions back and forth and answering in real time still gives me the ability to talk to a mom who only speaks Spanish, but I don’t necessarily have to be there in person and we’re still having kind of a live discussion.”

The personal nature of Facebook chat also allowed Richards to have a discussion with the mother about her husband, who had contracted COVID-19. The detail gave a fuller picture of this particular family’s challenges during the pandemic.

Zoom and other video chat tools are useful for more than interviewing sources. They can also be used to virtually “hang out” with them. Vázquez Toness found sixth-grader Malaki Solo at a food distribution site at a school and later spent a day with him on Zoom as he navigated his classes and did his homework online. She supplemented this with phone interviews, which she said he seemed more comfortable with, but being there on Zoom allowed her to paint the picture of him “sprawled on the couch reading” while his mother watched TV and watched her son.

Some of the biggest education stories during the pandemic have been the inequities in remote learning — and this won’t go away in the fall. Richards plans to sit in on more Zoom classes next semester to show what’s really happening.

“In the early days (of the pandemic), I was careful about asking teachers too much if I could sit in on their classes because everybody was still trying to figure out privacy issues, and people were also just trying to figure out how to do this in a sort of reliable way,” Richards said. “I’ll be less shy about asking to sit in on classes this fall because I think it’s really important for us to document what that experience is going to look like for kids.”

#LESSON 3: FINDING & FEATURING VULNERABLE KIDS

As always, one of the biggest challenges of education reporting is finding vulnerable kids. Many reporters are turning to community and advocacy groups as a first step in connecting with families, but the options don’t end there.

Vázquez Toness said that sometimes reaching those without reliable access to phones and internet is done the old-fashioned way. “Maybe that means leaving a handwritten letter at their door and just being patient and waiting,” she said.

Others have asked old sources for help in reaching new families. The Tribune’s Swaby did this to find families living in hotels after Texas lifted its eviction moratorium. USA Today’s Richards also relied on past sources from a story about bilingual education to report her story on how English-language learners are coping with online learning. At the EWA conference, Seattle Times education reporter Dahlia Bazzaz said she keeps a spreadsheet of all of the student and parent interviews she’s done over the last four months, so she can circle back to some of them later.

This takes time, ingenuity, and strong communication with your editors. Swaby said it’s important to be patient and to ask editors for more time to report these stories. “Being able to say, ‘Yes, I do have a lot of interviews, but I know that this is not all that’s out there. I know that there’s multiple voices that are missing’ and then pushing for that time has become even more important,” she said.

#LESSON 4: DATA = CONTEXT FOR ANECDOTES

In-person reporting, Zoom hangouts, and centering vulnerable students are all key. But parents, teachers, and students have strong and often conflicting opinions on school reopenings and remote learning, and reporters need more than anecdotes to give their pieces context. Looking at the numbers is one way to do this.

“Definitely data is still very important and that is a source that you can keep,” WBEZ’s An said. She said she plans to check in with districts about enrollment numbers this fall and how that might affect budgets, as more parents are choosing to homeschool this year.

In June, Vázquez Toness looked at the data from a Suffolk University poll on Massachusetts residents’ opinions on returning to in-person classes in the fall, and found the critical story: 60% of Black and Latino respondents did not think it was safe for schools to reopen. Only 44% of white parents agreed.

In her recent story on the prevalence of learning pods, the Tribune’s Swaby compared different data sets. The numbers show that Black and Hispanic Texans are more at risk of contracting the virus from working essential jobs, more fearful of sending their kids back to school, and less likely to be able to afford private teachers.

“There’s no one opinion that any person has or that any group has,” said Swaby. “You always have diversity of opinion among parents, among teachers. You need to get as much of that [data] in as possible.”

Related coverage and commentary from The Grade:

Writing great profiles in the age of remote reporting

Coverage challenges in the COVID-19 era

Covering the coronavirus

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Colleen Connolly

Colleen Connolly is a freelance journalist who covers New England for The Grade. Her work has also appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, The Guardian, The New Republic, Smithsonian magazine, and the Chicago Tribune. You can follow her on Twitter @colleenmconn or find out more on her website: https://colleenmaryconnolly.com/.