The case for the Ed Lab model

There’s no silver bullet when it comes to funding high-quality education journalism, but the emerging practice of embedding foundation-funded teams in legacy newsrooms makes a lot of sense. Could an Education Lab soon appear at the New York Times?

By Alexander Russo

Next month, when the Dallas Morning News launches a new vertical called the Education Lab, it will be joining at least four other education-focused teams paid for with foundation funding inside commercial/for-profit newsrooms. More could soon be on the way. 

Once considered taboo, foundation-funded teams of journalists working inside legacy newsrooms have been growing for a while now. The strategy can be thought of as a compromise between a stand-alone nonprofit and traditional advertising- and subscription-based commercial journalism. Or, think of it as Report For America on steroids. 

Several of these efforts involve the education beat. And, though there’s been one notable blowup where things did not go very well at all, the education-focused experiments generally have put up a strong showing, both in page views and in coverage quality, with limited controversy. 

Besides the Dallas Morning News, there are similar education teams housed at the Boston Globe, USA Today, Seattle Times, and the Fresno Bee, which launched last September.

In a perfect world, high-quality education journalism would appear daily, paid for by disinterested funders and distributed widely and free to users. No advertisers, no sponsors, no billionaire owners. No subscriptions! 

In the world in which we live, foundation-funded teams operating inside established commercial newsrooms seem to be a reasonable compromise between traditional news outlets and nonprofit ones. 

However, the real test will come as the model proliferates or when an outlet like the New York Times jumps in, which could possibly happen sooner than you think.

Disclosure: The Grade has received funding from several of the foundations involved in these efforts. Read about our practices and funders here.

Next month, when the Dallas Morning News launches a new vertical called the Education Lab, it will be joining at least four other education-focused teams paid for with foundation funding inside commercial/for-profit newsrooms. More could soon be on the way. 

Legacy newspapers and foundations have attempted to produce enhanced commercial coverage going back a ways now. The Ford Foundation has funded various journalism efforts in the past. And foundation-funded journalism has been shared with and published by commercial news outlets going back at least to the creation of ProPublica in 2007. 

However, these efforts, sometimes called community-funded journalism, seem to have flourished in recent years. Perhaps best known among them are the offerings from the Seattle Times, which features a handful of foundation-funded labs covering various topic areas and a seven-year track record.  Its Education Lab was created in 2013, and has found success by hiring talented journalists, embarking on a robust engagement effort, and choosing core themes through which to examine education’s sprawling range of issues.

But the Seattle Times is no longer alone in adopting this hybrid approach. The McClatchy-owned Sacramento Bee has launched an Equity Lab. Indeed, McClatchy, which also owns the Fresno Bee, is said to be launching 10 new community-funded journalism labs over the course of 2020. The Chicago Sun-Times recently hired two reporters whose positions are funded by the Chicago Community Trust. Others can be found at the Tampa Bay Times. You get the idea. 

Not all of these efforts use the “lab” name or follow exactly the same approach. USA Today’s national education team was expanded in 2018, thanks to foundation funding, and now includes a full-time dedicated education editor. The Boston Globe’s effort, dubbed The Great Divide, was launched in 2019 as part of the paper’s Spotlight investigative unit, based in part on the paper’s January 2019 series, the Valedictorians Project, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. 

Perhaps best known are the offerings from the Seattle Times, which features a handful of foundation-funded labs covering various topic areas and a seven-year track record.  Its Ed Lab was created in 2013.

Varied as it may be, the Ed Lab model has some obvious advantages over stand-alone nonprofits, including a built-in distribution system and a willingness to tell more immediate, less policy-oriented stories. They’re frequently more local in nature as well, compared to nonprofit outlets that can sometimes be wonky and staffed by newcomers.

For example, just before the pandemic, the Fresno Bee produced a series of stories about a bus pass voucher program that was under threat of being cut, which would have estranged students who relied on it. Though I’m sure some have done so, beat-specific nonprofits don’t generally focus on mundane but important stories. 

“That’s the difference between us and stand-alone platforms,” says Lauren Gustus, who heads McClatchy’s community-funded initiatives. “We live in Fresno, our reporters graduated from the schools they’re covering and have kids in the schools they’re covering.”

The development of the Fresno effort began about 18 months ago, according to Gustus, and ended up focused on education after a series of discussions with community leaders, elected officials, and – yes! – subscribers. The effort launched in December 2019, and now has full funding for two years. It features Spanish-speaking reporters, translated stories, and use of SEO [search engine optimization]. Engagement, listening sessions, and survey work are also part of the project.  

In terms of quality, Ed Labs have gathered some of the strongest teams and produced some of the best education journalism of the recent past, including standout reporting about the pandemic’s effects on schools from USA Today, the Seattle Times, and the Boston Globe.

While the Globe’s The Great Divide team has not yet been able to repeat the success of its Valedictorians Project series, it has produced a surge of strong coverage that was not available in recent years.  The foundation-boosted education team at USA Today has been able to produce a steady stream of high-quality coverage in the past several months. Last month, it won an EWA award for its coverage of the pressure on American teachers. 

There are also some practical advantages to the Ed Lab model. Given the state of things in journalism, a two-year gig might be more certain than legacy reporters can expect. And, embedded education teams are more likely to be part of a unionized newsroom, which could provide protection to journalists not usually available among nonprofit news outlets, at least not education-specific outlets.

The labs also present an obvious opportunity when it comes to diversity, inclusiveness, and equity, says Tom Huang, assistant managing editor for journalism initiatives at the Morning News, who spoke with me about the newest of the education labs. “We don’t get to hire new reporters all the time,” he points out. “So this is a huge opportunity for us.” The first hire – an internal promotion – was to name longtime education writer Eva-Marie Ayala as the section’s new editor. 

In terms of quality, Ed Labs have gathered some of the strongest teams and produced some of the best education journalism of the recent past, including standout reporting about the pandemic’s effects on schools from USA Today, the Seattle Times, and the Boston Globe.

The model has some clear downsides, including the need to develop fundraising operations, obvious concerns about editorial independence, and a complicated set of skills and relationships required to make it work. 

“It’s critical to have buy-in from all of the key internal stakeholders, including the top leadership and the education team,” according to the Seattle Times’ Kristin Dizon. “So much of the work, both at the initial stages and throughout the project, is about relationships.” Proactive communication with funders, readers, and community members is also important, she says.

In reality, most for-profit newsrooms lack a development infrastructure to engage potential funders. And fundraising can be a challenge, at least initially. “That’s not easy, asking people to support a for-profit newsroom,” notes McClatchy’s Gustus.

Even once the money has been raised, there’s also the issue of stability and continuity. Most funders promise to fund for a year or two, not longer. From some perspectives, a year of planning and pitching for what may end up being just two years of funding probably isn’t worth it. Not everyone will find deep-pocketed support from funders who are in it for the long haul, like the Seattle Times has enjoyed.

The biggest challenge of all is to make sure that the effort is editorially independent, making clear that funders don’t get to assign stories or see stories ahead of time. 

“All of that’s easier said than done in the trenches, but as far as I can tell in Seattle they hadn’t run into significant troubles with that,” says the Dallas Morning News’s Huang. 

The notion of coverage funded by foundations rather than advertising dollars or subscriptions raises a thorny set of issues that have undone past efforts. 

For example, the Los Angeles Times launched Education Matters in 2015 but ran into almost immediate controversy over funding sources and disclosure problems. Facing criticism from the local teachers union among others, the education team’s story assignment and coverage decisions were questioned for pretty much the entire period of the two-year grant, which was not renewed.

In recent years, outside funding and editorial independence have not appeared to be as big a concern as they were in Los Angeles. However, not everyone is a fan of mixing funders and coverage, including former Dallas Morning News education reporter Matthew Haag, who described the forthcoming EdLab at his old paper as “another route to influence the coverage” by groups he previously covered.

Not everyone is a fan of mixing funders and coverage, including former Dallas Morning News education reporter Matthew Haag, who described the forthcoming Ed Lab at his old paper as “another route to influence the coverage” by groups he previously covered.

For now, at least, the coverage environment is mixed. Stand-alone education nonprofits like Chalkbeat and EdWeek continue to do strong work, as do public radio outlets like WBEZ Chicago. And outside funding isn’t a requirement to do good education journalism in for-profit newsrooms. The Wall Street Journal just created a new national education editor spot and hired Chastity Pratt to handle it, without any outside funding that I know of. The Washington Post has assembled a strong team of education reporters, local and national. Part of a team that includes a handful of reporters with no direct funding for schools coverage, the LA Times’s Sonali Kohli won the EWA award for best K-12 beat reporter in the nation. 

However, stand-alone nonprofit outlets like ProPublica and education-specific networks like Chalkbeat, which once seemed on the rise, seem to have lessened their commitment to education (in the case of ProPublica) and slowed their growth (in the case of Chalkbeat). And once-strong education teams at legacy outlets like the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times are now down to just one or two people. The education team at NPR has much diminished over the last year or so. And the New York Times is down to just two or three full-time K-12 education reporters, depending on how you count.

The New York Times is keeping mum about its next steps, but the need to find new ways to bring resources into newsrooms may be partly why the Times hired Sharon Pian Chan away from the Seattle Times last year, naming her VP for philanthropy. If and when the New York Times Times ever announces a foundation-funded education team, the EdLab model will be truly put to the test.  

Related coverage: Assessing the surge in Boston-area education coverage.

Related coverage: How the Seattle Times education team covered the COVID-19 crisis