2011 Contest Winners Offer Tips and Advice

EWA has asked the first-place winners of the 2011 National Awards for Education Reporting to share  tips and advice with their colleagues based on their experience. Several have graciously responded and over the next week or so, we will publish their observations.

Fawn Johnson, National Journal. First prize in Single Day News Coverage or Feature, Small Market Print:
I may be in a different position than other education writers because I cover education from a national perspective rather than a local one. My project—to get the people who created No Child Left Behind to evaluate how well it accomplished its goals—required a lot of badgering. In that sense, it is no different from the excellent local stories that I see popping up from other EWA members.

For the story “Report Card,” I put together a short written survey asking participants to “grade” the various aspects of No Child Left Behind that were identified by the law’s drafters as its goals. (I came up with four primary objectives of the law and three secondary ones and asked for letter grades on all seven.)

Then I started bugging people. I knew I needed the major players like Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., and House Speaker John Boehner, who wrote the law. I also needed the teachers' unions to weigh in, the education reform advocates, and the members of Congress now charged with reauthorization. Oy. I got very good at sending e-mail reminders. Here are some tips.

• Send individual notes, not mass e-mails. It’s a pain, but it comes off better. Your sources will know you really need them. Follow up with phone messages... nicely.
• Nail down the most important people before you even embark on the rest of the project. Miller’s office told me that he would be willing to be involved, and they gave me an hour-long sit-down interview. So did Margaret Spellings (former Education Secretary), both of whom were key to the question of whether (and how) the law worked.
• Make sure you ask the right questions. That required advance research and interviews to determine what, in fact, the issues were. Some of my survey participants filled that role for me.
• Once you have the key players on board, you can use them to get other people to participate. I got one union to respond, and then the other one weighed in. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, the chairman of the Senate Education Committee, was the very last one to give me a response, and his staff knew I needed it because all the other Education “big four” in Congress had participated.
• Be flexible. I spent a lot of time explaining my project to people who were nervous about it. Half of my respondents refused to assign grades to the parts of the law, but they could answer my questions really well in narrative form. In the end, I got a very nuanced view of what worked and what didn’t by asking the same questions in lots of different ways—by e-mail, on the phone, and in person. I made clear what was quotable and what I would use only on background.
• Give your participants deadlines way in advance of when you really need them. That way the stragglers will feel like you’re giving them special treatment, and you can start writing your piece while you’re harassing them.