Chalkbeat

GothamSchools, EdNewsColorado, and the other two soft-launch new venture sites in Memphis and Indianapolis were the predecessors of Chalkbeat that co-founded by Elizabeth Green and Philissa Cramer in 2014 officially.[10] The education news site was first launched in 2008 as GothamSchools, and it merged with EdNewsColorado in January 2013. They were then relaunched jointly as a new national network known as Chalkbeat. Elizabeth Green and Philissa Cramer began with their local New York City education blog in 2008, and both of them had reached a consensus to bring their model to local communities in the U.S. strove to increase news coverage of local school systems. Chalkbeat was initially funded by Open Plans, a technology non-profit founded by Mark Gorton and together with the rest of the Chalkbeat network, Chalkbeat managed to raise $2.2 million in revenue in 2013, most of the funds came from philanthropic funding, and one third were earned revenue from sponsored ads and job boards listings. With more exposures and the website expansion, they attracted more funding from foundational donors and individuals so that they have more tools and resources to staff up.[4]

Even though the original brand, GothamSchools, had a loyal following, but according to the interview with Green, "there is power in numbers. It made sense that we should all have one name." Green and her team decided to merge because they realized the difficulty in building a sustainable business around journalism. And they were struggling to find a way to invest in what they require over the long term. The Chalkbeat bureaus were decided and chosen if the places have a lot of changes or possibilities in their education policy and if local foundation support was presented to help to launch a new site. Right after the sites were merged, Chalkbeat was waiting for federal approval of its non-profit organization status. At that time, Chalkbeat was still housed under another Colorado non-profit to handle functions such as human resources and served as the recipient of its grant funding. Chalkbeat had received grant funding $200,000–$400,000 annually from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation respectively and also from local foundations based in the states and cities where the Chalkbeat has sites, which led to criticism from some quarters.[6] Further expansion to more regions of communities was a goal for Chalkbeat, but they were cautious on their expansion pace because they want to do the current sites well.[10]

As in the year 2016, Chalkbeat had approximately 250 thousand visitors per month, and most readers are education insiders. Among their readers, one-quarter work for education non-profits and another quarter are teachers, 10 per cent are researchers or policymakers and parents respectively, according to Green. This reflects Chalkbeat's policy-heavy approach with insiders being part of the target audience. Chalkbeat also wished to reach out to people who care about education inequality but who are not directly involved in it.[6]

Recent years, philanthropy has become a more conventional means of funding journalism, nonprofit news website such as Chalkbeat that covers education in seven cities had been benefiting from the practice. Some organizations have made local journalism a priority. In 2018, ProPublica announced that it intended to fund projects on government accountability to expand its local reporting network.[11] Moreover, a blockchain-based start-up company, Civil Media, aimed to help start 100 journalism outlets by the end of 2018, has provided grants to newsrooms in Chicago, Denver and the Hudson Valley. Furthermore, a $20 million local media transformation fund was announced by The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Lenfest Institute for Journalism to expand the Table Stakes project helping to accelerate the digital transformation of major metro newsrooms in the U.S. The Knight Foundation and the Democracy Fund were contributing funding to the American Journalism Project, which aimed to act as a venture philanthropy firm by providing grants and consulting to local news outlets. The venture firm was still at its early stage, and it runs by Elizabeth Green, John Thornton (the founder of The Texas Tribune),[1] and a successful venture capitalist would sit on the board of directors.[12]

Elizabeth Green is the co-founder, CEO, and editor-in-chief of Chalkbeat[1][13] that is based in New York City.[10] Green had studied teaching methods in the U.S and Japan for six years. One of her published books, "Building a Better Teacher" launched with New York Times magazine cover story discusses the principle behind the teaching skills and narrates how complicated teaching could be. She believes that "good teachers are not born, they are made" and teaching itself must be taught and the key is that appropriate techniques are being applied. It addresses policymakers on how to improve the skills of educators and the ability of teachers.[14] The book established Green as a leading voice in education.[15] Green worked for U.S. News & World Report magazine, and she covered New York City schools and wrote on education for the now-defunct New York Sun Newspaper previously.[2][16] She realized the importance of covering news from pre-school education to higher education with issues existed or potentially exist from school policies to politics on a more local level. This is also why Chalkbeat mainly focused on education problems in the local communities.

Chalkbeat had unveiled and adopted a code of ethics that covered all its bureaus to govern the conduct of its team members and those that they work with since 2015.[8][17] Its code of ethics draws inspiration from other nonprofit news organizations, including the Marshall Project, ProPublica, Texas Tribune, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, as well as from professional organizations such as the Education Writers Association and the Society for Professional Journalists.[17]

MORI stands for Measures of Our Reporting's Influence. MORI is a WordPress plugin for tracking and reporting the impact of an organization's journalism that Chalkbeat developed in 2014.[9][18] It is a plugin that has its impact tracking and reporting system with deep ties to Google Analytics and as well as its built-in taxonomies for the detailed story and impact types. It was initially only used privately within the organization. After two years, Chalkbeat announced the open source release of the first product in the MORI Platform: The MORI Impact Tracker where users can download and install freely.[19] It allows users to record impacts individually, review impacts over time by searching and sorting them conveniently, and export lists of impacts to a spreadsheet for further data crunching and sharing. Users can attach impacts to a particular WordPress post or a broader category or tag or stand alone. MORI also has a dashboard widget to display the latest impacts posted where users can check regularly.[9]

MORI generally combines article-tagging, event-tracking and goal measurement as a whole. Journalists need to categorize the article by type, for example, Analysis, Curation, Enterprise, Quick Hit, etc., and then identify the target audience of the post, for example, the general public, education participants, education professionals, influencers or decision makers before posting or publishing an article. They can also add a narrative description and an impact tag to the article page in the content management system (CMS) if there is a meaningful offline event related to the article. Goals can be set in prior in categories such as Content Production, Content Consumption, and Engagement.[9][20]

At first, Chalkbeat was concerned about whether journalists would adopt MORI, but the reception was positive. Lots of conversations unfolded in newsrooms about whether an article constituted an impact. Reporters and editors started asking how they could sort data by the articles they had produced previously, and they were tallying up the results of published articles.[20]

Awards listed below are referenced from the Chalkbeat official website.[22]

• Official website