EWA at IRE24
Attend EWA’s Sessions at IRE24 in Anaheim!
Are you registered to attend Investigative Reporters and Editors’ 2024 conference in Anaheim, California? The Education Writers Association organized two sessions on June 20 and June 23 at IRE24.
Education is a hot-button issue! Dig into story ideas and topics to cover in 2024, and learn about public records requests to supplement your reporting in schools and communities.
Registered attendees can find EWA’s planned sessions on the online IRE24 schedule, or see the session descriptions below. Reach out in advance of the conference! We’d love to catch up with you in-person, too.
Photo credit: Urban Angel/Bigstock
EWA Sessions at IRE24
This panel will cover what records requests are behind some of the best reporting in education. Speakers will present on a national reporting project and the public records database they built, troubleshoot obstacles they ran into and ways they rephrased their particular requests. Speakers will also cover what requests lead to community-centered reporting and what requests lead to data stories, and who they talked to next to tell their stories.
- Matt Drange, Business Insider
- Jewél Jackson, Illinois Answers Project
- Marina Villeneuve, Salon
- CD Davidson-Hiers, Education Writers Association (moderator)
Schools are a crossroads in a community. This panel discussion will highlight the stories that will be most prominent on the education beat during the rest of 2024. As journalists gear up for election coverage, anticipating the issues coming from and having the most impact on education will assist reporters on any beat to tell more comprehensive stories.
From school funding decisions to campus protests, from parent groups influences to school safety/hardening, from LGBTQ rights and supression to book bans continuing, speakers will cover large ground on what journalists can cover in education, and what they can pull from the beat into their own reporting.
- Divya Kumar, Tampa Bay Times
- Graph Massara, HuffPost
- Sydney Sims, Capital B Atlanta
- Torsheta Jackson, Mississippi Free Press/Report for America (moderator)
Records Requests to Make on the Education Beat 
