Member Spotlight: Ann Doss Helms on Covering Education for 22 Years

As I approach retirement, I’ve been thinking about the changes I’ve seen in education coverage over the past 22 years.

It’s probably hard for the digital generation to imagine how dependent school districts were on newspapers before the internet was widely used.

In the early 2000s, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools had just been through a legal battle that ended court-ordered desegregation. The school board had to redraw boundaries for the entire district. Every time they had a proposal ready to go public, a handful of CMS staff would huddle in top-secret meetings at The Charlotte Observer to put out a special section. Parents would see the boundary plans when the morning paper landed.

And when the No Child Left Behind Act made test-score breakdowns available, the Observer would print pages of fine print listing the numbers for local schools.

Daily newspapers dominated all local coverage. The front pages set the community’s agenda and opinion writers shaped the discussion.

At its peak, in the early 2000s, the Observer had more than 260 newsroom employees and Sunday circulation topping 300,000. Our education team included two full-time K-12 reporters, a part-time higher education reporter and reporters doing hyper-local school news in surrounding counties. Line editors, copy editors and editorial writers had deep expertise. There were researchers, data analysts and investigative reporters to bolster education reporting. 

I was part of that team, and it was amazing. And yet we still never had enough staff and time to do all the stories that we could envision and that readers clamored for.

Do-It-Yourself News Coverage

Of course the internet kept growing, reaching more people in new ways. That loosened school districts’ dependence on newspapers and opened new avenues for officials, schools and advocacy groups to reach targeted audiences.

In Charlotte, the state’s online report cards and the CMS website got good enough that we relinquished the routine data-sharing chores. In many ways that was good news for Observer journalists, freeing time to analyze data and explore the new opportunities that our own website created. But the internet also reduced local advertisers’ dependence on the newspaper. That meant even as we needed to beef up staffing for a strong online presence, the money that could have paid for expansion was drying up.

When The Great Recession piled on, layoffs became routine at newspapers across America.

Terry Abbott, a former press secretary for the Houston Independent School District, made a name as a consultant telling districts how to take advantage of the new climate. When CMS hired him in 2012, I reported on a piece he’d written for District Administration magazine urging district leaders to use “the slow death of great American newspapers” to take greater control of coverage.

As I wrote in July 2012: He laid out a vision for a “Permanent Campaign” for public support that includes “producing full-blown news releases in news story style,” pushing those stories immediately to TV and “blasting out” news stories about upcoming items on school board agendas.

“School districts must create their own supercharged newsrooms to find and deliver compelling, dramatic stories about success — and failure too,” Abbott wrote.

As I recall, I was both amused and appalled. All organizations that are subject to press scrutiny fantasize about how great it would be to skip the pesky reporters and cover their own news. But there’s just no substitute for independent journalism. When we’re at our best, reporters analyze without spin, challenge without fear, highlight voices that aren’t being heard, and explain what’s murky and muddled. 

Banished to the Outer Ring?

Abbott wasn’t entirely wrong, of course. Newspapers have closed at a distressing pace — an average of 2.5 a week last year —  and those that survive have smaller staffs and audiences.

When McClatchy offered “early retirement” buyouts to veteran staffers (including me) in 2019, Charlotte Magazine reported that the Observer had 38 newsroom employees, down from about 250 in 2007. The boxy building with printing presses that sat on the edge of uptown Charlotte was sold and demolished. Today’s newsroom is a co-working space, and the headcount is hard to nail down because so many jobs have been merged to share duties with other McClatchy newspapers.

CMS communications staff churn through even faster than reporters, but they continue to pursue the dream of shaping their own narrative. I recently spotted a poster that illustrates  the school board’s communication priorities with concentric circles: District and school leadership near the center, employees and families a bit further out, social media near the edge … and news media at the very outer ring.

I groused a bit — independent journalists rank below TikTok and Facebook? — but districts would be foolish not to shape their own story. 

Sadly, in some small communities that’s the only story residents can get. Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism classified more than 200 counties as news deserts in 2023, with another 228 at high risk of losing local news coverage.

A Chorus Instead of a Solo

But many cities, including Charlotte, still have robust education coverage. The digital revolution may have undermined the newspaper monolith, but it has enabled a chorus of voices to tell the story.

In Charlotte, broadcast outlets go deeper than they used to. I think that’s partly because websites now offer a format to share details that don’t fit into air time and a way to get wider attention for significant stories. I love the personal connection listeners feel when they listen to me on radio, but I don’t think I’d have been comfortable switching to WFAE in 2019 if I didn’t have a way to offer more depth through online stories and a digital weekly newsletter.

Digital news sites abound. Some, including Chalkbeat and EducationNC, focus exclusively on education. Others have a wider focus that includes education. In Charlotte, relatively new digital sites cover everything from school boundary changes and school board voter guides to long-form analysis and profiles.

Blogs offer teachers and advocates new ways to tell their stories. They may come with a slant, but the best of them do serious research and break or advance news. And teachers sharing their classroom stories provide insights that can be hard for outside reporters to capture.

Podcasts offer another way to dive deep. American Public Media’s “Sold a Story” has shaped the way children are taught to read. The New York Times’ “Nice White Parents” explored racial dynamics and gentrification in Brooklyn, but the theme felt relevant in Charlotte.

Demographic changes that are transforming schools can also shape media options. In Charlotte, where Latino students now outnumber white ones in the school district, the Spanish-language media is a growing presence.

And legacy newspapers can’t be counted out. The Observer has continued to hire experienced, talented education reporters since I left, and its investigations team has survived all the cuts.

Isolation and Camaraderie

Surviving in today’s world is all about adaptation. In March 2020, when newspapers started sending their staff home because of “the novel coronavirus,” I was certain that wouldn’t work for radio.

I am writing this, in summer 2024, from my home office, where a few switches and buttons can get me live on air. 

For those first few crazy weeks of the pandemic, we all struggled with the technology that allowed us to “go remote.” Now we’re almost too good at it. When it’s so easy to do video interviews and live-stream meetings, it can seem wildly inefficient to spend hours driving across this sprawling region for coverage. But every time I visit a school or cover a meeting where I can chat with folks in the audience, I’m reminded how much face-to-face connections matter.

And that brings me to one last change: Even as the structure of local journalism has fragmented, the people doing the work have pulled together. Some partnerships are formal, like the Charlotte Journalism Collaborative, which emerged in 2019. But it also feels like there’s an ever-growing informal network of journalists who celebrate and share each other’s work, even as we each strive to be first and best. Maybe that’s because we realize that in this tumultuous media environment, today’s competitor may be tomorrow’s colleague (and vice versa). Or maybe we understand that no one can do it all, and it’s better for someone else to land a great story than for that story to go unreported.

Journalism Still Matters

I often tell aspiring journalists it’s easier than ever to find an audience for great writing and reporting … but harder than ever to make a living at it.

There’s plenty to worry about. Media outlets still struggle to find a viable business model. People who embrace propaganda, reject transparency and call reporters “enemies of the people” are no longer on the political fringes. Our future is far from guaranteed.

One thing I know, though, is that people still value what we do. For 22 years, I’ve heard from families, school district employees and community members who are grateful for independent coverage. Sometimes we point out problems that officials would rather hide. Sometimes we clarify complexity. And when we highlight a success, it carries extra weight because our audience understands it’s not just puff.

Even people who are skeptical of “the media” connect with local reporters who cover what they care about. And people definitely care about education.