This story first appeared in Ann Doss Helms' weekly education newsletter. Sign up here Sign up here to get it to your inbox first.
Nora Carr was in charge of communications for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools when I started covering the education beat for The Charlotte Observer in 2002. She was a nationally known school communications expert, and I remember her telling me that she’d never seen a city as engaged with public education as Charlotte — nor one where the media covered it as intensely.
As I approach retirement, I’ve been thinking about the evolution of education coverage since then.
In the early 2000s the internet existed, but it wasn’t yet considered a reliable way to communicate with families. That forced CMS into a symbiotic relationship with the newspaper.
For instance: The school board went through numerous plans to redraw school boundaries in the wake of a 2000 court ruling that ended court-ordered desegregation. Each time new proposals came, a CMS team would huddle in top-secret meetings with Observer staff to print special sections full of boundary maps. The public got its first look when the morning paper hit the streets. Likewise, when test scores were released the Observer would print pages of fine print listing the data for local schools.
The Observer dominated local news coverage. Its front page set the community’s agenda and its opinion writers shaped the discussion.
At its peak, in the early 2000s, the Observer had more than 260 newsroom employees. That included two full-time K-12 education reporters, a part-time higher education reporter, a line editor and copy editors who specialized in education. We had a Mecklenburg Neighbors team who picked up a lot of school announcements and features, bureaus in each surrounding county that could be tapped for regional education stories and a Raleigh team to keep up with state news. There were researchers, data analysts and investigative reporters to bolster in-depth education reporting. Folks on the editorial board had a deep knowledge of the beat. And in those pre-smartphone days, we had professional photographers with great equipment to illustrate our stories.
I was part of that team, and it was amazing. And yet … we 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 the district’s dependence on the Observer and opened new avenues for district leaders, schools and advocacy groups to reach targeted audiences. 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 explore the new opportunities and demands that our own website created. Now we could shoot for being first and best on breaking news, instead of waiting for the morning print edition. 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.
By the time Heath Morrison was named superintendent of CMS in 2012, layoffs had become routine at the Observer and newspapers across America. Morrison hired consultant Terry Abbott to suggest changes in the CMS communications department.
At the time I found a piece Abbott had written for District Administration magazine that summarized his philosophy. As I wrote in the Observer in July 2012, Abbott urged district leaders to use "the slow death of great American newspapers" to take greater control of education coverage:
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, and those that survive have smaller staffs and audiences.
When the Observer 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 that sat on the southern edge of uptown Charlotte had already been demolished and replaced by shiny office towers.
The old uptown Education Center, a homely architectural cousin to the Observer building, has also been vacated. I recently went to the new one in south Charlotte for a news conference, where I spotted a poster in the CMS communications office. It illustrated 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 — WFAE and the Observer rank below TikTok and Facebook? — but the truth is CMS would be foolish not to shape its own story.
But here's another truth: For 22 years I've heard from families, CMS employees and community members who are grateful for independent coverage. Sometimes we point out problems that officials would rather hide. And when we highlight a success, it carries extra weight because our audience understands it's not just puff.
And that's the good news: Our region has not become a news desert, especially when it comes to education.
A chorus instead of a solo
The Observer has shrunk, but it's not dead. Its current crew includes an experienced education reporter and an investigative team that has survived all the cuts.
And so many voices have joined the chorus telling the education story.
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. Dedrick Russell is a rare broadcast long-timer; he took on the education beat at WSOC-TV not long after I started covering schools at the Observer. I jumped to the broadcast world by joining WFAE in 2019, sticking to the ed beat. Between Dedrick and me, we keep a lot of institutional knowledge alive.
As our region's Latino population has boomed, our Spanish-language print and broadcast coverage has grown. And The Charlotte Post's Herb White has helped tell the story of education in the Black community for decades.
Education coverage gets a significant boost from digital or hybrid news outlets such as The Charlotte Ledger, Axios Charlotte, The Assembly and Charlotte Magazine. Education NC debuted in 2015 as a statewide source of digital news and commentary; it has become a must-read for me.
Blogs have created avenues for teachers, parents and advocates to reach a wide audience. The best of them do serious research and have helped to break or advance news coverage. And their personal stories provide insights that can be hard for outside reporters to capture.
Podcasts offer a relatively new way to dive deep. American Public Media's "Sold a Story," for instance, has shaped the way children are taught to read. The New York Times' "Nice White Parents" explored racial dynamics and gentrification in ways that felt relevant to Charlotte despite the Brooklyn setting.
So even if the Observer isn't the news monolith that it once was, we've been lucky to see a chorus of voices emerge.
Isolation and camaraderie
Surviving in today's world is all about adaptation. On March 10, 2020, I had lunch with a former newsroom colleague. He told me the Observer was about to shift everyone to working from home because of the novel coronavirus (remember that name for COVID-19?). I thought that was crazy, and clearly wouldn't work for radio.
I am writing this, in summer of 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 let school boards hold countless emergency meetings via Zoom, helped Gov. Roy Cooper field reporters' questions remotely and allowed journalists to file our stories from home.
Now we're almost too good at it. When it's so easy to do video interviews and livestream 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.
So much has changed since Nora Carr introduced me to the beat in 2002, including Carr's untimely death in 2022. But her words remain true: This region still cares deeply about education. And those of us who cover it do, too.
