Delano Massey & Chastity Pratt Transcript: April 7, 2025
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:00:00):
The third session of the April, 2025 widening training. We’ll hear from two veteran journalists who will help us turn contexts about the education department dismantling into content for our newsrooms. First Delano Massey is the managing editor for Axios Local, where he helped launch coverage in more than two dozen US cities. And he now leads the editorial strategy across the Midwest. He has held key roles at CNN, the Associated Press and in local newsrooms nationwide, and his work champions equity, accountability, and the enduring impact of local storytelling. Delano is joined by Chastity Pratt, who is the National Education Editor at the Washington Post. Prior to joining the Post, she was the Education Bureau chief at the Wall Street Journal, a fellow at the Neiman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, and she covered education at the Detroit Free Press at Newsday and at the Oregonian. You can read their full bios on our website@nationalpress.org, but Delano and Chastity, thank you both so much for joining us today. Thank you. I’m going to start with you, Delano, because as I was pivoting from doing a session that was strictly about investigative reporting and research and data, I came across your story about the book Bans and about how the Department of Education declining to consider lawsuits about them. And so I wanted to have you start by telling us how that story idea came to you and how you developed it.
Delano Massey/Axios Local (00:02:07):
Yeah, look, this is first, again, thank you for having us and for hosting this conversation. I think it’s important to me, and I guess a little bit of background, when I was at CNN in 2020 and had started the race and equality team, and so among the things that we talked about other than CRT or critical race theory, there was all kinds of unrest, but also this was the start of conversations around book bands and also people who were running for office to be able to have some more control on school boards. So I think it’s a topic that I was very much aware of and just kind of tracking the book bands. And I noticed that there was an increase, and so our data team had pulled in some of the information and they wanted to know what to do with it, but it is one of those stories that you could actually write every year, but it seemed like people were not having the same conversations, not in an intentional way, and so the bands were happening, but there were also not really being contested, and that meant that these bans were going through.
(00:03:18):
And when you look at the list, one of the things that I’d asked the data team to do was to try to pull up the recurring books. Well, the books that often got banned were books that told anything about race or gender, talked about race and gender. In some cases, you saw books that were getting banned, like Dear Martin by Nick Stone. And it didn’t really, if it talked about anything that had to do with race or policing, et cetera, then it was immediately getting put on this list. And I think the conversation that was important to have was collectively, where are we right now? And I think that that sort of accelerated, and the concern that a lot of librarians had was that there weren’t enough people that were talking to them about this fight, and especially the fact that it was now in the courts and they wanted to bring more attention to the matter. So initially that was that story. And then from a local side, we had seen in Atlanta basically these free libraries that were popping up with the band books so that people still had access to it. So I ended up basically doing two of those stories, one nationally and one locally, but it was more just to put more of a concentration on this topic that people were not talking about anymore, and certainly not in the same way that they were during the summer of 2020 and the fallout thereafter.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:04:45):
So that when a journalist is trying to communicate the importance of this kind of a story, particularly in such a fractured society that we’re living in right now, what message would you give the journalists about how to contextualize the impact of this decision?
Delano Massey/Axios Local (00:05:09):
I think that what I tend to think, I’m prone to go down rabbit holes. So if there is a story that is interesting, then I’ll start digging into it. But then I also started looking at, well, how do I relate this? How do I turn it into a national story and making that relevant? Because there are other states that have gone through this, and what we have seen from a political standpoint is even if we talked about critical race theory, some of these things are cooked up locally and then they become national trends. Or in the reverse of this, if we talk about DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and we also look at this from the historic arc that exists, and we also know that it’s been affirmative action, and this isn’t anything that’s new. So just paying attention to the history of things. And I think that the challenge in the newsroom is being able to tie all those things together that if you can even take the past and let people know that this is happening because we didn’t necessarily deal with previous transgressions, and why is this relevant to today?
(00:06:13):
Asking that question and also figuring out the trends. I just need three. If I have three, then that’s enough for me to do a trend story. So knowing that it’s an issue in Tennessee, that it’s been an issue in Georgia and Alabama, that’s enough for me to say that there’s at least three states that have taken legislative action to try to eliminate some of these discussions. And I think that what we have seen, even at the start of this year, if you have an executive order, what tends to happen if you say, well, we can’t do this on the federal level, well then that usually gives people the green light to try it on the local or the state level. And so then legislation usually gets pushed through in other ways. So I think it’s, as a journalist, it is to capture the moment we were there, we’re sitting on the windowsill of the things that are happening.
(00:06:58):
And so that’s part of it. But also just making sure that it is relevant to our audience and making sure that it is digestible to them and that they can actually see what’s happening and if they’ve missed it, getting them caught up quickly so that they actually know these are the things that are happening and this is the concern, this is the harm and this is who it might harm on any side of that. And I think if you’re doing that, then who is benefiting on either side of it? That question is something that I often think about as a moral compass whenever I’m pursuing a story.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:07:32):
Y one of the reasons I was excited about having you join us is that as a national editor at a paper like The Post, and because of your background and your history of education reporting, I wanted you to start us off with your take on the impact of this dismantling of the executive orders and how as an editor you think about what your coverage strategy should be.
Chastity Pratt/Washington Post (00:08:09):
So yes, it’s good to be here with everyone. It’s good to not to take an hour to talk about the real stuff as opposed to fretting about what is going to happen this afternoon or tonight. So thank you for having me. And so yeah, the impact, I mean, it’s the Trump administration has made it very clear that they intend to change how schools operate from preschool through college. And so the impact is anybody who goes to a school, I mean, that’s just what it is. At the same time, when we first started writing about this during the campaign, I think it was really important for us to help people to understand the guardrails, the simple stuff. What does the United States Department of Education do? No, they’re not in charge of your graduation requirements. No, they don’t determine what your kid is learning in third grade tomorrow.
(00:09:09):
So we start there before we even talk about the impact, define the situation. Define what is dismantling, what does the Department of Education do? What does it not do? So once we get that baseline reporting through, we can help people just start to understand the impact. Okay, school lunches are going to be all right. This is not that $1.6 trillion of student loans. That’s what they’re in charge of. One of the biggest parts of the Department of Education, one of their biggest functions is the student loan portfolio. People didn’t know that. So you define the issue, define what’s going on, and readers can start to understand the impact. So it’s everybody and everything in some sort of way, but at the same time, it’s not because it’s only what, nine 10% of the funding for K 12 schools. So define it. Then we start to talk about stories.
(00:10:06):
How do we begin to cover what this is going to mean today, tomorrow, next year, 10 years from now? I think that if your newsroom is anything like mine, you only have so many people, you can’t do everything. So it’s most important first to set your priorities, stay in your lane, stay in your lane. You can’t cover everything. Where are you going to plant your flag? You have to know your community. What is most important in your community? Is it bilingual education? Is it vocational education? Is it the graduation rates? When you know your community and the issues that are most important that are playing out in your community, then you can stay in your lane and set your priorities. Are your priorities teaching and learning money, politics and culture trends that are happening and have been happening for years? Is it school closures? Once you set your priorities, you know what’s going on in your community, then you know where to plant your flag.
(00:11:18):
I’ll give you an example. I used to be the education Bureau chief at the Wall Street Journal. Money, money, money, money. So that was our lane. We stayed in that lane. We did stories around the cost of college. We did stories around test scores, but we said, this is what the test scores mean for the trajectory of the economy. So you stay in your lane now at the post politics, politics, politics. So we’re going in behind scenes telling you how they came to this decision to shut down the Department of Education. We’re giving you the politics because that’s what our audience expects of us. So not to get too technical, but you have to know your audience. What do they care about? Why are they coming to you? So yeah, you set the priorities, you say which story lanes or story threads you’re going to plant your flag on and you take it from there. That’s how we do it at the post.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:12:16):
One of the things that the two conversations prior has driven home for me is that, again, most schools are primarily funded by state and local funds. So journalists would’ve to be careful to not beat the crisis drum in that regard. But the flip side of that is that the impact of whether that pot of money, example Title one funding, if it eliminated or reduced, those state and local communities are going to have to figure out a way to make it happen. So let’s start with your, I think you said you had two reporters covering K through 12, is that correct? And then two doing higher ed.
Chastity Pratt/Washington Post (00:13:09):
That’s on my team, but we also have a team of general assignment reporters and a team of national reporters who we tap often to pick up things that we can’t pick up as well as the political reporters will help us as well.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:13:25):
Well, that was going to be the next part of the question is in terms of contextualizing this and realizing that this isn’t just a story about what goes on in the classroom, can you give us some examples of stories that you have assigned recently or that reporters have pitched to you that sort of expand this image of this conversation?
Chastity Pratt/Washington Post (00:13:49):
Sure. Let me look at my little handy dandy list here. So I don’t know, just this weekend we had stories, I’ll just take it back to Friday. On Friday we had a story about the A DL Anti-Defamation League. They come out and they condemn the Trump administration and all of the different actions the Trump administration is taking to deport protestors on college campuses. Now, is that the dismantling of the US Education Department in some ways because they’re tramping on the trampling on the role and responsibilities of what we understood the US Education Department to do what we understood Department of Homeland Security to do. The Trump administration is just swooping up kids off of college campuses who they think were at protest and disappearing them. The education department has functions. The Department of Homeland Security has functions for when they think something is going wrong on the college campus, it’s the Office of Civil Rights, there’s a whole investigative process, not anymore, they’re not abiding by the functions that have been in place for many years. And so on that day we say, okay, are we going to run this as a daily, something we do now a DL coming out and condemning the Trump administration, or do we step back and say, this might be a bigger story. And in that moment we decided we have to do this right now.
(00:15:42):
And that’s what we did. And that’s about knowing your lane. We’re a very politically driven newsroom, and we knew that our readers wanted to know about this right now. Does that mean that we won’t do a bigger step back story later? Of course not. We reserve the writing opportunity to do that, but this was, we’re staying in our lane. Our audience expects this from us as quickly as we can give it to them. And so we just churned it out, bam, five o’clock on a Friday, even though that might not be the best time to get numbers. But that was how we responded to knowing our lane, knowing our priorities, knowing our audience.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:16:21):
Alana, I want to pivot to you right now now and ask you about this issue of there’s a great deal of concern that elimination and reduction of the Title One funds would mean that efforts in recent years to train teachers to respond to the various communities that they’re working in might be diminished. And because of your role with the CNN Race and Justice team and your perspective on this issue, is this something that communities should really be concerned about in terms of even a crisis? I hate to put it that way, but I’m just wondering what your thoughts are about that.
Delano Massey/Axios Local (00:17:14):
A lot of times, especially for Axios Local, I mean we’re in 31, soon to be 32 markets right now, and it doesn’t necessarily look the same for every one of our markets. So I think about Chicago, there’s definitely an important story there because Chicago schools have really suffered, they’re already looking at a billion dollar deficit, and that’s not something that the state can plug. So what do you do for those schools? Or if you look at Detroit, which is also one of the markets that we have, there are a whole separate host of issues that exist for a city like Detroit or even Philadelphia where you don’t really have a very good base to draw from to help to fund the schools. And so I think that what we have potentially is a conundrum, but in places like Indianapolis or Columbus where you have a lot of charter schools and Columbus is a market that has some of the largest charter schools in the country, we’re trying to figure out what is the narrative that we should be writing and what’s the story that we should be telling because it is essential and it provides some utility to our readers.
(00:18:24):
I think that a lot of times it’s kind of, as Chastity had said, we have to be judicious about the spots that we pick. So for Axios, our model is two or three reporters in every market. So we can’t do everything, but we have to figure out how we can strategically work across the markets to do the stories that need to be told. In some cases, it’s coming from collaboration where we work closely with Chalkbeat in Indianapolis to ensure that they have an expertise. We’ve got these local tentacles. So what is the story that we need to tell in that market? And are we best positioned to help to get that out locally and nationally by utilizing Axios unique position in this market right now? But I do think that the question that you pose is one that we’re actually talking about. Now, there is an issue here and there’s an issue that will likely grow for our reporters, especially they’re residents.
(00:19:23):
They live in these markets that we represent. They just happen to be journalistically trained. So what I often will tell my team is use that lens. You are a parent. Some of the best reporting comes from some of those reporters that have actually experienced this. Monica ing has lived in Chicago for the bulk of her life, and so she knows this because she has put multiple kids through this system. And so that is her subject matter expertise. And so I think what you’ll see, especially over the next couple of months and actually headed into next year where we’re going to focus on this and we’ll continue to focus on education because it is an important pillar in our markets.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:20:02):
I’ll ask both of you and I’ll start with you and then Chastity if you would pick up, but this whole issue of why education is more than just again, what happens in the classroom. And so what we heard from the other speakers and what I’ve heard in researching this topic is until the public has an understanding of the social determinants of health and how they all play into outcomes of student learning, student education, or do you take that into consideration when you are assigning stories to Llano and then I’ll go to Chastity.
Delano Massey/Axios Local (00:20:45):
We would probably flip it, right? The reporters actually help us to surface the stories that are most important in their market. My role as an editor and as the managing editor is to help them to figure out what’s the best way to tell the story, but also how then can we connect that to the national or whatever that trend story might be so that we are reaching in making the biggest impact that we can possibly make on that. But I think we are in this spot where every day we’re trying to figure out which story are we chasing, which story do we pursue, what needs to get the bulk of our attention or when can we put some points on the board to do the story? It’s kind of like, as Chasity had mentioned, sometimes the role for us is to get the story out but then to revisit it later. And I think what we are trying to figure out now, especially there’s so much that happens just now with tariffs. We went into the day thinking that we were going to need to do some kind of a reaction story. Then we were like, okay, maybe we don’t need to do it, or what is the story going to be now because there is an effect to this, but we have to figure out how does this drill down very locally for our audience because that is actually who we are trying to serve best.
Chastity Pratt/Washington Post (00:22:04):
I don’t think I understand the question. Could you repeat the question?
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:22:08):
Well, I guess for me, particularly when it comes to working with individual journalists to talk, have conversations around a particular topic, and I’m starting to drift myself here, but for example, I’ll use an example. I read something about the rural education funding that was part of title one. People have so many perceptions about the challenges for public education and how it’s painted as urban cities Baltimores or whatever, all the problems. But when I read about how that particular program has a tremendous sort of return on investment and yet it too can be negatively impacted by the dismantling and the cuts, I wonder about how you advise journalists to communicate that to topic.
Chastity Pratt/Washington Post (00:23:19):
Well, I mean the thing is we all know that when you’re writing about any subject, part of the story is you got to be some background, some explainer. If we’re writing about the US Education Department, again being dismantled, you got to put some background in there to explain the context. And once we do that, then we can get into the story. I look at issues like rural education funding for rural schools versus urban schools. Like any other thing, our job is to cover the biggest stories on our beat in a way that is distinctive and in a way that your audience is expecting from you. They’re coming to you for a reason. They’re coming to this local outlet or this national outlet or this economic based outlet like the journal for a reason. So you have to cover the biggest stories on your beat and the way that it’s distinctive in the way that it serves your audience.
(00:24:21):
And we approach every story. Who cares? Why am I doing this story? Do the people reading my news care? And they might care in Florida, but they might not care anywhere else. So do I do the story? Maybe, maybe not. If I have a reporter who’s on K 12 and she wants to write about what’s going on with Head Start, but the impact isn’t outsize isn’t big enough, we can’t make a big enough declarative statement in our headline, then we skip it. And so just as far as how do I guide a reporter or how do I help them figure out which stories to write, it’s every day you’re asking yourself, who cares? Who cares? And why is this more important than the thing that I was working on that’s going to take me three days? Do I have to stop what I’m doing now? How important is it to my readers?
(00:25:21):
And that requires knowing people, knowing the humans in your community who pay the taxes, who send their kids to that school district or that statewide system. You have to know people right now. We have so much news going on. I’m telling my reporters now, we know every day Trump is going to rain down 3, 4, 5 different things we can cover. We’ve been in this cycle for almost 90 days now, and what we’re finding is that what we always knew, people stories are breaking through right now. People stories, impact stories, the story we were hearing about the college protestors and how he was going to go after them for so long, and then when they scooped that woman up off of the sidewalk at Tufts, that story broke through because it was a human being attached to all these policy points. We have been telling people about this is the news moment we’re in now, if you’re not writing people’s stories, then you’re not going to break through as much. So this is the moment, this is the news moment of two months ago was all the eos and everything. Now what does that mean? What does that mean for regular people in their everyday lives? Show me the impact. Don’t tell me, show me. You’ve been telling me for weeks now show me
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:26:48):
In this heavily politicized environment, there is sometimes the perception that we’ve been spending billions and billions of dollars on education. And as Trump recently did in a press, he noticed that still horrible and the student grades are still bad. And so it’s being couched as why not try something new? Because what we’re doing isn’t working. What would your response be in terms of working with journalists around telling that story?
Delano Massey/Axios Local (00:27:25):
I think about if you have a good story sometimes or there’s there when we have a conversation about it and that conversation can continue to build. And I think a lot about various efforts that have been made, like No Child Left Behind. I came up in an era where there was a whole lot of standardized testing. And so I think about it and what I try to tell my reporters sometimes the pathway to distinctive reporting is also using your own experience and helping people to sort of relate to that aspect of it and walking them through the context or historically speaking, just telling them, look, this isn’t necessarily a new thing. Some of these debates we’ve had, we did a story last summer looking at Brown versus board of Education and you could do an anniversary piece, but an anniversary piece is only so good if you can’t make it relevant to the president.
(00:28:20):
And looking at the data and saying, okay, my personal experience as somebody that grew up in the Midwest and grew up in a city where it’s 95% white and a school that benefits greatly from it’s tax dollars that get pumped into that public school system. So I’m a product of this, I’m a benefactor of this, but also as a journalist, I started my career in covering East St. Louis and seeing how it could systemically fail a district as well or living in Philadelphia and really getting to see that up close and personal. And so to me, sometimes my superpower is my experience. Nobody is going to be able to replicate the experience that I have and how I can translate that into a story because the experience is actually my first litmus test and it’s like, alright, well where are we today? What were some of the pitfalls or the setbacks and what is the argument that is being made right now that this is failing, it’s failing for a whole host of reasons, but also tell the full context of the story.
(00:29:26):
Some of it is because going back to Brown versus Borg, none of this was really fixed then whether we were talking about, we went from segregated school rooms to segregated buses to lottery systems that sort of segregate people in unintentional ways or using zip codes. And so what you have now is a system that continues to fail, but it doesn’t necessarily fail for some of the talking points from a political standpoint that people are putting out there. And so if you can really unpack that and look at it like on the local level that is really truly a good service and a benefit to your audience. If you can tell them and show them this is how we got here and this is also why it matters, which is one of our axioms, why does this matter? And if you can’t explain that, then you probably don’t have a very good story.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:30:14):
What are you hearing from post readers and audience about communicating what’s happening in American education
Chastity Pratt/Washington Post (00:30:25):
On any given day, people might understand how, I mean everybody went to school so they think know how schools work, they don’t. So there’s a lot of questions. Can he do this? Can he do that? Can he fire everybody? Can he send the title one money to states as block grants? Is my FAFSA going to get processed? There’s a lot of questions just about all of these sweeping changes. Can he do it and if so, what is it going to look like at the school down the street from me? That’s what people are saying and asking and wanting to know. And as far as covering it, you start with if you’re covering a local beat, my advice would be what are the pain points in your community now? Is it you have too many schools you need prior to today, prior to Trump saying anything, what were the pain points in your community?
(00:31:25):
And now that we know all of these changes are coming, how are those pain points going to be impacted? Ask yourself that you’re going to have some stories because those are the stories that you’ve been having to date. And so now how do these new sweeping changes impact those issues? Did your school district have a budget deficit before? Well now what’s going to happen? Did your school district have a teacher shortage before? What’s going to happen now? Was your state one that underfunds land grant institutions or higher ed? What’s going to happen now? So if you know the pain points, you know what your community already cares about, now you have to figure out what is that going to mean now? And if you’re in a one thing, I always say in workshops like this, if you’re covering a school district, there are just certain set of facts you always are supposed to have on hand.
(00:32:17):
You need check register for your school district without the payroll. I mean the checkbook, what did they spend money on last year, period. It’s going to be a huge file. Don’t let ’em give it to you as a PDF. Do you have every employee by location and title? Do you have a salary report again, no PDFs, make sure they don’t give you a PDF. Do you have the cell phone numbers and emails for everybody who is in an administration? This is baseline stuff you have so that when huge changes rang down, you can compare. You have something to compare your district’s pain points to in the past and then the present and then the future stories to come.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:33:02):
I want to ask you about higher education and something that I didn’t really think about as much until I started working on this session and that is that we think about the K through 12 classroom when we think about the Department of Education primarily. But some of the funding and some of the programming is obviously intended to prepare high school students to go to college, prepare colleges to provide programming and information for those students. So chastity, when you’re working with your higher education team, what stories are you hearing coming up or are you working on in that regard?
Chastity Pratt/Washington Post (00:33:47):
Tell you what we’re working on, Rachel.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:33:49):
Well, you don’t have to break it all down, but I mean, what are the things that these journalists need to think about in their communities
Chastity Pratt/Washington Post (00:33:59):
As far as higher ed? You got to look at it like this. They have fired different words for it, laid off fork in a road, whatever, deferred retirement, all that stuff. They’ve gotten rid of half the people who work for the US Department of Education and that means the federal student aid office has been, I wouldn’t say gutted, but a lot of people are gone. And so we all have to pay attention to what happens when you get rid of half of the people who do the work. There’s going to be backlogs. What does that look like for Mrs. Smith’s third grade class? What does that look like for Professor Smith’s engineering class at Colorado State? And again, it goes back to understanding what the US Department of Education does and what they don’t do. So we should all really be trying to figure out if they shrink this institution, this agency down to its lowest compound because they can’t close it down, what is that going to mean where you live?
(00:35:09):
Are they going to, can they send all the money to the states? Well, maybe not. Can they? And if they do, when is that going to happen? A lot of this stuff, like I said, I’m sending my team out into America’s, I’m like, let’s find out what it looks like on the ground. But we all know that a lot of stuff hasn’t come to pass yet. The money, the title money was already sent most of it, so there’s that, but there are some things that are happening now. He’s talking about clawing back the covid money that wasn’t spent. We know that there are some states that spent all their money and some that didn’t. Is your school district one of those? Is your state one of those who didn’t spend all their covid money and if they did or they didn’t, what is that going to look like for the colleges? Are we going to see tuition increases? Are we going to see enrollment impacted? Really, if we understand what the education department does, then we can sort of get into the stories that way.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:36:14):
Delano, do you feel there’s enough coverage of the potential remedies or course corrections that could happen based on these orders? Do people understand what’s possible and not?
Delano Massey/Axios Local (00:36:31):
I don’t think so. I think in some ways yes, and I think there are people who have been following it and I think again, I would always say sometimes just the conversations that you have with your friends, that is sometimes the best indication of what people are talking about or the things that are surfacing in group chats or if you go back and you talk to family, I have siblings and going back and I’m going to get a different response to what is happening in this country depending on which of my siblings, no judgment to them that I talk to. That’s the reality though. And some are so focused on what they have going on in life that it’s like, is there a service that we can do that is an explainer piece that really helps to distill this for Axios that is going to be our thing.
(00:37:21):
How do we distill this in a way that you can digest this and so that you have an understanding and we can get you caught up quickly. I think that there’s so much that was happening, and this is also by design, the political aspect of this. When we started the year, we knew that there were hundreds of executive orders that were in draft and then they continued to roll out. Well, this is kind of like a flood of information that most people just can’t catch up with. But also news avoidance is a very real thing. Sometimes people just get to the point where even in journalism circles where they’re like, this is just too much. I don’t know, there’s just too much for me to try to figure out and to sort out. Just thinking about it from a very real standpoint sometimes is the best way that you can approach things because if you have a question about it, chances are somebody else does and you are in a position where you can go ask the question that somebody else might not have the skills to do or the training, the know-how and you can actually pull it and you can ask the question, I love the Reddit, explain it to me like I’m five.
(00:38:26):
Just break it down to me like that. And I would say, I use my ignorance as a superpower too. Break that down for me so that I can crystallize this for my readers and they have a good understanding of it and so that I don’t talk over them.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:38:42):
I’m going to open this up for questions soon, but I just wanted to quickly say to the journalist that one of our speakers from last month talked about how she was at dinner with one of her friends who happened to work in a hospital and she talked about how the impact of the executive orders on immigration had completely upended the way the hospital ran. And mothers are showing up in the maternity ward terrorized, and they had to totally overhaul and revamp their processes. So I want to encourage all of you, if you know any teachers, if you have access to that community and if you have interactions or overhear some people talking about things, those are the way stories are elevated. Chastity, would you agree with that in terms of how we need to open our radar?
Chastity Pratt/Washington Post (00:39:44):
Body’s a source, right? I was just at University of Michigan when I was at home this week. My daughter’s boyfriend is a computer science major and he just started talking to me about his classwork and I’m like, tell me more. And he gave me a story idea. We were just having a regular conversation about school and ai and yeah, you have a conversation with anybody in your life and you say, oh, give me a story idea. I know you’re thinking about something that the media needs to be covering that we’re not. Give me a story idea. Now, of course, people outside of journalism don’t necessarily know what a story is all the time, so you have to do a little media literacy, but whatever people are caring about whatever is vexing them or pissing them off is a possible story. If not for you, maybe for someone else in the newsroom, but yet everybody that you meet is a potential source. And I would say one of my superpowers is source. And I would chat up anybody anywhere, anytime and come away with something. And that’s just, you have to look at your whole career like that. Anybody anywhere can give you a story idea and maybe not for today, maybe for next year. And collect contacts, anybody can be a source. Just always contact, always talk to people about anything that they care about. Whatever they care about could be a story because it’s happening where they are in their community that you cover.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:41:16):
That’s especially important and true about this topic in particular. I would say. Let’s see if there are any questions. Does anybody have questions for Chastity or Delano?
Mark Edwards/Washington Examiner (00:41:31):
I had a short question about yourself. Oh yeah, my name’s Mark Edwards. I’m a video producer for Washington Examiner and I had a question about mainly pitching and trying to make sure that we’re including what you talk about, the human element in stories. I agree with you very deeply that that is what is breaking through right now. And at Examiner they do a lot of analysis and on my end it is a lot of explainer pieces and I love explaining things. It’s part of why I got into journalism because I just like explaining things. But in terms of, I’ve been seeing a lack of that people driven, people focused reporting that I do think breaks through and actually gets through to people and frankly does better numbers video wise as well. So I wanted to ask if you as an editor, if you had any advice for pitching and making sure I can get across to my editors that we have to include some of that human element, whether that’s, I’ve been reporting on Terrace lately, so whether that’s interviewing people like small business owners and things like that, or maybe talking to teachers, students, parents, whatever on the education front and what the dismantling of the Department of Education would mean for them.
(00:42:45):
So I guess if you had any advice for pitching those stories and making sure we’re including the human element and getting that across to my editors, that’d be awesome.
Chastity Pratt/Washington Post (00:42:54):
It sounds like you already know that that’s important. So that’s half the battle.
Mark Edwards/Washington Examiner (00:42:58):
Yeah, right.
Chastity Pratt/Washington Post (00:42:59):
That’s half the battle. I dunno, I talk a lot to my reporters. So a pitch sometimes just comes out of a conversation about something that they heard from a source. But my advice on pitching is always do your homework first. I mean, I’m one of those editors, you don’t have to do too much homework. I want to talk about it anyway. But if you can’t explain it in a headline or a sentence, then you don’t know what the story is. You shouldn’t be pitching it yet. Do as much homework as you can before you pitch it because your editor is going to have a bunch of questions and you don’t want to look like you were just pulling something out of the air. So do all the homework you can. If you want to do a story and it is going to break through with a person being the center of the video, being the center of the story, then you should at least know who you want to put in the story. Or if not who like, oh, this story needs to be about preschool teacher. I am going to reach out to the unions and the PTAs and everybody try and find myself a preschool teacher. You should at least know who the center of the story is going to be and why their story is important. So for me, just pitch with news and information already having been collected.
Mark Edwards/Washington Examiner (00:44:26):
Awesome. Thank you. Thank you.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:44:28):
Ano, do you have any thoughts about that in terms of creative pitching?
Delano Massey/Axios Local (00:44:34):
I think one thing that sticks with me, so AP is their muscle is enterprise off spot. That is where you’re supposed to live all day. So if you think about it, I actually, I just told our Kansas City reporter because she’s new and we’re trying to build up to actually launch the newsletter. So I said, there are three things that you should do. First you should see what everybody else has done on it and well first see what we’ve done on it. So start with a Boolean search axios.com, and then topic and topic that should help you to know what exactly we’ve done on it. The second thing is look at what the people are doing that move the news wave, Washington Post, New York Times CNN, those are the ones that actually move the news wave. They do a story and it is actually what everybody else ends up doing too because of their sheer influence like AP literally.
(00:45:30):
And they fact checked it reached two thirds of the world every single day. So that’s a good indication. The third one, that’s your story because you should not duplicate what those other two have done. If we’ve already done it, you don’t have to do it, but figure out your pathway because for us, look, trying to break through when there’s a crowded field, we have to have distinctive content. So I will always tell my reporters, you need to zig when everyone else is zagging. So you find the story do not be, if five people are covering it, it’s like running into a fire. You don’t need five people to run into the fire. Don’t be the sixth person to do that. Actually stand back and actually observe, do that story. And so most of the time I spend a lot of time telling my reporters to do the story that they are sort of talking about in an analysis, a study. It is a starting point. It is not the story. It is a starting point. And if you can frame around that and put a real person there, the impact of a cut is that teachers have already been paying out of their own pockets anyway. So now what’s going to happen? And then try to find that person and then try to build a story around that.
Mark Edwards/Washington Examiner (00:46:38):
Awesome, thank you.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:46:40):
Other questions? I want to jump in then with an observation. You can both tell me whether it’s correct or appropriate for us as journalists to maybe lead with this, but I just come away from this whole issue thinking that obviously the most at risk, the most vulnerable children, young people in this discussion are communities of color or lower income communities. But again, in such a polarized society at the moment and the anti DEI mood that’s swept across the land, how can journalists acknowledge that issue and report on this topic? It seems to me it’s unavoidable to mention the fact that the most at risk are communities of color. But Delano, what are your thoughts about how journalists should tackle this?
Delano Massey/Axios Local (00:47:53):
I tell people all the time if I’m on a panel or just in conversation, that I have wound up covering some of these issues through necessity or circumstance. No matter where I have been in my career, even now, what got me here, because if I see a gap, I cover the gap and I try to cover the gap. I can’t cover everything, but at least at this particular stage in my career, in my life, I try to figure out as best as I can, how do I fill that void? And if nobody else is going to do that story, I’m going to do that story. If you pull the data for the book bands, but you’re not going to use the data for book bands, I’m going to figure out a pathway to that story. So to me it’s like we are in a very unique time right now, and I don’t think that it is highly controversial to actually acknowledge this.
(00:48:44):
And I think that my role as a journalist, as an editor of color, as a black man, my experience is to actually cover what I’m seeing right now, unfold before my eyes. I have that obligation and that’s what we should do. So how does that fit into the world of Axios? It fits because I’m going to figure out the rules and I’m going to make that work in the workspace that I have and using the platform that I have. So I’m going to call a thing a thing like if we’re talking about DEI bands or we’re talking about black history Month, I think contextually speaking, it is important for me to be able to do that. But as a journalist, you’re not going to challenge me on some of this because I can actually walk you through the history of it as well because I’m doing my work. It is not just that I’m covering it, but I can also give you the context because historically I look at that I have a bookshelf of books that also helps me, and that is the difference between me having a topic versus me having a story and getting that story across the goal line to an editor. Because sometimes if we don’t have the story buttoned up, that’s not going to be enough to get it across. And so we just have to be mindful of that. But do the story
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:49:52):
Tedy, have you heard the sort of fatigue among readers and audiences in terms of, here we go again, more talking about at-risk, vulnerable communities of color when it comes to this topic. Is that something that you have to take into consideration?
Chastity Pratt/Washington Post (00:50:12):
Take it into consideration? Yes, always. But I look at it like this. Are we only going to do a story in Detroit when we’re talking about all these poor little black kids? Is that the only time you go and do a story in Detroit when it’s an at-risk story, then yeah, you’re going to get some pushback. You’re going to get people who are saying that it is not only not fair, but it is not a accurate, I guess, picture of the Detroit public school. And every time you write about a black child, it’s a woe is me story or it’s from the gap that you’re going to get pushback from there. When you’re doing just a regular story about, I don’t know, the dismantling of the US Department of Education, are you going to all colleges including Morehouse and Spelman, or are you only writing about Morehouse and Spelman?
(00:51:17):
It’s about black schools. You know what I’m saying? So when I look at covering the gap, covering the kids who need the most and always get the least, we have to do it in a way that is not feeding into anything stereotypical or that the community is going to feel like they’re being always portrayed as from a victimhood standpoint. But at the same time, you look at communities and you have to figure out, okay, if I’m doing stories about Detroit public schools or Columbus or Chicago or wherever, are we understanding and making clear to our audience that first off, 54% of kids in public schools are black and brown. 54% of schools school children in America are black and brown. So we should be writing about them more often than anybody else because they’re the majority of the school kids in America. And when you’re not doing that, are you doing disservice to your readers? Are you inaccurately portraying America’s public school students? Ask yourself that. And when we cover all children, whether they’re poor, disabled, L-G-B-T-Q, if we’re doing just a general story that is not about a DEI topic or not about income, make sure anybody and everybody’s in the story. So then when you go back and you have to do a story that’s just about black kids, it doesn’t look like you only write about black kids when it’s something sad or bad.
(00:53:07):
And so yeah, we do get people saying, here we go again. But that’s a reflection of point, the fact that we’re not covering everybody all the time
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:53:19):
As we wind down. And this has been a terrific conversation, the total pinnacle of all the different conversations we’ve had today. But what I’d like to ask both of you is, I’m putting you on the spot a little bit here, but in these next few months is when schools are developing their budgets for what they’re going to be able to do next fall and once it’s locked in, that’s it. That’s just the budget. So do you have any advice based on the executive orders, based on the conversations that people are having about this topic as they go back to their newsrooms, whether they cover education or not, maybe just go sit in on a school board meeting, go to a Facebook page for what advice might you give them in terms of developing stories about this issue? Ano?
Delano Massey/Axios Local (00:54:25):
I think it’s always useful to sort of embed yourself and as best as you can to absorb as much as you can and to listen and to talk to people. I think that’s the roots of a very good story. So going to the school board meeting to see what is happening, to see who the people are that are there that are talking about the issues or that are excavating some of the issues, but trying to get a feel for as best as you can, whatever that topic is, and be a student of it. If you can be a sponge, then do that so that you can really saturate yourself with the information because it doesn’t really help if you, you just parachute into the meeting and then you think that because you have the agenda, you’ve got the topic, that’s not enough. But to be able to talk to sources and to develop sourcing around it and not just that, to be able to stay in touch with your sources too and to kind of follow up. Because sometimes if I go to a meeting, I’m not even going just for the intent of doing that story right then and there. I’m going to educate myself in this process too. And it might be a couple of times before I actually decide that I’m going to do a story. So if you have the ability to work out multiple notebooks, do that. So work out of your spot enterprise, off spot enterprise and use the enterprise to gather strengths so that you can do a very potent story.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:55:53):
Any advice
Chastity Pratt/Washington Post (00:55:59):
This fall, I’ll have 30, 30 years in journalism. So I will claim officially being an old head, probably older in journalism than some people on this panel are in life. But
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:56:16):
I got you B by 10 years on, go ahead.
Chastity Pratt/Washington Post (00:56:21):
But no really sharpen my skills in covering education by covering money stories because money touches everything. And don’t let anybody tell you that money doesn’t change educational outcomes. That’s it. Absolutely does. And if it didn’t, the rich districts would give the money to the poor districts, which they won’t. So yes, money makes a difference and money is a good story, but the people stories behind it are what make them shine. And so I would just riff up something that the Lano was saying, which is you have to be a student of the beat. Your budget is coming up. Do you understand budget? Do you need somebody in the budget office to sit down with you for an hour and explain it from rooted to tuda? You need to understand what you’re getting yourself into. Because if the US Department of Education is either closed, probably not, or dismantled or shrunk, there’s going to be some financial blowback for every school district in every college in America.
(00:57:27):
Do you understand your budget? Can someone explain it to you? What are these changes going to mean for your state? You need to understand your state, how your state is funded, your state school aid formula. Do you really understand it? Do you understand the timeline for when the budget is just in draft form and when it becomes a real living thing and it’s going to get voted on? Do you understand the public comment period for either of those things? Is your state ready for what’s going to happen with the Department of Education? What happens if they get rid of the department of IES that collects data? How is that going to affect your state or your school district? What happens if they claw back the covid money? What happens with staffing is your state or your school district staff to a level to absorb the changes that are coming. These are just basic questions. This is where you have to be a student of the beat. Like Mr. Massey, he was saying, you have to learn how things go. And if it is huge, it’s a lot. There’s somebody in your district or your state or your teacher’s union, somebody could sit down and explain it all to you over several periods, not in just one conversation, but I would just say, become a student, like you said of the beat. Know what you don’t know and try and figure it out.
(00:58:52):
The stories will come, the stories will come.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:58:57):
If there are no final questions, last call, if there’s someone who wants to ask a question, if not, or did I just hear somebody? Maybe not. So I’m going to end with a conversation I had with Sonia Ross about what’s happening with all of the executive orders and everything that’s going on in Washington these days. And I admitted to her that it got me shook for a minute. It’s like, what the heck is going on? Sonia’s whole energy is, don’t believe the hype. It’s targeted. It’s designed to disrupt and throw people off, and there’s going to be enough of a firewall in place and lawsuits and whatever. So when it comes to this issue of education, I’d like both of you to sort of give us your sense of where we are in terms of potential impact. Whether we should be panicking, running in the streets, or whether or not we need to be communicating to the public that there are solutions. There is something to be hopeful about.
Chastity Pratt/Washington Post (01:00:22):
I was looking, I’m like, is it my turn? Yes. Schools are about children and young adults. And when you’re doing stories about children, there’s always hope. There’s always, there needs to be hope. There has to be hope young minds. And so it’s your job to find that hope. Absolutely. But I think we are in a moment, not unlike the pandemic, during the pandemic, if you are on the education beat, then you are square in the middle of the spotlight because people had their kids at home and they didn’t want ’em there. Then that grew mushroomed into very, very many, many, many stories. So we are in a moment where this administration is trying to make some historic changes. And if you’re covering education right now, you are in the spotlight. You are in the hot seat. You can do big stories right now. Keep your eyes open, go to the school board meeting, but go to the basketball game too. Basketball game, because people at the school board mean it. People at the basketball game, not the same people. So yes, this is a moment, this is a historic moment. You become a student of the craft. You do the stories that people care about, about people. And I think, again, there is hope because this is about children and young minds.
Delano Massey/Axios Local (01:01:44):
Also, shout out to the OG Sonya Ross. She is one of my mentors. I would say a great person once said, I believe the children are future and we should teach them well and let them lead the way. So if dude really seriously, well bring some Levi to this. Yeah, I think that, look, there’s been periods of time throughout history that have been tough. And I talked to Sonia too because I had called her when I was at the ap. She was my mentor on the race and ethnicity team, and she is somebody who always would say that, right? But I think that what is also important is that I think about I’m having fun.
(01:02:29):
Well, I am. I’m doing what I want to do, and I’m pursuing the stories that I want to do, and that’s also joy. I will write about some of the things that are happening, but I’m also going to go review Will Smith’s album too, and write about that. And So to me it’s finding a way to balance and to cleanse my own editorial palette, but also capturing these moments of joy that are happening in this very historic moment as well, because it’s not all bad too. And so even if we talk about going to the schools, but capturing these programs that are really helping kids and highlighting people who are doing that work because there are people who in this moment are stepping up right now in this particular moment. Those stories need to be told as well, don’t singularly focus on one aspect of this, but look at the whole picture that is forming.
(01:03:18):
And the tapestry that we have is one that is beautiful and also as journalists. And I would say that we have a responsibility in that to make sure that we’re capturing the full scope of it. You will never say that. I just did one thing. You will say that I do a lot of different things, but that is the trajectory in my career. It’s kind of like Hawkeye. The Avengers. He’s got a different arrow in his quiver for a different scenario. It doesn’t matter what it is. Be that person that is like the jack of all trades, but also be one that can master something, right? You’re a subject matter expert. And I think that where we are right now is there’s a whole lot of things that are happening, but this work that we’re doing, it is very important not just for us right now, but for the people that will look back on this moment 20 years from now,
Rachel Jones/NPF (01:04:02):
We have gotten two incredibly valuable pieces of advice today. One from Laura Anderson of the Omics Lab who told us to never waste a crisis. We are in a crisis moment of sorts, but now Delano and Chastity have told us and reminded us that we are in a moment and we need to become students of this moment. And we need to do that for our communities and for the children. So Delano Massey of Axios Local and Chastity Pratt of the Washington Post, we are incredibly grateful to both of you for joining us today. And thank you so much.
###
