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Chalkbeat is a non-profit news organization committed to reporting education issues rooted in local American communities. The mission is to "inform the decisions and actions that lead to better outcomes for children and families by providing deep, local coverage of education policy and practice." It aims to increase influences on one of the essential stories in America: the effort to improve schools that have lacked access to quality education. Chalkbeat has seven bureaus where news is reported regularly: Chicago, Colorado, Detroit, Indiana, Newark, New York, and Tennessee. Chalkbeat was founded as GothamSchools in 2008 by Elizabeth Green and Philissa Cramer. It merged with EdNews Colorado, founded by Alan Gottlieb in 2013 and then redesigned and relaunched the website to Chalkbeat one year later. Over the years, Chalkbeat has won patrons, supporters and awards, and had a solid base of financial support. In the process, Chalkbeat worked hard to navigate the ethics of non-profit funding and strived to measure the impacts of its reporting and respond to critics from the public. Chalkbeat's policy shifts and broader trend focused vision is to cover stories that might have fallen to the wayside in other newsrooms, with a grounding in local knowledge and relationships formed through beat coverage. Its goal is to bring its reporting to a broader audience. In New York City, Chalkbeat has conservative competitors such as three daily newspapers and a public radio station with an education-focused blog. Another key online competitor is Capital Education that owned by Politico.

In 2016, Chalkbeat took a further step to clarify its expectations, standards and editorial practices by unveiling and implementing a formal "code of ethics" that covers all its bureaus. The code of ethics was used internally for purposes and was listed on the Chalkbeat's official website. Beyond this initiative, Chalkbeat had also introduced a tracking impact platform, called MORI - Measures of Our Reporting's Influence. This impact tracker is free to download and utilise for tracking and reporting the impact of an organisation's journalism.





History
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. 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. strived 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.

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 realised 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 organisation 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 fundings $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. 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.

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 outreach to people that care about education inequality but not directly involved in it.

Journalism Website Trend
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 organisations 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. 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), and a successful venture capitalist would sit on the board of directors.

Elizabeth Green - Co-founder
Elizabeth Green is the co-founder, CEO, and editor-in-chief of Chalkbeat that is based in New York City. 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. The book established Green as a leading voice in education. 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. She realised 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 focused on education problems mainly in the local communities.

Code of Ethics
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. Its code of ethics draws inspiration from other nonprofit news organisations including the Marshall Project, ProPublica, Texas Tribune, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, and also from professional organisations including the Education Writers Association and the Society for Professional Journalists.

Stories are accurate

 * Check facts and correct errors promptly and transparently, and learn from mistakes.


 * Plagiarism and deliberately distort facts or context, including visual information, is prohibited.


 * Identify the sources of reporting and seek independent verification from multiple sources to confirm or contradict claims.
 * Assess evidence and claims without bias.
 * Provide context for readers to understand the facts, and acknowledge uncertainties.

News-gathering is conducted comprehensively, ethically, and transparently.

 * Journalists identify themselves openly and accurately to sources and manifest to how the reporting might be used, and not misrepresenting themselves to get a story.
 * Avoid using unnamed sources or rely on a single unnamed educator to provide insights, try to gather ideas from different people.
 * Cite unnamed educators may be applicable as educators could be vulnerable to negative consequences of speaking to press when reporting about the effects of programs or policies on the classroom.
 * Use exceptional sensitivity when dealing with children and inexperienced sources or subjects. Reach students' parents, guardians or advocates when writing about elementary and middle school students in certain instances.
 * Explain the reason when a source is not named if using an anonymous source is unavoidable and appropriate in that case. Negotiate with those sources to provide as much information as possible about them to readers to assess the sources' reliability.
 * Have explicit conversations with sources about how the information they provided can be used.
 * Reporters share information about sources with editors so that they can assess jointly whether and how the information gathered could be used. Anonymous quotes must demonstrate a conversation between a reporter and an editor.
 * Give people the right to act in response to reporting that might portray them negatively.
 * Actively seek sources who lack access to large public platforms.

Journalism reflects independent conclusions

 * Do not seek or accept secondary employment, political involvement, and other outside activities.
 * Do not accept gifts, favours, fees, free travel, and special treatment from sources and potential sources.
 * Do not pay for access to news.
 * Do not work on stories, projects, or initiatives in which they have a personal connection, vested interest or financial interest.
 * Do not give favoured treatment to sponsors and donors.
 * Do not participate in political activities.

More principles are adhered by the team to protect journalism from the influence of sponsors donors, and financial supporters, including Chalkbeat board members.

MORI: Chalkbeat’s Tracking Impact Platform
MORI stands for Measures of Our Reporting's Influence is a WordPress plugin for tracking and reporting the impact of an organisation's journalism that Chalkbeat developed in 2014. 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 utilised privately within the organisation. 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. 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.

MORI generally combines article-tagging, event-tracking and goal measurement as a whole. Journalists need to categorise 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.

At first, Chalkbeat was concerned about whether journalists would adopt MORI, but the reception turned out positively. Lots of conversations unfold 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.

=== The MORI Cycle === The three stages of MORI cycle is a non-stop repeating process which enables Chalkbeat to figure out which types of stories led to the most impact so that the team could plan to write more of them.

2017

 * AERA Awards for Excellence in Education Research
 * Colorado Press Association
 * Education Writers Association Awards
 * Best in Indiana Journalism (SPJ Indiana)
 * Excellence in Journalism (SPJ Detroit)
 * Green Eyeshade Awards (SPJ Southeastern US)
 * Top of the Rockies (SPJ Region 9)

2016

 * Education Writers Association Awards
 * Best in Indiana Journalism (SPJ Indiana)
 * Top of the Rockies (SPJ Region 9)

2015

 * Education Writers Association Awards
 * Best in Indiana Journalism (SPJ Indiana)

2014

 * Education Writers Association Awards
 * Best in Indiana Journalism (SPJ Indiana)