Mating Game

Newspaper in Education programs strive to link worlds of print and Web

Editor & Publisher, 6 February 1999

By Matt Villano

Students in Doreen Andersen's fourth grade class know more about Long Island history than many Newsday readers. Last year, in a series called "Long Island: Our Story," the newspaper published an article about a famous person or event in the area's past. Most readers saw only the printed page, but Andersen distributed the articles to her students, then rounded out each lesson with a trip to the paper's Newspaper in Education (NIE) Web site.

Online, the children checked out diagrams and pictures, followed interactive time lines, and listened to narrated excerpts of associated material. They played "Mystery of History," a game in which Andersen asked her students a question about a particular article, and they had to hunt down the answer on the Web. With a few clicks of a mouse, says Andersen, the articles simply came to life.

"My kids were able to read these articles in print, and then they saw them develop on a screen right in front of them," says Andersen, who teaches at the Nesconset Elementary School in Smithtown, N.Y. "The newspaper took on a whole new dimension for them. They still enjoyed the printed pages, but they thought this…[was] just plain fun."

As more teachers in elementary and secondary schools across the country connect their classrooms to the Internet, publications like Newsday are responding with Web-based educational resources that combine editorial content with interactive, multimedia wonders. Nearly 75 newspapers from Fairbanks to Fort Lauderdale have launched NIE sites over the last few years, and Jim Abbott, manager of educational programs for the Newspaper Association of America Foundation (NAAF), says that number should top 100 before the end of the millennium.

Those NIE directors who have Web sites say that while subscribing teachers enjoy receiving newspapers in their classrooms once a week, the teachers like the luxury of having lesson plans online. Students, they add, love the seemingly endless amount of information they can find there. Parents like the sites, too, because they can log on from home and see what kinds of lessons their children learn in school.

The only ones who aren't always raving about these new, education-oriented Web sites are the NIE coordinators themselves. While news organizations continue to view the Web as a medium they must conquer to survive, NIE organizations are struggling to figure out how they can use the Internet to attract young readers and, at the same time, teach those youngsters the importance of the printed page.

"We put NIE online because these days, youn people aren't as involved with actual newspapers as they are with the Internet," says Patricia Houk, Newsday's educational services manager and the woman who masterminded the Web site Andersen uses in her classroom. "An NIE Web site can be a great resource for these kids, but at the same time, we certainly don't want them to stop reading the paper itself."

Newsday's online NIE program was launched with the online newspaper in 1995. From the beginning, Houk says, the goal of the Web site has been to support the program's offline curriculum and activities.

This month to commemorate Black History Month, Houk says her staff has developed activities based on reprinted content from the newspaper itself.

Suggestions on how teachers can incorporate the paper's daily coverage of this event comes directly from curriculum guides and these activity pages. The rest of the information - such as a link to a virtual tour of the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis - exists only on the Web. Teachers can develop lesson plans solely from information in the guides, but Houk says those teachers who incorporate some of the Web-only information will make a good lesson even better.

"We want these kids to understand that Newsday is their information provide, online and off," she says. "If a teacher doesn't bother with our Web site, will that teacher's lesson suffer? Not necessarily. But the teachers who use the Web and the paper together are the ones who'll teach more interesting stuff."

Jean House knows all about combining online and offline curriculum. House, NIE manager for the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., used the Web to revolutionize her paper's NIE program in just three years. With the help of a local high school student, the News & Observer launched its "School Zone" NIE Web site in 1996. When it went live, the site featured a subsection called "NandoNext," a series of pages written by teens, for teens. Teen-agers logged on by the thousands to read articles about topics like dating, saving money, and applying to college. The pages were so successful, House says, that the News & Observer began printing them as part of the paper the following September, in a monthly section called "Horizons."

"We went about the whole thing totally backward," House says of the teen page. "Usually, papers have the content first, then they put it online. In the case of 'Horizons,' we used the Web to develop the content, then we put it in the paper."

Since then, as House and her staff have trained North Carolina teachers how to use the Web, they've promoted their offline NIE program through its new online component. The results, House says, have been overwhelming - since 1996, the News & Observer's annual NIE circulation has tripled from 400,000 to about 1.2 million. What does this mean for NIE? More students are reading the paper now than ever before, House says.

One of the main reasons the News & Observer's NIE program experienced such a significant increase in circulation was a carefully developed strategy of marketing the program to a specific audience - teachers. According to the NAAF's Abbott, many online NIE programs falter because they never identify whom they're trying to reach through the Web.

"An audience is something NIE programs must define before they go online," Abbott says. "That's just as true for NIE programs as it is for any other department of a news organization."

If most of the teachers in an area aren't wired, Abbott suggests, a newspaper should wait to put its NIE program on the Web. Such is the case in Florida, at the St. Petersburg Times. NIE manager Lee Ann Yeager says that most of the teachers who subscribe to her program work in economically troubled school districts, and few of them have computers in their classrooms. Since there's no demand from subscribers, she adds, her organization has not developed an online component to NIE.

"We're not seeing many requests by teachers to go online, so we don't feel a rush to do it," Yeager says, noting that even if teachers were wired, the Times wouldn't have the monetary resources to put NIE on the Internet. "When more of [the paper's subscribing teachers] go online, I'm sure we'll feel the need to get [an NIE Web site] going. Until then, it's just not a priority."

Some papers, however, have succeeded in establishing a successful Web component to their NIE programs with no audience at all. The Provo (Utah) Daily Herald launched its NIE Web site last spring at a time when almost none of the local schools were using the Internet. With the computer giant Novell headquartered nearby, Daily Herald officials assumed that sooner or later Provo teachers would log on. They hired J. Alan Baumgarten as the paper's director of educational services, and Baumgarten convinced them to build a Web site for the paper's NIE program.

"By providing the online framework for Newspaper in Education, our thinking was that hopefully teachers and school districts would get their classrooms wired more quickly," Baumgarten says. "We worked hard to set the site up so it has lesson plans ready for teachers to use right away."

The Daily Herald's site offers teachers a new lesson plan every week. Plans always relate to current events, and teachers can print them directly from the Web, or they can have students follow the plans on computers in the classroom. Baumgarten purchases the plans from a Dallas-based company called Online Education Inc., an outfit that specializes in providing online curriculum guides to NIE Web sites.

Teachers like Karl Barksdale say the program creates an engaging mix of the old and the new. Barksdale teaches computer skills at Farrer Middle School in Provo, and uses the Daily Herald's online lessons to get his students reading the paper ever week. At the end of each lesson, he says, he gives his students material that connects the Internet with content in the daily newspaper.

"This tie-in is critical because it helps students understand the relationship between online and traditional print information sources," Barksdale says. "If the goal is to help students become lifelong learners and critical consumers of information, [then] the Herald's online lesson is [one] solution."

An even better solution, says Abbott, is creating a Web-based environment in which teachers, students, and parents can connect with current events and with each other. That's exactly what The New York Times did with its Learning Network.

The Times invented NIE back in the 1930s, when executives decided that for the paper to survive, they needed to get the paper into the hands of students. The paper's emphasis on young readers ended in the 1950s, when thousands of subscribers moved to the suburbs and the paper spent its money delivering to homes instead of classrooms. Priorities changed again in the early 1990s, when market research showed that people who read the times every day are mostly people who were exposed to the paper at an early age.

The paper redoubled its efforts to get its product back into the classroom and embarked on a calculated plan to supplement a new NIE subscription drive with a Web site.

After years of research, a task force, and four focus groups, Times officials launched the Learning Network this past September. The site is among the newest of the industry's online NIE representatives, and with separate content sections for teachers, students, and parents, it quickly established itself as a comprehensive newspaper-related online education resource.

Every day, the Learning Network posts a different feature article from the newspaper itself, supported by an e-mail based lesson plan and suggested activities, both online and off. Times staffers develop new lesson plans every week, with input from curriculum writers from New York's Bank Street College of Education. For major events such as the impeachment trial or an election, the lesson plans evolve nightly, as the news occurs.

"It used to take us three or four months to put together a printed curriculum guide," says Patsy Morton, director of education alliances. "With the Learning Network, we can get information on the Web in a matter of days. It's amazing how much more responsive we are now."

Earlier this winter, Morton continues, she received a number of e-mails from parents interested in additional resources for home schooling. Within days, she and education editor Robert Larson created a "Learning at Home" feature specially designed for parents.

The home schooling feature attracts steady traffic throughout the week, Morton says. The most popular portions of the site, however, are the "On this Day" in history feature and the "Ask the Reporter" feature, where students can send e-mail questions about the news to a number of Times reporters and editors who volunteer to answer a certain number of questions every day. Participating journalists receive hundreds of questions each week, and Morton says that many of the questions indicate that students are following current events.

"It's way too early to have a definitive result of the effect our site has had on the kids," she says. "We do know, though, from the e-mails they're sending us, that they're reading the news. At this point, it doesn't matter if they read their news online [or offline], the fact that they're involved with the paper at all is very important."

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