How to Cover Education News in a Pandemic: Lessons from EducationNC
We interviewed Nation Hahn and Mary Willson to learn how these newsletter-makers adapted education products to meet their audiences’ new information needs.
This is the third post in the Sign Me Up! series, a project that talks directly with newsletter-makers about their newsletters, and these days, specifically COVID-19 newsletters. This interview has been lightly edited for brevity. You can read the first post, featuring John S. Adams and Montana Free Press, here, and the second post, featuring Al Tompkins’ Covering Covid-19 newsletter for journalists here.
In this interview, we hear from two newsletter-makers at EducationNC (EdNC), a nonprofit newsroom that covers education in North Carolina: Nation Hahn, director of growth, and Mary Willson, director of engagement. Nation launched the newsletter Awake58 in August 2018 after piloting community college coverage across the state and has authored the newsletter weekly since then. Mary joined EdNC earlier this year from the startup 6AM City, a newsletter-powered media company that she helped scale from their first newsletter, GVLtoday, to seven markets with 30+ employees.
Nation and Mary each bring a breadth and depth of newsletter-writing and newsletter-managing experience, and we are pumped to share both of their perspectives on how things are going with newsletters at EdNC.
Newsletter Wizards: Tell us a bit about yourself. How long have you been at EdNC? What are some of your personal favorite newsletters?
Nation: I’ve been with EdNC.org full-time since the summer of 2015, but I worked on the concept for three years prior as a consultant. I’ve been involved with our growth and engagement efforts from the beginning. My favorite newsletters include Morning Brew, POLITICO Playbook, My Sweet Dumb Brain, The Sunday Long Read, Laura Olin’s newsletter, and Axios Sports with Kendall Baker. I could list off another dozen, but those are some of my must-reads each time they hit my inbox.
Mary: I joined EdNC as director of engagement in early February. While I’m relatively new to EdNC, I’ve been writing newsletters since 2015. I was a digital producer for the USA Today network right out of college for a few years before joining the newsletter startup 6AM City in Greenville, S.C. Some of my personal favorite newsletters are The Information’s Tech Briefing, WTF Just Happened Today, and Quartz Daily Obsession. And on the local level, 6AM’s RALtoday and Raleigh Convergence are daily go-tos to stay connected with my new city.
Newsletter Wizards: Mary, tell us a bit about your newsletter work at EdNC. What are the newsletters about, who do they serve; and, why?
Mary: I manage EdNC’s EdDaily and EdWeekly newsletters. EdDaily is a feed of the most recent articles we’ve published, which goes out every day at 9 a.m. and also includes links about education from around the nation, curated by our Editor-in-Chief Mebane Rash. EdDaily’s core audience is our most dedicated readers who want to stay up-to-date with education news in North Carolina on a daily basis — school administrators, teachers, education policy folks.
EdWeekly, sent out Fridays at 3 p.m., is a larger, broader audience and our goal is to give a summary of what happened that week in education in North Carolina — and highlight our deeper reporting of the week. It’s a link-heavy newsletter, so readers skim the headlines and summaries, and click through to read more based on their information needs and interests. We also list guest articles, called perspectives, and announce any multimedia projects, such as new podcast episodes or video series. One important piece of EdWeekly is that we use our engagement texting and survey platform, Reach, to ask a question — which has been sourcing audience questions about COVID-19 weekly. We then text out this question after EdWeekly goes out to our texting group.
One of our other newsletters, Early Bird, is written by our early childhood reporter Liz Bell. It’s been fun to work with Liz on her newsletter voice and exploring her audience, which is a very engaged, niche audience of those mostly working in the early childhood teaching profession.
Newsletter Wizards: Nation, tell us a bit about the newsletter you write, Awake58. What is it about; who does it serve; and, why?
Nation: Awake58 documents the stories, news, research, and trends across the community college system in North Carolina. Awake58 also captures news and research from across the country. We reach the faculty and staff of all 58 NC community colleges, along with philanthropists, political leaders, and state government types. We also reach a core of civically engaged North Carolinians who give a damn about education in North Carolina. I strive to give people a one-stop-shop for all of the latest news in community colleges through Awake58 each week — a sector that has traditionally been dramatically underserved in news coverage. That is a core reason why the newsletter exists. I believe meeting unmet information needs is one reason why user research has indicated that at least some members of our audience have said they feel more connected to their state and the community college system as a whole due to the newsletter and our overall community college coverage.
Newsletter Wizards: Nation, what changes have you made to Awake58 in response to the pandemic, and why?
Nation: We have shifted our content to highlight institutional and leadership lessons in real-time, as well as educate our audience on the reaction and policy shifts from state government. Our overall engagement efforts at EdNC.org have included our Ask & Answer series, where we connect readers directly to official resources, as well as online town halls. We’ve included more CTAs and solicitations in all of our newsletters, and I’ve certainly tried to keep them front and center for Awake58 each week over the last month. My hope is for the newsletter to feel like a hub for conversation in the community college space — and I hope the audience feels that way particularly over the last month.
Newsletter Wizards: And what have you noticed about your audience response to these changes, if anything? Any other observations about your newsletter audience from metrics?
Nation: We’ve always prided ourselves on trying to meet the information needs of our community as a topical news site, but I am incredibly proud of the work of our team to meet information needs in real-time during an evolving situation. We’ve instituted new approaches to engagement, launched a new podcast called Hope Starts Here to spotlight bright spots and reasons for optimism, and generally tried to strike a balance in our coverage. As a result, we’ve experienced higher open rates across all newsletters including Awake58, more forwarding, and >30% more traffic to the site as a whole. More importantly, I’ve received more direct replies to the newsletter each week … a measure of engagement that I consider among the most important metrics for newsletter success.
Newsletter Wizards: Mary, can you tell us more about changes made to the daily and weekly newsletters you in response to the pandemic, and why?
Mary: We added in a section to our EdDaily newsletter which includes resources such as our daily updated COVID-19 updates, resources for educators, and our callout for questions from readers. And, we aren’t changing our question asks in EdWeekly, knowing our most valuable question is to give our readers the chance to ask what they want to know. Then, we are answering these questions in an ongoing series called “Ask & Answer.”
Newsletter Wizards: And what have you noticed in terms of an audience response?
Mary: Our open rate is up across the board, but we had one day where our open rate jumped 15% — which was answering a question about teacher pay which has been one of our most-asked questions. We’ve also seen our highest click-through-rates when we answer very specific questions through our Ask & Answer series.
Newsletter Wizards: That is amazing. Any other reflections you have about newsletters and newsletter strategy during the pandemic?
Mary: This time of crisis has really elevated the importance of newsletters and connecting personally with our readers. All month in EdWeekly, we’ve had a personal message to our readers up at the top, reminding them that we are in this together. Our audience’s time is valuable, and we are trying to serve them through important information they can’t get elsewhere about education in NC during COVID-19, which includes listening to what they need, and diving deep into issues that are affecting them — and delivering this content directly to their inboxes.
Nation: Newsletters should always be evolving to meet audience information needs. Ideally in real-time. The best newsletters, in my view, feel like a conversation with a very informed friend, or mentor, or an expert. Our conversations evolve daily — they shift in relation to our most pressing thoughts, the news cycle, or the weather — and newsletters should do the same. Most importantly, they should shift to meet essential needs during news cycles such as COVID-19.
I’ve been impressed by the pop-up efforts across the industry — and the ways that even the most widely read newsletters have adapted, even if in some cases that means striving to provide a balance from the non-stop COVID news. I have been thinking a lot in recent weeks about how we take the lessons we’ve learned as an industry — in terms of engaging our audience online, evaluating and meeting information needs, and serving our audience to the best of our abilities — and build them into our culture moving forward.
We’ve been impressed by all the pop-up efforts too, Nation! Stay tuned for even more newsletters-during-COVID coverage next week.
