A peek into PBJ’s school outreach program
We’ve spent hundreds of hours looking at, and reaching out to, schools all across the country — and the results have been overwhelmingly positive
The Project for Better Journalism is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization working to strengthen student journalism at high schools all across the United States. Learn more about our work and advocacy.
The core tenets of our organization have always been mission-based: to promote student speech and to equip journalism educators in this digital era.
To do our work effectively we have to promise and ensure longevity for our school chapters, which place a tremendous amount of trust in our organization’s ability to continuously provide and support their journalism platform and program.
We do not take this trust lightly, especially since we are a relatively young organization (with around three years of history). We’ve implemented a number of policies designed to retain that confidence. For example, although we plan to be around for much longer, we only take on new chapters if we have funding on hand to sustain them a minimum of 4 years.
A recent influx of funding and support, led by various grants and organizations around the country — including Youth Service America and Harvard University (with more funding in the pipeline)—has allowed us to massively increase our number of chapters. This is a slow and careful process, but it is also a tremendously exciting moment for us.
I wanted to take a moment and share and clarify some facts regarding our school outreach program.
Why does PBJ exist in the first place?
Our mission is to increase access and quality to journalism
Our mission is to increase American students’ access to, and quality of, high school journalism programs. Around the country, journalism budgets are being slashed as funding migrates towards core competency fields and student testing. Most stunning, this shift and lack of funding occurs across all types of schools, from wealthy suburban areas to cash-strapped urban environments.
For us, that’s very frustrating. Our hope is to serve as journalism’s support infrastructure and bolster journalism educators’ impact. We are here to help schools offer more for less.
The facts indicate that what we’re doing is working: over 50% of our schools say that their journalism programs would have downsized or shut down entirely if the Project had not intervened at the right moment. And at many other schools where funding is still adequate, we’re helping educators improve programs and improve quality and engagement.
Why is PBJ conducting an outreach program?
We’re reaching those that would have never found us
Because of the collaboration and impact-driven aspect of our program, it’s important to us that our network of chapters remain diverse, geographically and socioeconomically. Over 40% of our schools encompass under-served populations.
If we solely relied on schools reaching out to us, the breadth and spread of our schools would suffer. That’s unacceptable to a mission-based organization like ours. As such, we consider outreach one of the most important things we do.
The evidence is in our favor. Over 20% of the schools we contact chose to immediately apply for Project membership. Here are just a few kind (and anonymized) comments that journalism educators have said to us — in the last two days alone — when we have contacted them. None of these educators would have found us on their own:
New Jersey public school:
I did a little reading on your website and I am so impressed and quite frankly grateful for the project and its efforts. The implementation of a school newspaper website really changed how my students viewed journalism class. I am very fortunate to have an administrator who was willing to pay for [another provider’s] website but I know how happy she will be… [with PBJ].Georgia public school:
I’m definitely intrigued. I have been struggling all year to get the students motivated and turned to [another provider] out of desperation, but we really are too small of a program to pay the bill long term. Being able to publish online has made a significant difference.Arizona public school:
I am starting from scratch, and this is another reason why your program sounds like a Godsend. My class next year will be mostly comprised of freshmen who didn’t request an elective, so I have some real building to do, but I’m in it for the long run.Connecticut public school:
[The self-funded nature of our program] has really worked against us this year and we were discussing switching back to a print copy because of the lack of funds and the lack of student interest in the online paper… We are highly interested in switching over to your platform.
What we are hearing back from educators is an emphatic yes. We’ll keep doing what we’re doing because it shows that our work is wanted — and often desperately needed.
How does your outreach program work?
On average we spend 30–45 minutes looking at each school. And we’re looking at hundreds of them.
PBJ’s outreach program is a time-intensive operation into which we have poured hundreds of man-hours. On average we spend 30–45 minutes looking at each school. That adds up to quite a bit of time — but we think it’s worth it.
First, we begin with state-level lists of high schools. We cross-reference these lists with other lists — among them a federal list of Title I schools, as well as lists of top- and low-performing high schools in each state (and lists of top high school journalism programs). The goal is to have vast breadth and large variation in the schools we look at.
For each school, a staff member searches for existing journalism programs (usually by Googling the school and for its news program). He or she looks at various metrics to determine answers to various questions, among them —
- How strong is this school, and this school’s journalism program?
- Is this school potentially at risk of losing their journalism program (via funding, staffing cuts, or other factors)? How strong are the extracurricular programs at this high school in general?
- Would this school benefit from membership in the PBJ program? And, would the PBJ network benefit from this school?
- Do we have the ability to successfully take on this school and offer them our program? And, will we be able to do so for years to come?
If the answers to questions 3 and 4 are yes, the school is a good fit for our outreach program. The staff member then researches contact information for journalism educators (or other faculty members) and passes his or her research — along with contact information — to a second, senior-level staff member, who verifies the information and fit of the school.
For each school, the process from finding the school to contact, takes anywhere from one to two weeks.
There is an important addendum I would like to make. A few people have suggested that our outreach program only targets specific vendors or companies providing journalism services. These allegations are false.
We support the work that many in the journalism education space are doing (and in particular, acknowledge that we are all in this effort together). If we reject a school’s application to Project membership, we actually often point them towards these very companies (our favorite is School Newspapers Online, which we encourage all journalism professionals to consider).
Of course, in the course of our outreach we expect to contact some schools that already have contracts with many of these companies — but we also contact many more schools that do not. Our outreach is indiscriminate of previous affiliation. We contact schools with pre-existing journalism programs and those without. We look only at quality, fit, and potential.
Given our exceptionally high success rate, we expect our outreach program to continue as we scale up our funding and organization impact. Just like many others, we believe our work makes a positive mark on students all across this country.
We will continue fighting for the right of all students to have quality journalism programs, and we will continue fighting for all journalism educators to have the opportunity to provide just that.
Brandon is a national director at the Project for Better Journalism, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization working to strengthen student journalism at high schools all across the United States. Learn more about our work and advocacy.
