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From AJR,   January/February 2003

TV Blackout   

By Carl Sessions Stepp

Carl Sessions Stepp (cstepp@umd.edu) began writing for his hometown paper, the Marlboro Herald-Advocate in Bennettsville, South Carolina, in 1963, after his freshman year in high school. He studied journalism at the University of South Carolina, where he edited The Gamecock.

After college, he worked for the St. Petersburg Times and the Charlotte Observer before becoming the first national editor at USA Today in 1982. In 1983, he joined the University of Maryland journalism faculty full time.

In the ensuing 30 years, he also has served as senior editor and book reviewer for AJR, writing dozens of pieces. He has been a visiting writing and editing coach for news organizations in more than 30 states.

     


Ask Joanne Williams how much time she spends covering colleges, and the education reporter for WITI, Fox 6, in Milwaukee answers: "Not much...not enough."

I have to cover all of education from preschool to grad school," she says, "and it's only me."

Williams has covered education for the past three years, one of the relatively few TV journalists on the beat full time. For broadcast, even more than for print, K-12 coverage overshadows higher education. Williams estimates that about 20 percent of her time goes to higher education. "So much about higher education that makes news is fiscal, and generally that isn't the stuff that makes really good TV news," she says.

Yvonne Simons, who has covered education for the past 15 years, the last eight at WRAL in Raleigh, calculates that higher education has received from 10 percent to 25 percent of her attention.

Simons, a Knight-Wallace fellow at the University of Michigan this year, says she knows only a handful of broadcast reporters who cover education full time and none on higher education full time. Elementary and secondary school news dominates because of its relevance to viewers.

"When you look at the primary demographic of television--18 to 45 years old," Simons says, "you are looking at parents of young kids."

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