Beckie Supiano, a reporter at The Chronicle of Higher Education, along with James Roche, Associate Provost of Enrollment Management at the University Massachusetts at Amherst, led a candid session at the AACRAO Annual Meeting on the reporter’s perspective on data, information and higher education. Supiano, who has been covering financial aid at the Chronicle since 2008, told attendees on Tuesday afternoon that colleges who have an opportunity to share their information and stories should do so.
“We are open to talking to people, that’s why you become a reporter,” she said.
Roche encouraged audience members to consider that higher education reporters play a large role in agenda setting. News stories, he said, don’t tell readers how to think but, instead, what to think about.
Both Supiano and Roche emphasized that higher education sources have the opportunity to teach reporters, particularly student reporters, about their work. In fact, Supiano said reporters often like to be treated like they know less than they do. “It’s a really bad interview if I don’t get a really good idea for something else I’d like to look into. If you walk in thinking you already know everything, you really are doing it wrong.”
Supiano mentioned her interest in covering stories connected to campus-level data (rather than national-level data) and using those types of stories to demonstrate broader issues and to understand a larger group of people.
“National data can hide a lot of things,” she said.
Q&A took place throughout the session, with discussions emerging on a range of topics, from student debt and college media relations operations to reporters’ processes for corrections after publishing and assisting student reporters.
“Colleges are dynamic, they are always changing,” Supiano said. “Hopefully my own thinking about these things is getting more sophisticated.”
Download handouts from the presentation here.