Guest– Mebane Rash
Ep. 149: Journalism in the Business of Hope
Chapters
00:00 A Journey into Public Policy Journalism
03:58 Building a Modern Education Platform
10:54 Listening as a Core Value
20:09 Journalism During Times of Crisis
30:04 Technology and Future Educational Models
40:46 The Path Forward for EdNC
News can feel relentlessly negative, but as this week’s guest points out, that’s a choice about what gets covered, not a reflection of what’s actually happening in our communities. Mebane Rash is the founder and CEO of EdNC, a nonprofit, paywall-free online newsroom that covers every public school and all 58 community colleges in North Carolina. She joins Bill to talk about building a newsroom on the principle of “do no harm,” why her team aims to be the best in the world at listening, and how being in schools day in and day out makes it hard not to be optimistic.
Mebane started EdNC in 2015 with three people and a mandate to “fail forward, fail fast.”Today her 15-person team spends four days a week on the road in all 100 counties, and half of EdNC’s readers now live outside North Carolina. When Hurricane Helene devastated the western part of the state, EdNC didn’t just report on the damage; they used that same reporting to write grants and bring funding into the hardest-hit counties, earning the NorthCarolina Press Association’s Public Service Award. She also shares what she saw in Singapore’s classrooms, why she’s never seen cell phones be a real problem in thousands of school visits, and how she thinks about AI as just the latest change teachers will figure out, as they always have.
Resources:
EdNC Website
LinkedIn
Twitter
Facebook
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