Education

Editor Picked for Real Clear Education

By Mark Walsh — January 08, 2014 1 min read
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Real Clear Education, the soon-to-be-launched education news channel of RealClearPolitics.com and Bellwether Education Partners, now has an editor.

It’s Emmeline Zhao, who was the associate education editor of The Huffington Post until last year and before that was an economics reporter and an intern at The Wall Street Journal.

As I reported here last month, Real Clear Education is scheduled for launch this spring and will be an unusual partnership between Chicago-based RealClearPolitics, which covers and aggregates news not just in politics but in about a dozen topical areas, and Bellwether, a Washington nonprofit education consulting firm led by Andrew J. Rotherham.

Rotherham, a former domestic-policy aide to President Bill Clinton and a frequent writer on education topics, will be executive editor of the site, with Zhao as the editor. Both Rotherham and Tom Bevan, the executive editor of RealClearPolitics, said in my story last month that they didn’t foresee major conflicts with an education news channel in the editorial control of a policy firm, though several Web comments about the piece said they had their doubts.

The choice of an editor with solid news credentials may help allay those concerns. Zhao, a graduate of Duke University, has also worked for the Duke Chronicle and for FTChinese.com, the Chinese-language affiliate of The Financial Times.

And in 2008, she was in China to cover the Beijing Olympics for Olympic News Service. She covered baseball, Rotherham said in an email.

“Emmeline brings a great combination of new media savvy, old media values, and experience covering education,” Rotherham said. “She’s a rising star and we’re glad to have her on the team.”

A version of this news article first appeared in the Education and the Media blog.