Behind the Scenes

We’re happy to announce that the new Teacher Magazine site is now live. Actually, it was been live for a few days now—we were just too frazzled to actually write anything about it earlier. (But we did make our launch deadline—not by much, but we made it.)

The new site—like the re-launched magazine—is intended to give leaders in the teaching profession the information and tools they need to guide their schools and steer reform. It also has a greatly enhanced layout and organization and more interactivity.

This redesign was done on a very tight schedule, but we are proud of the result—and of the resourcefulness and expertise our of entire team. It’s a sign of things to come across edweek.org.

So please go over to www.teachermagazine.org and give us your feedback. We haven't gotten much so far, so we're sort of wondering whether people have even noticed.

And remember, everything on the Teacher site is free with registration. Come often, tell your friends, etc.

Posted by Anthony Rebora at 7:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We're sorry, but it was pointed out to us that the comment feature wasn't working on this blog. We've been switching our templates around to implement methods of combating spam in comments and trackbacks, and hadn't updated this old blog to use them.

Well, comments are now working, so post away! Also, many posts include trackback as well -- try those out too, so we can see if they are worth our using.

Thanks,
Paul

Posted by Paul Hyland at 4:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

(Alexander Russo, in This Week in Education, posted a short entry describing our pricing structure last week. Stefanie Hemmingson, Education Week's director of audience development , details below our web site pricing structure and its reasons.)

As many of you may know, nearly a year ago edweek.org—home of Education Week, Teacher Magazine, the EPE Research Center, and Agent K-12—made the decision to begin charging a subscription fee for premium content.

Why did we do it? Well, the hard truth is that while we are a non-profit, we support ourselves with subscription revenue. And the edweek.org site was just a little too good—rich with news, information, research and analysis—and we found our paying print subscribers were leaving because they could get what they needed for free. We offer free registration and paid, premium access, so that we can maintain our paid subscription revenue, while also fulfilling our mission to provide up-to-the-minute, accurate reporting on the latest developments in K-12 education.

Edweek.org visitors have several ways to access the site, depending on their needs. First, they can
register. This is FREE, and provides limited access to edweek.org. Visitors who register can view the headlines on the edweek.org homepage and read any two complete articles of their choice each week. They can also read unlimited articles on teachermagazine.org, participate in chats, review and download statistics from the Research Center, check out all of the jobs on Agent K-12, and receive any of our informative newsletters.

The registration tier gives users a great amount of access, but it is limited. So for the more “casual user,” this is a great option. Believe me, we have nearly ¾ of a million of these folks who are getting exactly what they want out of edweek.org at absolutely no cost.

For educators who need more information more frequently, there is paid, Premium Access. Whether these subscribers choose Online Only (monthly or annually) or Print Plus Online, they get unlimited access to edweek.org, plus a Daily News feature, to keep these subscribers truly up-to-date. They also get access to 25 years of Education Week archives. This feature is especially helpful for researchers and policymakers.

Subscribers to Print Plus Online obviously get both premium access to edweek.org along with Education Week in print (and at only $10 more to include print, it’s a great deal :-). All of these paid subscribers are the “power users” of news and information on K-12 education.

So almost a year after changing from a free site to a tiered subscription site, we have learned that we can continue to provide the quality K-12 education reporting we are known for, keeping tens of thousands of educators, administrators, and others informed on the issues on a daily basis at absolutely no cost. At the same time, we can provide a deep well of information and unlimited access to power users who are willing to subscribe to edweek.org.

Stefanie Hemmingson
Director of Audience Development

Posted by Paul Hyland at 1:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Our biggest project this summer has been redesigning the Teacher Magazine site. As Jeanne mentions below, we're sort of queasy about giving firm dates for the completion of new projects (with good reason). But in this case, there was a press release going out, so we were cornered. We committed to Monday, Aug. 14, as the go-live date for the new design. (Originally, the launch was scheduled for Friday, Aug. 11, but I managed to buy us an extra weekend just in case: I’ve been through site redesigns before.)

Anyway, we didn't just decide just to redesign Teacher out of the blue. The new site is to accompany a major re-launch of the print magazine that’s been nearly a year in the planning. In an effort to meet changing market demands—and maybe create some new ones—Teacher Magazine will have a new editorial orientation: Each issue will focus on an important theme in education, starting this month with the Achievement Issue, and will be designed to give teachers the practical tools and information they need to spur reform. The magazine will also be more explicitly targeted to leaders in the teaching profession.

Our job was to translate this vision to the Web site. Being the Web team, we got a pretty late start on this, and then decided to do way more than was humanly possible anyway. We somehow resolved not only to integrate the magazine’s new format onto the site but also to give the site a thorough overhaul—i.e., to try out a bunch of new stuff we’d been talking about on a theoretical level for months. Among other things, we expanded the page width, diversified the layout, reworked navigational organization, and created lots of new space for multimedia and interactive features.

We’ve also tried to give Teacher a more distinct identity on edweek.org—as we’ve learned from a number of readers that it doesn’t really have one currently. (A lot of people apparently don’t even realize that the entire Teacher site is free with registration.)

All this hasn’t made for the most restful of summers. An older colleague of mine in a former job once told me that redesigning a publication is lot like making sausage—i.e., it ain’t pretty and you probably don’t want to be around for it. That quote has popped into my head at least a few times in recent months, particularly when our proposed new site design was in the dreaded “comment” stage. (Democracy can be a real nuisance sometimes.) But I think I can now safely say that things are coming together—thanks in large part to our remarkably talented and composed designer Chienyi “Cheri” Hung and our masterful technical consultant Serge Ivanchenko. We are very excited about what we have going.

So make sure to check out www.teachermagazine.org on Aug 14, if only to see if we make the deadline. We hope you like what you see. If enough people do, you may soon see something like it on the rest of edweek.org, too.

Posted by Anthony Rebora at 2:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

edweek.org has a research center (raise your hand if you knew that, please). It's the research arm of Editorial Projects in Education, our parent company, and has a lot of incredibly talented, smart, research-y people working there, headed by the inimitable Chris Swanson. It publishes a lot of reports during the year, as supplements to regular EdWeek issues and articles. Quality Counts and Technology Counts are the center's two major publications, familiar to most readers, along with other special reports.

This year, under Chris' leadership, we ventured into the deep waters of graduation rates with the analysis, Diplomas Count, which generated more than a little interest. As well it should have. It's a groundbreaking report. Part of the report included a mapping feature. This feature, á la google maps, would allow readers to drill down to district-level graduation data—the first time EdWeek has published data at that granular a level.

We were under a very tight deadline on this project. When it went live on June 22, the mapping portion (provided by a third party) which we had touted highly in all our promotional materials, was just not ready.

No problem. We posted a note on the table of contents that it would be ready in a week.

It wasn't.

Then we said by the end of July.

Um ... that would be a no-go.

Believe me, we don't like promising our readers things and then not delivering. I think I can go out on a limb (after being here eight years) and say that we don't make promises lightly here at edweek.org. I can also safely say that it's very rare that we don't deliver on time. We're a newspaper for pete's sake, (ok, news outlet, for you online purists), so we get the concept of deadlines.

But sometimes...there are extenuating circumstances. We're ambitious. We have to rely on third parties. As the saying goes...stuff happens. No one's fault. But we could have communicated the delay better to our readers.

You are definitely going to see an advanced mapping feature; we have every intention to make it happen.

But you won't catch me posting any firm dates until I have seen it with my own little eyes.

Meanwhile, we'll consider this another deposit in the bank of lessons learned.

Posted by Jeanne McCann at 1:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)