School & District Management

A Media Organization With Many Faces

By Debra Viadero — September 06, 2006 2 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

Editorial Projects in Education, the nonprofit organization that publishes Education Week, grew out of a 1958 venture by 15 editors of university alumni magazines. The success of their collaboratively published report on American higher education led to the incorporation of EPE, further annual reports, a newsletter for college trustees, and the 1966 launch of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

See Also

Return to the main story,

The Story Behind the Stories

By the 1970s, the Chronicle was attracting enough advertising to become self-sufficient, and the board of EPE agreed to sell the newspaper to its editors in 1978. Board member Ronald A. Wolk was tapped as EPE’s president with a mandate to explore options for another project. The result, in 1981, was a newspaper for the precollegiate world: Education Week.

Over the quarter-century since then, EPE has evolved into a multifaceted media organization that produces more than a dozen products and services aimed at providing information on K-12 education. It has an annual budget of $14.7 million and 86 full-time employees.

“Early in the 1990s, we started thinking about the organization as a hub of assets that could be leveraged to reach different audiences,” said Virginia B. Edwards, who is EPE’s current president, while Mr. Wolk is now chairman of the board. “The idea is to serve the public education sector as broadly as possible with high-quality information.”

Education Week generated 90 percent of the organization’s revenues in the fiscal year ending July 31. The other projects of EPE, based in Bethesda, Md., include:

Teacher Magazine, first published in 1989 to further extend EPE’s reach into the classroom. Three times nominated for a National Magazine Award, Teacher was recently redesigned to appeal specifically to “teacher leaders.” The magazine has a circulation of about 100,000.

Edweek.org, the Web portal for all of EPE’s products and services. The Web site was launched in 1996 primarily to house online versions of Education Week and Teacher; edweek.org now provides breaking news written and posted daily. Users can also find daily roundups of education news from other papers; blogs; interactive features such as Web chats; research resources and databases; audio features; a photo gallery; a searchable editorial archive; and a job-recruitment service. So far this year, the site has drawn from 18,000 to 48,000 individual visitors a day.

The EPE Research Center, which began a decade ago as the research-support team for Education Week’s annual Quality Counts report. The center now has a staff of seven full-time researchers, who provide the research backbone for that report, Technology Counts and Diplomas Count, and other projects. The center compiles statistics from all the Counts reports into searchable databases located on the edweek.org site. It also does research for outside groups.

Agent K-12, an online service that allows job-seekers to post their résumés and search for openings in education, and lets employers advertise positions.

E-mail newsletters and alerts. More than a half-dozen free e-mail newsletters tracking developments on topics such as the federal No Child Left Behind Act, curriculum, and educational technology are sent each month. Readership ranges from 10,000 to 30,000 per newsletter. Readers can also sign up to get e-mail updates alerting them to stories in Education Week and Teacher.

The Education Week Press, a book-publishing venture begun informally in 1993 with From Risk to Renewal that now has six titles. A book featuring selections from 25 years of Education Week commentaries is due out in spring 2007.

Related Tags:

A version of this article appeared in the September 06, 2006 edition of Education Week as A Media Organization With Many Faces

Events

School Climate & Safety K-12 Essentials Forum Strengthen Students’ Connections to School
Join this free event to learn how schools are creating the space for students to form strong bonds with each other and trusted adults.
This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
Assessment Webinar
Standards-Based Grading Roundtable: What We've Achieved and Where We're Headed
Content provided by Otus
This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
Reading & Literacy Webinar
Creating Confident Readers: Why Differentiated Instruction is Equitable Instruction
Join us as we break down how differentiated instruction can advance your school’s literacy and equity goals.
Content provided by Lexia Learning

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
View Jobs
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
View Jobs
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
View Jobs
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.
View Jobs

Read Next

School & District Management Opinion How We Can Fix Chronic Absenteeism
Experts on school attendance lay out five steps to ramping up family and student engagement.
Hedy N. Chang & Catherine M. Cooney
6 min read
A young student is sitting at the desk in the classroom and looking worried at the test. The students around him are absent.
Vanessa Solis/Education Week + E+/Getty
School & District Management Letter to the Editor Women Still Face Barriers to Leadership
A letter to the editor discusses the challenges women face in education leadership positions.
1 min read
Education Week opinion letters submissions
Gwen Keraval for Education Week
School & District Management When Principals Listen to Students, Schools Can Change
Three school leaders weigh in on different ways they've channeled student voices help reimagine schools.
6 min read
School counselor facilitates a group discussion
E+ / Getty
School & District Management State Takeovers of School Districts Still Happen. New Research Questions Their Value
More than 100 districts across the country have experienced state takeovers.
6 min read
Illustration of a hand squeezing the dollar sign with coins flowing out of the bottom of the dollar sign.
iStock/Getty