With this issue, we introduce some content and design changes in Education Week. Chief among them is the new features section, On Assignment, that begins on page 18.
Since our first issue on Sept. 7, 1981, Education Week has been American education’s newspaper of record. Our editorial goal has been to cover this field in a comprehensive, objective, accurate, and timely way. That will not change.
We created the features section to allow us to tell the story of education more fully and more richly than the conventional constraints of the news pages permit. The inaugural feature in this issue on Eliot Wigginton makes the point.
The stories in this section will have more “voice’’ than typical news articles; they will be written more in the style of magazine articles, sometimes with a point of view; and, on occasion, they will deal with topics not easily accommodated in news columns.
In a field with so many constituent and advocacy groups, each with its own interests and its own periodicals, Education Week has tried to steer straight down the middle, taking no sides, airing all views. Instead of publishing editorials, we created the Commentary section as a forum for the clash of opinion and ideas. In the months ahead, we plan to expand this section and to solicit additional opinion pieces on important and timely topics.
Readers will also notice some design changes. The use of color on page 1 and in the features section and the magazine-type design in the features section are the most obvious. The headline and body type have also been increased slightly for ease of readability. A newly designed table of contents on page 2 provides a quick summary of the major stories and commentaries in each issue.
The expanded Commentary section and the more open design in the features section will add about four pages to the typical issue of Education Week. But the newspaper’s editorial space has always been dictated by the amount of news, and that will continue to be the case.--THE EDITORS
