Let's Get More Child Care Stories Out There
Help me find people to apply for New America's Child Care Reporting Grants
A former editor of mine, while editing a policy-heavy story that needed more depth, lamented the demise of beat reporting. Beat reporting allowed a reporter to concentrate on one policy area, learn the details of an issue and understand its breadth and depth. So instead of individual stories becoming a primer on the topic of the day, the reported pieces could be written with greater clarity and with a quicker turnaround.
This editor, of course, was right. And as newsrooms shrink, beat reporting has become less common, more reporters are jacks-of-all-trades and fewer have the bandwidth to last many years into the job, so the length of experience may have a ceiling.
My colleague Haley Swenson and I have argued the case for making child care its own beat in a newsroom for similar reasons - child care is complicated. There are variables on multiple sides: the parents who need it and pay too much, the providers who offer it and receive too little, the children who use it and rely on a high quality experience to learn and grow, and the public policies that tweak the edges for the very poor, but do little to fix what is essentially a broken system and a market that doesn’t work. When I first began researching and reporting child care stories as part of the Better Life Lab’s Innovations for Universal Child Care Report, I was surprised how long each reported story would take to fully integrate the policy ramifications. Reporting on complicated, nuanced policy is, unsurprisingly, hard to do, despite the fact that the public’s need to understand child care in all its complexity has never felt more urgent.
This need is further exacerbated by the shrinking of newsrooms nationwide – leaving fewer reporters on staff to develop expertise, and fewer editors, sometimes with fewer years of experience, juggling more stories to keep up with digital demand.
As has been reported at
, more than 2,500 newspapers in the United States have closed since 2005, and the New York Times predicts we will lose one-third of U.S. newspapers by 2025. This loss of journalism expertise is daunting, and it means that public policy issues like child care may not receive the attention they need.But we are trying to change that. The Better Life Lab at New America is offering another round of child care reporting grants. We’re looking for solutions-oriented stories focusing on how and why care issues matter to families, our country, and a thriving economy. We’re open to all mediums, including print and online stories, photojournalism, graphic stories**, podcasts, audio stories, multimedia projects, and videography. We want readers to come away with an understanding of why care matters and how it could play a pivotal role in the upcoming election this November. New and experienced reporters are welcome, and we especially encourage people with traditionally underrepresented viewpoints and perspectives in media to apply.
These grants are in collaboration with the Bainum Family Foundation’s WeVision EarlyEd program, whose core shifts include rethinking when learning begins, who is served, the quality of care, or what it costs and how to pay for it. (You can read more about these shifts here.)
So please…if you are a writer/reporter/content producer and are interested in applying, I encourage you to do so, or please forward along to others who you think may be a good fit. We’re open to ideating, to creative pitches big and small, and crazy ideas that haven’t yet found a home. What matters is if you want to write about policies surrounding child care and the real-world impacts, and from there we can start a conversation.
And for those who identify more as readers/consumers of media rather than writers, please keep on reading. I’ll continue to link to articles and stories I think are relevant in the early education/child care space and I encourage you to be cognizant of the role our country’s policies play in making parenting and caregiving more difficult for many. It’s very hard to be a parent in America right now, but it doesn’t have to be this way.
It’s a policy choice that we’ve made.
So please help me find some journalists willing to tackle this!
Better Life Lab’s Child Care Reporting Grants
Read the full call out for reporting grants here from The Better Life Lab.
Please feel free to share widely with your networks.
Want to know what a reporting grant story can look like? Read about the previous round of reporting grants here, and see the list of stories we published.
**The reporting grants were also the point of origin for my foray into graphic stories with illustrator and friend Dianne Kirsch. You can read the three graphic stories in their entirety here: Did Covid Break Child Care? | The Child Care Cliff | Why is Child Care So Expensive?
(This Substack has been adapted from a previous article published by Early Learning Nation).