A Gift from CER — Redeem by Dec. 31
Attention all state and local education reform groups! Get in the Holiday spirit with a gift worth approximately $15,000 from the Center for Education Reform!
Want free access to the most complete news coverage on issues affecting your organization, regularly throughout the day AND on your website? Now you can have your own Media Bullpen — free. Keep reading…
One of the greatest single influencers of community opinion, legislative action, and public policy is news coverage and editorial analyses. That is especially true in the area of education policy.
Be it academic standards, student performance, teacher pay, funding, enrollment, testing or any of the dozens of other issues that make up education policy, the media, by and large, shape the debate. If you work in the education policy arena or are affected by education policy decisions, you can’t afford to be indifferent to, or unaware of how the media are looking at and reporting on education issues.
But how can you effectively monitor and improve an information environment as pervasive and vast as that of the news media?…
…By bringing The Media Bullpen to your organization! The only aggregator – and analyst – of education news in the country.
CER’s Media Bullpen is the largest aggregator of education news in the country. Each day, the Bullpen’s unique technology, which the Center spent considerable time and money developing, downloads all the education reform related media from throughout the nation and stories in the “Pundit” database in the backend. The news is available by source, state, issue title and more.
Each day, Bullpen editors look at how key education issues are being covered and provide the insight and analysis needed to help subscribers better understand those issues. Working in a virtual newsroom they monitor the dozens of stories and commentaries on education that appear day-in and day-out across the country and analyze them for accuracy, fairness, objectivity, context, and use of credible data – separating fact from fiction and opinion from analysis. They also identify omissions or other gaps in reporting.
The editors then post their findings on the Bullpen site, explaining the hows and whys of who got their stories right, who got them wrong, and who struck out completely. Using the vernacular of baseball, stories are graded as strikeouts, pop-ups, singles, doubles, triples or homeruns. The Media Bullpen also calculates on-going statistics from its analyses, maintaining “batting averages” for various categories and an “All-Time Batting Average” for media reliability.
Bullpen posts are sorted into national, regional, state, and local categories. The Bullpen has a database of thousands of stories, upon which readers can comment, email comments directly to reporters and, create their own personalized Bullpen news feed which alerts them when articles are waiting
Thanks to the technologists behind the Bullpen, we now can offer organizations a tailor-made feed on any issue or area they choose. That feed, once developed, can be emailed to a large or limited group of people at regularly scheduled intervals AND can also be made into an actual rolling feed on their website.
Imagine no longer needing to use people or resources to do Google, Cision or other searches for news each day? The Bullpen reduces the amount of time people must spend looking for pertinent media and frees those people or resources up to do more substantive work.
Having a Bullpen feed gives you access to ALL media coverage of education in your selected issue or state (or both!). Imagine not having to “clip” articles, subscribe to costly services or wait to learn what’s out in the press from your colleagues.
Because anyone involved with, or concerned about, education policy in America uses the Bullpen, we know that having your own feed will give new constituents and citizens a reason to come to your website more often. Lawmakers, school administrators, community leaders, parents, teachers, policy analysts – even members of the media themselves – have found CER’s Media Bullpen an invaluable source of news, information and insight and they will find your organization’s Bullpen as valuable.
To make it possible for us to produce the feed for any organization does cost us money, and this new effort is fee-based to cover our costs of the technology, the alterations in the search and the management and maintenance. Thanks to the services of an MBA-Education Pioneer this year, we have developed a plan for making the Bullpen and all its assets available to state based groups, for an approximate cost of $9,000 – $15,000 a year, depending on how extensive the organization’s needs are.
However, CER is offering a special, one-time, one year “gift” during this season of giving. We are seeking bold, dedicated organizations that provide great services to reformers in their state or community and want to provide cutting edge media coverage and access to citizens and policymakers. Upon selecting our two first customers, the Center will produce and maintain for a full year a robust, tailor-made Bullpen that is distributed to your staff and board, and available on your website.
The offer is good until December 31 so you must act quickly. Here’s how:
• Go to www.mediabullpen.com and explore the site. Keep in mind that what you see is only a fraction of the news coverage that the Bullpen stores in the backend and that would be part of the news feed we produce.
• Write us at [email protected] and tell us what your existing media operations (if any) is like, how you currently get yours news and how your organization works to address reporters.
• Then, tell us how you think The Media Bullpen co-branded for your local purposes would advance our shared goals of helping the media get the issues right.
Note: Thanks to the generous support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, we will give priority to the applications of groups from our target states. You know who you are!
The Center’s leadership team will review all “applications” and make public a final decision by January 4, 2013. At that point, we will work with your team to develop your specifications and complete your own Bullpen feed by January 31st.
So get in the game, today! We look forward to hearing from you!
