Roundtable Participant: Debra Viadero, Education Week

MS. VIADERO: I thought I had to describe what Education Week is, but after Adam's introduction, I'm not sure I have to do that, but I'll go ahead and do it anyway. We are an independent national newspaper that focuses solely on K-12 education. We have an average of about 51,000 paid subscribers, but about four times as many people are actually reading us. We also have a Web site where we provide free access to our publications. We have several related publications, and about 440,000 people are registered users of that Web site.

Most of our readers, most of our paid subscribers are practitioners. Superintendents, principals, assistant principals, assistant superintendents, et cetera, make up about half of our readership, maybe a little bit more than half. Only 8 percent are teachers, and the rest are a mixture of policymakers, researchers, and other education writers from more mainstream kinds of publications.

And I tell you who those readers are to give you some idea of who we are writing for when we decide what research to put in our paper and what not to include. And that's part of my job, making those decisions. I do rely on abstracts a lot in what I do, because I am reading about 12-15 education journals on a regular basis. And the abstracts, I liken them to the leads that I write in my own stories. They either hook me into reading the article further or not.

And I also use them in another way when I'm looking to do in-depth research on a particular topic. And these are for the longer research articles that we write about once a month or so. And in those cases I might turn to something like the ERIC database, and the abstracts tell me whether or not to try and get the full text article or not. But I try to use ERIC as little as possible, partly because I find that the abstracts are difficult to use, that they send me down the wrong path, give me incomplete information. And we can talk more about that later on.