EdNews site changes, new features

When Education News Colorado launched in January 2008, it ran on a primitive web platform and focused exclusively on coverage of the state policymaking apparatus. A provocative (some would say snarky and obnoxious) blog accompanied the news coverage. Just two people worked on the site, neither of them full-time.

As times have changed, EdNews has evolved. The staff numbers five, our coverage has broadened and deepened, and what was once the blog has morphed into something quite different.

In the ever-changing world of online news, to stand pat dooms a site to irrelevance. The EdNews staff is constantly evaluating our website design, its features and, most important, its content.

Over the summer, we phased in a number of design changes and feature enhancements. Now that everyone is back in school and turning from the heat of summer to weighty matters of education policy and practice, we’re taking this opportunity to explain changes on the EdNews website:

  • Events calendar. One key new feature is our events calendar, which we designed to be interactive. Our goal is to have education events, large and small, appear here so that people come to view our calendar as the place to find out what’s happening in the world of Colorado education. School board meetings and meetings of other governmental bodies focused on education will appear on the calendar as will speakers and high-profile events. The calendar will realize its potential when readers add events as well. Submitting an event is simple; just click on the “submit an event” link under the calendar on our home page.
  • Jobs board. Another new offering is the EdNews jobs board. Created with our partners at GothamSchools in New York, we hope the jobs board will become the first place job-seekers and employers go to find or post education-related jobs. And it’s not just Colorado jobs that appear here: ample jobs in New York, as well as cities like Memphis, Washington D.C., Providence and Philadelphia appear on the board.
  • Rise & Shine. A third addition is the daily Rise & Shine roundup of education links from around the state as well as selected top national news and opinion pieces. This feature appears every weekday morning and allows EdNews readers to see, at a glance, what’s making headlines in the world of education that day.

We’ve also tweaked and updated some existing features.

Finally, we’ve refreshed the design of our homepage and of our eNewsletters. All of this comes on top of our continuing news coverage of areas often ignored by other media, such as education questions on the November ballot and in-depth reporting on education issues in the state’s General Assembly.

We hope you’ll take the time to peruse our website and check out some of our new and updated features. And, as always, we’d love to hear what you think.


Alan Gottlieb is the publisher of EdNews Colorado. He can be reached at agottlieb@ednewscolorado.org or 303-903-8245. Gottlieb spent 15 years as a newspaper journalist before moving into the world of education policy. From 1997 until June 2007, Gottlieb served as education program officer at The Piton Foundation in Denver. Among other endeavors during that time, Alan launched and supported initiatives that promoted socio-economic school integration. He co-founded EdNews in 2008.
Nancy Mitchell is the managing editor of EdNews Colorado. She can be reached at nmitchell@ednewscolorado.org or 303-478-4573. Mitchell has written about K-12 education for more than a dozen years in Florida and Colorado. Before joining EdNews in 2009, she worked for newspapers in Indiana, Utah, Florida and Colorado, including two years reporting on education at the Colorado Springs Gazette and eight years covering state and Denver education issues for the Rocky Mountain News.