sitesALIVE Foundation - Newspaper In Education

Use of Funds - Newspaper In Education

A key component to expanding the Foundation’s outreach and content delivery is our participation in the Newspapers in Education (NIE) program. Our NIE partnerships showcase the concept of on-line learning adventures to hundreds of classrooms and over a million students, teachers and parents. Here is how the partnership works. Newspapers have Newspaper in Education departments whose mission is to engage future readers and to provide a service to the community by providing newspapers at reduced cost to schools. They are allowed to count these reduced price newspapers as part of their total circulation by the Audit Bureau of Circulation.

Since 1993, NIE has published a wide variety of interactive learning programs in over 50 newspapers in the U.S and Canada including the LA Times, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Seattle Times, NY Newsday, the Denver Post, the Miami Herald and numerous community newspapers. NIE departments market to their local teachers and deliver to these teachers a Teacher’s Guide and a classroom set of papers on the day of the program publication in the newspaper. Families at home who receive the regular newspaper also get the series. This provides an exciting educational vehicle that parents can explore with their children. The newspaper articles include information on how to link to websites that provide more comprehensive programs. In this way, they can be one of the most effective outreach efforts to teachers and families that have not previously explored on-line learning programs.

NIE programs provide broad-based access to very appropriate audiences. The largest NIE program to date covered the science and technology of the America’s Cup. The series ran in 27 newspapers reaching 19.2 million weekly readers for 11 weeks, reached 3500 participating teachers. In 2001, the Wichita Eagle won the first Newspaper Innovators in Education Award from the Newspaper Association of America Foundation for running 5 continuous programs on science in partnership with sitesALIVE!

Your support for either established NIE programs or a program in your community brings interactive and on-line learning opportunities to hundreds of schools, thousands of teachers and millions of students and their parents.