News Gent

About News Gent

News Gent publishes almost nothing of its own. It reads widely across the Australian and international education press, then points you to the pieces worth your evening and says briefly why.

There is a particular kind of shop, increasingly rare, where the person behind the counter has read the stock. You walk in vaguely wanting something and you walk out with a specific thing, because someone who reads for a living listened to what you said and made a judgement. That is the business we are in. We are not adding to the pile of writing about education. We are standing next to the pile, having read a good deal of it, telling you which parts of it deserve your attention this week and which parts are handsomely produced filler.

This is an unfashionable proposition because it is not scalable and it is not clever. It is simply the work of reading. Someone sits down, goes through the trade press, the higher education press, the general news coverage of schools and skills, the government releases, the research blogs and the better newsletters, and forms opinions. The opinions are the product. Anyone can publish a list of links, and an algorithm can publish a longer one faster. What an algorithm cannot do is have read a piece three years ago, remember that its author has since changed position, and mention that in one line.

We say almost nothing original and we say it proudly. Original reporting is expensive, difficult and honourable, and there are people doing it well who deserve your traffic more than we do. Adding a thin fifth account of a story that four outlets have already covered properly would make us busier and make you worse informed. Curation is a real service precisely because it declines to compete with the thing it serves.

The reading is deliberately wide and deliberately unbalanced. The Australian trade press and the higher education press are read completely, because that is where most of the sector's institutional memory lives. Government and regulator publications are read as primary documents rather than as journalism. The general press is read selectively, mostly for the education coverage that appears in political and economic reporting rather than on the education page. International coverage is read for the arguments rather than for the news, since another country's funding formula is rarely relevant and another country's decade old mistake usually is. Academic work is read when it is readable, which is less often than it should be.

A piece earns a mention on one of four grounds. It reports something new and does the work to stand it up. It explains something structural better than the existing explanations do. It makes an argument that is wrong in an interesting and productive way. Or it is simply written well enough that reading it is a pleasure, which is a legitimate reason to send someone somewhere and we refuse to apologise for it.

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