This Week In Education Weighing The Education Writers Assoc. Under Lisa Walker

This Week In Education

Weighing The Education Writers Assoc. Under Lisa Walker

by Alexander Russo

I had the chance to talk with outgoing Education Writers Association executive director Lisa Walker the other day and was reminded how much I liked her and, to an extent, what she’d done with the little organization that I have both loved and loathed these past ten years.
Maybe like they say you only appreciate things once they're ending. Or maybe the organization's current directional changes, however belated, are such a relief after years in which freelance and online writers like me, nontraditional types who didn't buy into conventions like objectivity and anecdotal ledes, were mostly ignored.
It’s hard not to like the EWA organizational backstory, which includes Walker starting as a part time staffer and an annual conference that had 70 or 80 people.I wish I could go to the 2010 conference in San Francisco next week.
And Walker doesn’t disagree with me that the EWA email listserve begun in 1995 is one of the organization’s main features, a “landmark service” as she described it. Listserves are horribly retro now, and EWA didn’t