Tension Convention: Reporting on Higher Ed Realities

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Hi, and welcome to the Trusted Voices Podcast, hosted by Erin Hennessy and me, Teresa Valerio Parrot. Welcome to our take on the latest news and biggest issues facing higher education. We often welcome leaders who are living, studying, and reporting on these challenges and ask them to share their own experiences and perspectives. We also make time for the two of us to share what we’re thinking as we engage with higher ed’s trusted voices.

Erin Hennessy 

Hi.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

It’s back! The academic year!

Erin Hennessy

Happy second episode of the season.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Yes. I hope everybody listened to the first one and saw our beautiful new graphics.

Erin Hennessy

Yeah, if you didn’t, press pause right now. No, kidding.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Yes.

Erin Hennessy 

And I’m back from vacation. Reluctantly. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

You look so rested and healthy.

Erin Hennessy 

Hmm. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

This is location two that I have shot from. So you will be getting the Teresa Valerio Parrot Fall Tour this year.

Erin Hennessy 

Goodness gracious. That puts some pressure on me to go somewhere interesting.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

I don’t know that you need to do that, but as we talked about this year, we’re gonna try to have episodes come out more often, and that means we’re gonna be taking the show on the road here and there. So thank you all for joining me on my travels.

Erin Hennessy 

Yes. We should get a tour t-shirt.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Ooh, I might do that.

Erin Hennessy 

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

And with that in mind, where would you like to start with current events, Erin?

Erin Hennessy 

Well, these are somewhat dated current events, but I think they’re good stories. So I definitely held them for our conversation.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Mm-hmm.

Erin Hennessy 

And the first story that I hope folks read about a week ago when it came out, was a story in The Chronicle about sort of all the behind the scenes conversation institutions were having around not Compact 2.0 or 3.0, whatever the current version is, but Compact 1.0. and it was a great story written by Kate Hidalgo Bellows and just dug into how institutions were working together and how associations were working together to sort of angle on what to do with this compact offer and it was…

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Or even what it was, the definition of what is this, what isn’t it, what are our vulnerabilities, is this really an opportunity, right?

Erin Hennessy 

Yes. Yeah. And so it’s just very interesting and for me to see how folks were talking about this, what they were, I’m making a nervous face, putting in writing to colleagues about their deliberations and their thought processes. And it just, I think, underscores how very much on the back foot higher ed has remained when it comes to working with, responding to the Trump administration. And some of that I think is just because the way that the administration has engaged with higher education has been aggressive and outside of the norms that we were used to, even back in Trump 1.0. But it also just indicates how nervous institutions are and unsure, how unsure their footing is as they navigate responding to these things that just come out of nowhere and that we don’t fully understand.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

I had an interesting conversation with a sitting chief marketing officer for an AAU institution. And their question to me was, Is this news? And I said, oh I think it is. Because we’ve had conversations about whether or not institutions are talking to each other, how all of this is coming about. There is policy being created for higher education nationally through these conversations. And I think it also was a fantastic reminder that text is FOIA-able. So that, I think, is also a story. I think there were so many different ways that you can slice and dice this from the fact that everybody was trying to figure out what this is and what it isn’t. It wasn’t just us. It was people across the country of very different types of institutions. So that, we encourage people, if they don’t know something, to say, I don’t know. And we all know that these institutions stayed very quiet. So it was interesting to see behind the scenes that they were trying to figure out what they understood, what they needed to find more information about and who was willing to partner and who wasn’t and why. And so I thought it was a fantastic story about how complex all of this is.

Erin Hennessy

Yes, and honestly, I’d like more, please. I’d like additional report, I mean additional reporting on this topic, I think, would be very interesting. I would love to know more about the fallout from the current version of the compact and those institutions that were consulted, weren’t consulted. It’s hard to remember where everybody landed on whether or not they participated or saw drafts or just provided feedback or walked by the building while somebody was Xeroxing the latest iteration. I’d love to see a similar story about the behind the scenes of that. And I’m not sure we’ll get it, but Kate, if you’re listening. Put that on your to write list, please.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Well, and again, because the decisions that are being made whether to participate or not, what the language looks like, what all of the potential impacts might be, this doesn’t just impact the institutions that are listed, right? And we talked about this last time. Whether it was 1.0 and there were specific institutions in Kate’s story, or it was 3.0 as I describe it, and you had institutions who seemingly were or weren’t negotiating on behalf of an industry. How did, how is all of this coming about? Because those who are going to face the consequences or the benefits of this include hundreds of thousands of people. So let’s make sure that we know where it’s coming from and we understand what it means.

Erin Hennessy 

Yes. And I think it also underscores that there are times when elite institutions will come together and have conversations about how to move forward. And other institutions below, I don’t want to say below, that aren’t the elite of the elite don’t have the same networks, don’t have the same dedicated staff who can help navigate this. And to your point, if some subset of institutions is leading the charge on something that could become policy, it behooves those institutions to say, We need more people at the table.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Yes. So let’s talk about still the compact. I read an article that was in The Chronicle as well. This is a Chronicle heavy episode, everybody.

Erin Hennessy

All the way through to the end.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

All the way through the end, how UNC used AI to help draft its Compact 2.0 response. And the question is, is that hypocritical? And I think that’s fascinating and such a great question for all of us to be asking. When we set these limitations, when we set these expectations for the most important work, which we would say is students and faculty, how does that then also relate to what we expect from our administrators or not? And for something as important policy-wise as the Compact and a response to it. Is AI really the best place to draft that? I’ll let others decide that. But I think it is a choice. Let me put it that way.

Erin Hennessy 

I think it’s a choice and I think I would be inclined to read it as the university being somewhat dismissive of the Compact 2/3.0 and saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ll respond to this, but we’re going to use AI to do it.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

I don’t think it was that they were, my take is I don’t think they were dismissive. I think everybody is minding their P’s and Q’s and so worried about saying the wrong thing that they’re doing just exactly what they’re doing when they write that text to their mother-in-law, running it through AI to make sure they’re not gonna hurt anybody’s feelings, they’re not gonna ruin Thanksgiving, and they didn’t say something they didn’t intend to say. That’s what I think this is.

Erin Hennessy

I like my version better because it’s messy. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Mine’s messy. Look at the analogy I gave you there, ma’am. I would dare to argue perhaps mine is messier.

Erin Hennessy

Well, yeah, I know, but like petty. Petty is the word maybe I’m looking for.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Ooh, ma’am. Ma’am.

Erin Hennessy 

I know, I know. Anyway. Okay, keep moving along. We’re gonna inject a little bit of Inside Higher Ed into this very Chronicle heavy episode. I was grabbed by a piece that ran in IHE, this feels like a month ago, on August 31st, which was indeed 10 days ago.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

It was a month ago. Well, but technically on a calendar.

Erin Hennessy

Well, yes, technically. Let’s not get bogged down. I’ll ask AI to respond. It’s an opinion piece written by Judith Wilde, who was the founding chief operating officer for the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason in Virginia. And she’s responding to a column that ran an Inside Higher Ed that is an interview, I guess via text, between Rachel Toor, who’s the editor of The Sandbox, and Gordon Gee, who has been the president of almost every institution in the country, except for, I don’t know, Harvard. He’s had a long, long career as a president.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

I thought you were gonna say your alma mater and I was gonna say he’s served at mine.

Erin Hennessy 

Well, so far he hasn’t served at mine. Anyway, it’s reacting to part of a conversation that Rachel and Gordon Gee had about why new presidents might replace members of their cabinet, even if they are really successful team members. And Gee’s quote was “they may be performing brilliantly, but not necessarily for you or the agenda you were hired to advance.” And Judith Wilde’s position is that “a president should not arrive at a university with a personal agenda and then reorganize the institution around that agenda.” And this was sort of the gut punch for me. “Presidents are temporary stewards of institutions that existed before they arrived and, one hopes, will flourish long after they leave.” And I think that’s just such an important distinction as we look at so much turnover in the presidency and the tenure of presidents getting shorter and shorter while faculty continue to serve at institutions for 30 or 40 years. I think it’s really important to have that mindset as you go through a presidential search process, a transition process, and then hopefully transition smoothly into an institution, realizing that this is not my toy to play with and, you know thinking about Legos, snap this on and snap this off. This is a place that needs to be stewarded for the long term. And that is what the president is there to do and is selected to do, not to remake it in their particular agenda or the board’s particular agenda, but to determine and work with the board to figure out what’s the best interest of the institution for the long term. And so that just struck me. It stuck in my craw for the last ten days.  

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

And I would say go Judith. 

Erin Hennessy

Yep. It’s a great piece.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

I agree with that. And you and I both know that when we are approaching a crisis situation, we have our contract with the institution. It is not with an individual. And there’s a real reason for that, and that is we do not want to be there to represent the president. We will, if that’s what needs to be done, but most importantly, we are there to serve the institution. We are there to do what is in the best interest of the institution. And when I hear of presidents who say their institution and they think of it that way, I like to remind them of mission. Because the mission of the institution, I’ve never seen one that says it’s there to serve a president, there to serve a president’s ego, there to serve a president’s legacy. So reminding that it’s about students, it’s about knowledge, it’s about so much more than an individual or what they can or should do for an institution, I think is critically important. And kudos, Judith, I agree.

Erin Hennessy 

Yes, she ends it saying, “the best university presidents understand that they have been entrusted with an institution rather than given possession of it.” And I just, I would print this out and hand it to everyone in a search process, every president elect and encourage them to incorporate this into their thinking as they step into these roles.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Well, and it’s similar in some ways. There’s a bridge that can be made here, to a piece that I had years ago that was talking about the brand of a president. I don’t, well, I don’t like. I’ll say it that way. I’ll say that boldly, Erin. I don’t like when the brand of a president becomes bigger than the institution and is promoted in ways that supersede the institution. I think that is unhealthy for the institution long term. That is really dangerous for them. And I always encourage institutions that if you have a big brand president, have that conversation before you hire them about what that balance is going to look like and why the brand and the reputation of the institution comes first and why.

Erin Hennessy 

Yes. And I’m gonna build a bridge that comes off of your bridge to a piece I wrote several years ago about long-serving presidents and the challenges that they present while they’re in office and then for the folks that succeed them. And I worked for a very long serving president who was in the position for fifteen years. There are folks that have been in for 20 and 25 and 30, and I think that is where sometimes it happens with short-tenured presidents as well. But I also think very long-tenured presidents begin to see the university as theirs unless they are exceedingly careful. And some long-serving presidents do it right and the place is left stronger and has been stewarded well, but others, I think it just in their minds, in the minds of their leadership team, begins to seem that this is mine. I made it, and I’m gonna choose who follows me and I’m gonna hand it over to them and tell them what to do with it.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Erin, I’m gonna add on to that. And here’s how I’m gonna do that. I recently saw a CASE Summer Institute presentation where someone gave a statistic that I thought was interesting, and that is: 94% of people think that they are self aware.

So if we’re thinking about the fact that 94% think they’re self-aware, hmm, that’s not actually the number that are. And I don’t want to misquote how many are, but let’s just say I can’t assume that every university president falls within that self-aware group. So sometimes you and I’ve talked about this.

Erin Hennessy

I can assume. I can assume that.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

It’s okay to say. Ha! It’s okay to say, maybe it’s time to move on.

Erin Hennessy 

Yep Yes. Okay, your turn.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Our next topic includes the discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know is in crisis or needs help, please call or text 988 to connect with the local crisis center. Please fast forward to 21:30 into this recording to hear the rest of our conversation and our guest.

Okay, I am gonna read a series of headlines, and that tells the story that I want to have told, and then we can talk about it. There was a tragedy that happened in the UK just over a month ago, and I want you to hear the escalation within the headlines because I think it helps people understand the pressure that is being created in higher education today. 

The first headline says, Playbooks, plagiarism, and a pig’s head. That was on August 1st. August 12th, we have another headline. Cambridge agrees to hold independent inquiry into Jason Arday appointment. This appointment, if you read the article, is tied to the accusations of plagiarism. Jason Arday, professor at centre of Cambridge Row, found dead. This is on August 15th, so three days later. Academic who accused Jason Arday of plagiarism suspended by his university. Followed by Jason Arday accuser given three-month teaching ban but can continue to research. And what I, the reason that I’m mentioning these, first of all, is this was a really hard set of pieces to read as they happened. And as you saw the fervor and the social media pickup and the outrage that people had and the accusations that were flying. I worried that something really bad was going to happen because accusations like this very quickly move from an accusation, whether it’s real or it’s imagined, and that’s not mine to determine in this situation, from an accusation to a flurry to a fury. And there are people behind this. So I just want to have a moment for all of us to think about how what we say, how accusations that we put out there, how the targeting of individuals has a deeper impact than we might think. And this is a tragedy with a community that is grieving and an academic who is lost. And I don’t want for us to forget the role that side comments and clickbait headlines and real news are adding to the pressures that our academics are facing.

Erin Hennessy

Absolutely, particularly academics from marginalized communities…

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Correct.

Erin Hennessy 

…who may be also part of the LGBTQ community, who may be dealing with other forms of marginalization, maybe dealing with other issues in their own personal life. And it makes me think about, and I know you’re gonna ask Brad a question about this later, about what happened here in the States where we saw Claudine Gay and others, other scholars of color targeted for plagiarism. And granted, Claudine Gay, as the president of Harvard and a faculty member at Harvard, was in a very different place than Jason Arday was, with perhaps some more resources and a bigger network behind her because she was at a different stage of her career. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

That’s exactly what I was gonna say. Yes.

Erin Hennessy 

But it is, I understand and this the question you asked, Brad, I think an important one. Do we platform people who make these kind of accusations? And is that the job of higher education to platform those people? And I think, you know…

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Yeah. I think there’s a difference between platforming the accusations and trying to share an understanding of what these people are doing and why. Right. I think there is a differentiation here. And that line has to be so carefully walked. And at the core of all of it, and this is the part that really is just sitting so heavy with me, even a month later, is that we have humans, we have lives, we have reputations, and when people make accusations, either off the cuff or that they think is researched, the impact to others can be something that you can’t come back from. And I think that’s something really important for us to understand is the how and the why.

Erin Hennessy

Yeah. Yep. It was a terribly tragic story. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

So tragic.

Erin Hennessy 

And my heart breaks for him and his family and his friends and his institution.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Yes. Yeah, but you can see in those headlines how it just escalates and then the turn it takes and then we’re done. And I’m not done with it yet.

Erin Hennessy 

Yeah. And you know, you’ve selected some pretty responsible outlets.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Yes.

Erin Hennessy 

But there are a number of other outlets that cast this as a story about someone being elevated despite issues with their scholarship because the institution was trying to curry favor with certain constituencies by advancing a young Black scholar. And so there are a lot of pieces that implied this is what you get when you lean too heavily into DEI. You get folks that aren’t what they appear to be and aren’t “as good” as other people you could have hired and that is particularly horrifying to watch as well.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Correct. And it was horrifying to see that the accuser is an American who is on loan overseas as well.

Erin Hennessy 

Mm-hmm.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Okay, let’s change subjects.

Erin Hennessy 

Okay, let’s change subjects to the the institution that has been on everyone’s lips for the last couple of weeks, probably for reasons they didn’t want to be, but everybody is obsessed with Syracuse University and what Syracuse University says about the entirety of higher education and whether or not we are indeed circling the drain. There’s been a ton of chatter, but what really kicked it off was the story in the Wall Street Journal, about the “enrollment crisis” at Syracuse University. And this sort of I’m reading it as sort of this battle for the soul of the institution and who is Syracuse, what is Syracuse? Some people believe that Syracuse wants to become a more elite institution. Some believe that Syracuse fills a very important non-elite kind of role in higher education and provides a great education for it. Some folks believe that people are finally realizing it’s cold and snowy in Syracuse for many, many months of the year. But it’s an interesting dissection of sort of where Syracuse stands, and it’s definitely holding that institution up as a symbol of selective, private sort of I don’t want to say middle of the pack, but selective private institutions that are struggling and will particularly be hit by the enrollment cliff.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Yes. And I think it’s an interesting conversation to have about, I know I’ve heard some colleagues say, well, if that can happen to Syracuse, that can happen at my institution. And the answer is yes, and it’s always been that way. And I think that’s a significant shift that we’re starting to see at institutions that it used to be a them story and now it’s an everyone story. And that is true.

Erin Hennessy

Yeah. And there’s so much to this story. I mean, you and I have been around long enough to know that there are schools that are hot for a period of time and then they are less hot for another period of time. Right now, a lot of folks, a lot of traditional age college students want to be in the south at public institutions where there are these big athletic operations…

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Public and private. Yeah. Yeah.

Erin Hennessy

Public and private. But big athletics, nice weather. There’s just a cachet about the south right now that’s very interesting and cold, snowy Syracuse, despite having one of the best barbecue restaurants I’ve ever been to, even in the South.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Hmm. I think everybody in the South just stopped listening.

Erin Hennessy 

I know. Well, it was fun. It was fun doing this while we could.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Just saying, everybody remember that she’s from New Jersey.

Erin Hennessy 

And proud of it. Thank you. Anyway, the athletics question is in here as well. Syracuse had a huge men’s basketball program, very successful men’s basketball program for a number of years. It is less so now. So there’s just, all of the things that we are worried about are wrapped up in this story. And so I think folks who read it will have a lot of, oh that’s us too, kind of moments and I really recommend taking a look at it, understanding how the press is looking at our challenges, and then spending some time on social media as well. Jeff Selingo did some really great Instagram stories, sort of dissecting the “Syracuse issue” that were really interesting and shed some additional light on the piece. So it’s just some really big, ambitious, good reporting from Doug Belkin and Roshan Fernandez at the Wall Street Journal, and I commend it to everybody. Also share it with your board. Share it with your board.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Excellent. Yes, use it as a case study. Where are we and how would we be covered if that was us? Right? Think about your internal audiences.

Erin Hennessy

Mm-hmm. Yep, absolutely.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

There are so many different ways that you can dissect this as a tabletop drill, and we need to be using stories from the headlines for our drills.

Erin Hennessy 

Yep. All right, bring us home, pal.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

I’m bringing us home. I want to talk a little bit about data. I haven’t shared any data sources for a while, but I found this interesting survey that was on Navigator. And it was talking about a number of different things, including how people think of themselves as political or not, how they’re thinking about the midterms. Y’all can look at that if you want to look at it, and it is interesting. But here’s what I thought was interesting. There are two graphs at the bottom of their summary that really caught my eye. The first is younger Americans are split on how they consume news, but are more passive consumers than older Americans. And here was the interesting part. If you’re in Gen Z, you are 48% of you seeking out news and 52% having news come to you for current events in politics.

Erin Hennessy 

I was gonna say running far, far away from the news, which is what I’m doing lately.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Basically, yeah, it will find you though. 52% of you, it will find you. And if we juxtapose that with baby boomers who are on the other end of this data set. Baby boomers, 69% of them are seeking out news, and 31% say that news comes to them. So I can imagine for some of those baby boomers where they’re seeking out that news, and I think that’s interesting for us to talk about. But I think for Gen Z, we need to be thinking about that mix. If you move it so it’s a little bit more not generational, but an age band, it’s evenly split between 18 and 34-year-olds that 50% seek out news and 50% want news to come to them. That’s really interesting. We can’t think that if we just put it out there and it’s in the news, that we’re hitting our audiences and we’re getting our messages across. Whether that’s politics, current events, what’s going on in higher education, our faculty experts, et cetera, we need to be thinking also about how do we have that news get to 50% of those 18 to 34, all the way down to 32% of those older than 55. So it’s a different take.

Erin Hennessy

When we say news they want news to come to them, I assume that means social media, I assume that means podcasts, I assume that means those kinds of things as opposed to I’m clicking on nytimes.com every morning or like?

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Correct. Well, I’m not sure where podcasts fit, but what I can say is that the chart after that, because I don’t have the exact cross tabs, Erin, but the chart after that then says Americans across age groups.

Erin Hennessy 

Come on, Teresa, get the cross tabs.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

I know, I know, I’ll have to see if I can find them. Americans across age groups are using social media platforms at least once a day with Facebook as the great unifier. Who saw that? Facebook and specifically they’re looking at Gen Z’s use of Facebook. 72% of Gen Z say that they look at Facebook, Facebook!, at least once a day or more.

Erin Hennessy

For what? That’s fascinating. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Right?

Erin Hennessy

The kid in my life doesn’t have a Facebook account. Doesn’t have one. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

He probably doesn’t even know what Facebook is. Yeah.

Erin Hennessy

It well, it’s where his mother offloads all of his outgrown baseball stuff. Yeah, like he’s a TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat kiddo. And that’s it.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Which were the top sources for Gen Z. So TikTok at 82%, Instagram 82%, Snapchat at 70%. But again, it’s actually, it wasn’t the top three. If you look at the top three, it’s TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook in that order. Fascinating, right? So as much as we talk about Facebook being dead, I think we really need to think about if we’re wanting this information to boomerang back to Gen Z and millennials, because 82% of them are on Facebook apparently.

Erin Hennessy

Yeah.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

We need to be looking at some of those social media sources that we had kind of discounted.

Erin Hennessy

Yeah. Whew. I’m gonna have to sit with that one.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Right?

Erin Hennessy

Only reason only reason I’m still on Facebook is for town gossip and the buy nothing group and that’s it, man.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

I left years ago and could not be happier. Amen. 

Erin Hennessy

Yeah. Amen.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

So if we’re talking about news, if we’re talking about sources of news where we get our news, I would love to introduce our guest.

Erin Hennessy

Go ahead. Go for it.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

As The Chronicle’s editor, Brad Wolverton leads the newsroom in covering the biggest stories shaping colleges and universities. He works closely with reporters, editors, and visual journalists to ensure their coverage is timely, rigorous, and essential to their audience. He also serves on the executive leadership team, helping to oversee the company’s strategic direction. Brad returned to The Chronicle in 2025 after nearly a decade building editorial teams at HubSpot, The Hustle, and NerdWallet.

Earlier in his career, he spent 12 years at The Chronicle as a reporter and editor covering the influence of money in college athletics and earning national recognition for investigative reporting. He’s a graduate of Indiana University’s journalism program.

Erin Hennessy 

Brad, we are so excited that you made time out of a busy day, busy week to spend a little bit of time with us. And we’re really excited to dig in and ask you what it’s like in higher ed media these days. I imagine it’s just nothing but puppies and rainbows, right?

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

And unicorns and glitter.

Brad Wolverton 

It’s just, yes, it is a challenging time for sure. But as a journalist, you know, you always look for stories that have tension and this has tension from every direction. And so it keeps us on our toes. It’s an interesting time to be covering higher education for sure.

Erin Hennessy 

I’ll bet. A tension convention, if you will. You are about a year into your tenure now, back at The Chronicle, you spent twelve years at The Chronicle previously, and then you left both the publication and higher ed for about 10 years. And I’m wondering, a year into your tenure back in higher ed, what’s changed from your first run at The Chronicle? I know it’s a big, vague, open-ended question. I invite you to take it wherever you want to go. But I would love to hear what you think is better, however you define that in higher ed since you were at The Chronicle earlier, and what’s worse or what hasn’t changed enough.

Brad Wolverton 

Oh my gosh. Well I…

Erin Hennessy 

We like to start with the real big thought questions.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Yeah, not a tough question at all. Right.

Brad Wolverton

So I left The Chronicle just as Trump was coming into office for the first term. And I returned to The Chronicle just as he was coming into the office for the second term. And that probably, those bookended a lot of changes in higher education and continuing changes. So beginning with the politicization of higher education, with what’s happening through Trump’s presidency and at the federal level, as well as what’s happening in the states. And so there’s just so many changes.

These forces from the outside that are acting upon higher education that have just really increased the, they’ve kind of tightened the vice against higher ed. And I think you see that on the political level, you see it on the sort of operational and governance level through many of these changes from state politics and federal politics. And then you see colleges wrestling with this declining enrollment and student population that’s coming into college. You see them just challenged at so many different, in so many different ways. 

Erin Hennessy 

Yeah.

Brad Wolverton

So I think that’s probably what has changed the most. It’s like all, a lot of those outside forces have just become more challenging. So I think a lot has happened to higher education, but then if I look at what higher education has done to respond to a lot of those changes, a lot hasn’t changed, frankly. You know, I think one of the first meetings that I had with a college president who came into The Chronicle’s offices soon after I returned last summer, gave me a sort of window into this, which was just how do schools operate? How fast do they move? How nimble are they? How big are they thinking and expansively and how much are they changing?

And he was telling me about the strategic planning process that his institution was going through and how over the last six months, you know, they had really worked hard on this process. And I said, so what did you come up with? What’s the new strategic vision? And he says, oh no, that six months we just really worked to set up the process by which we were gonna, you know, think about our strategic plan and the changes to it. So that just reminded me, I came from that time when I was away from The Chronicle in those 10 years. I worked in, you know, the tech industry and in digital media startups and I worked out in Silicon Valley, things were moving so fast. Like if you had an idea and you didn’t put it in place by tomorrow, your boss was asking you what the hell you were doing. And now I think to come into a sector that is under siege really, but also not probably responding as quickly as they need to, in part because of just the bureaucracy of the system that prevents that.

Erin Hennessy

Yeah. Well, and it’s baked into our DNA, right? 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Yes.

Erin Hennessy

Like how how many times have we all been in conversations where higher ed leaders are just shocked that public trust in what we do and the education we provide is plummeting and we are stuck on the storytelling problem when really it’s, I think, much more the fact that the sector has not responded to what people are asking us to do.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Well, and I think that timeline question is an important one. I was just talking to an administration yesterday, and they are nine months into revising their faculty handbook. And what they’ve done so far is they’ve created the membership for the committees that are going to look into the handbook changes. We’re nine months in. That’s fascinating. 

Erin Hennessy

Yeah. Have they selected the font yet though? Because that’s where the things really start to take off once you choose your font.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

San serif. No, but I think that’s huge.

Brad Wolverton 

Yeah, I mean I don’t mean to knock them entirely because I think there’s a value to being deliberate and being inclusive of a lot of voices. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Correct.

Brad Wolverton 

You know, we could be accused of some of the similar challenges higher education is facing at The Chronicle because we haven’t moved fast enough to adapt to a changing world. And so I don’t mean to, you know, be a hypocrite and suggest that we’re not also guilty of some of the same sins.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

So I’m gonna circle back around to something that you were just mentioning, because I think you just mentioned two things that tie together of what I’m hearing about The Chronicle these days, and I would love for you to have a chance to talk about it. One is you talked about outside forces, and then you also talked about the value of hearing multiple voices in a conversation. One of the things that I think is interesting is you all have interviewed and you have given space to those who are critiquing higher education and who are actively working to raise questions and in some cases policy or other changes. And some academics I have talked to feel as if you were letting the fox into the hen house or you were platforming those who are trying to take down higher ed. And I’m curious how you think about that outside forces piece, but also being an outlet that is providing insight and information about an industry. And how do you properly do that without including multiple voices?

Brad Wolverton

You have to have multiple voices. And I think the forces that are acting upon higher education need to be heard from because the people who are behind those changes, you want to understand why they’re doing what they’re doing and how they’re doing it and what’s next and sort of how they’re planning for making changes to higher education. So I mean, we are a media organization and we are not The Chronicle for higher education, we are The Chronicle of higher education. And you know, as much as I really think it’s important for us to have deep relationships with people in the sector, to understand them, to, you know, build sources. We cover the sector independently with, you know, fair-minded journalism. And our goal is to shed light on what’s happening to the sector and what’s happening in the sector. So I think it’s really important to make sure we hear from those voices. And I hear the complaints. I get those letters. You know, why are you putting Chris Rufo on the cover of The Chronicle? I’m disappointed in The Chronicle’s coverage. And what we’re trying to do is shed light on what’s happening to the sector so the sector can be more effective in responding to those forces.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Well, and I support you in that. So know that as I hear those conversations, if we don’t know what the critiques are of us, if we don’t hear about them directly, if we don’t know where we’re vulnerable, how can we be stronger? So I, for one, support you on that front. 

Brad Wolverton 

Well put.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Now I do have a question for you that is a follow-on to Erin’s question. Erin covered your career trajectory, but there is one very different point about when you left and when you returned. You are now the editor. So I would love to hear from a leadership perspective how you’ve thought about that transition and how you approach relationships with people who were your peers previous to you returning.

Brad Wolverton

Well, I was both a reporter and an editor at The Chronicle and I worked across the newsroom. So in some ways, I knew a lot of people. I worked with a lot of people before. I was always excited to, you know, work on great stories and bring out the best storytelling that we could and bring it to bear on what’s happening in the sector. That hasn’t changed. I’m still at heart someone who thinks about what are the best stories we can tell and how can we tell them and how can we put our reporters in position to get, you know, expert insights that they can share with our audience. Certainly I have friends, you know, some of whom I now manage. And I, that’s always a little bit of a challenge, but I think the, it wasn’t too difficult to make that transition because I was a leader at The Chronicle before. Now I happen to run the newsroom and oversee a broader selection of things as a member of the executive team of the company, which is actually, you know, there’s kind of two jobs that I have. One is I help work with the executive team on setting the strategy for the company and really making sure that we’re doing what we can to grow the business. And then I also oversee a newsroom of about 50 reporters and editors and you know, make sure that we are paying attention to the things that matter the most, that we’re helping the audience as best that we can and that we’re growing the business nonetheless.

Erin Hennessy 

I wonder, Brad, based on that and talking about strategy, how you are looking at the trade publication landscape right now. I think for a lot of us, mainstream media is so crowded and so noisy and so difficult to get into that we are seeing a real increase in respect for and interest in being in the trades among our clients. And I just wonder how you’re thinking about, for The Chronicle specifically, but trades generally, how you all are looking to meet this moment. I think it’s a real time for the trades to shine and provide real deep, well-resourced coverage of the industry and I think more folks are looking to the trades than to mainstream. But I just wondered how you’re thinking about that from the editor seat.

Brad Wolverton 

I think some of my reporters might recoil at the notion that we’re a trade publication, but we very much are, you know, in the business of helping an audience understand itself and make sense of this moment. And so I think that trade publications like The Chronicle have always been the essential read for people. And I think that hasn’t changed. It’s probably become even more so during a time when so much is happening and, you know, we have reporters who’ve been at The Chronicle for 20, 30. We have a couple of people who’ve been here for 40 years, reporters and editors, people with incredible knowledge, way more than I have about the sector. You know, they are subject matter specific experts. And you put them on NPR, you put them on, you know, national podcasts like this, they can really help you understand the ins and outs of their beats much better than I can, and much better than many of their, you know, competitor peers at, you know, more mainstream news organizations can help you understand this sector. But I won’t lie, like when you are going up against the New York Times, which can put more people on one story than we have in our newsroom, that’s a big challenge. And it’s difficult because we need to show up for our audience to help them make sense of this moment because there’s so much uncertainty. There’s so much coming out of colleges and universities. You know, it’s not just for people who are trying to get their stories placed, but it’s for people who are leading institutions to understand what’s happening and what should they do next to sort of respond. So I think there’s no better place and there’s no better time than to, you know, no better place than The Chronicle and no better time than now for people to be paying attention to what we’re doing. And we’ve certainly made a lot of changes to make sure that we’re more kind of in step with the audience to help serve them better.

Erin Hennessy 

Yeah. What would your reporters who would recoil from trade publication prefer?

Brad Wolverton 

Well, I think we’re really a hybrid. I mean, we have a collection of people on our team who are just among the best writers in the country. I mean, you have people like, you know, some of the literally the best people writing in America right now. We have people with incredible talent. And I think they see themselves as storytellers and they don’t see themselves as like, we are, you know, helping higher education understand itself, but that’s what we do. We are certainly a trade publication, but we’re really a nice mix of both hybrid kind of trade and consumer focused because our audience is big and we write in a way and we report stories in ways that bring the sensibility of a trade publication, but also the sensibility of a consumer publication.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Let’s go one step further on that. Because as you talk about that, you talked about being a, the written stories, but I also know that as you’re leading The Chronicle, you’re reshaping your audiences, you’re reshaping what you offer. And I know that you’re looking at different formats now as well, based on where listeners, readers, people are, whether that’s to digestible newsletters and y’all have a new one that just came out, what kind of content you’re providing, podcasts, events, a whole bunch of different ways that The Chronicle hasn’t interacted with higher education in the past. So, how are you thinking about the mix of news and these new or expanded formats so that you enhance and you grow your audiences and you have that connection with them? And what does success look like as you take on these new formats?

Brad Wolverton

Well, one of the reasons why I was interested in The Chronicle and they were interested in having me come back was because of the experience that I had after I left The Chronicle. So I was able to really learn a lot more about digital media and finding new ways to reach audiences. And you know, we talk about higher ed being under siege. The media industry is also under siege. It’s not as authentic as it needs to be, it’s, you know, not always as truthful as it should be. People are getting information in lots of different ways. And so you really have to think about where your audience is and how you can make sure that you reach them on the platforms and in the ways that they need to consume information. And I think about it in terms of like, people listen. They like to take their podcast with them along, you know, whether they’re walking their dog or they’re sitting in traffic or whatever. You think about who makes up higher education. And a lot of people have come up in the academy and like that’s how they consume information. They are used to sitting in lectures and listening to things and then making sense of it and using that to kind of, you know, research new things and create discoveries and so forth. And so I think showing up with more audio and more video, it only makes sense for us because we’ve already, we’ve already gained the trust of the audience through the written form. And some of this is a matter of repurposing our content and helping us think about ways in which we can take something we write about and turn it into a podcast episode or a social media post or an event. And so I think we’re thinking broader than just the written and audio and sort of multimodal ways that you can reach people. But what I really want us to do is become more than just a place that helps you make sense of a moment, but it’s a place that helps you convene at conversations and facilitate dialogue and give people a chance to air their concerns and learn from each other as much as they learn from us.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Perfect. And I’ve been able to experience one of those and you all do it beautifully.

Erin Hennessy 

I wanted to revisit, you and I chatted in Anaheim earlier this summer. And I think the newsletters are so smart. I think Rick and Beckie are doing an amazing job with the Daily Briefing, and I told you that is one of my absolute everyday must reads. So I appreciate you leaning into that bit of experimentation and new ways of reaching audiences and making accessing the work that your reporters do easier for folks who have so much incoming coming at them all day long.

Brad Wolverton

Thank you. I appreciate that. I mean, I worked at a publication, it was a newsletter, and that’s all it was, called The Hustle. It was a business and tech newsletter, and we grew it into a newsletter that reached two and a half million people. And how we did that was part of what I learned, but the kind of content we created every day was one of the reasons why people open the thing up all the time. What I tried to do with that was think about, you know, what problem can we solve for audiences?

So when I was thinking about building The Hustle and helping the team grow The Hustle, you know, people consume information there. Like let’s take that audience that we served, which was people who care about business. There are a lot of mainstream publications that cover business in a really boring way. We covered it in a way we sort of solved the challenge of like business is boring, but I have to listen to podcasts, I have to, you know, learn about it. Well, we made it entertaining. We wrote it in a way that was, you know, really accessible for our audience. And I think that’s what some of this sort of skill and expertise that I brought back to The Chronicle. Not just understanding how to build and grow newsletters, and we’ve done some of that already, but really understanding how to think about reaching audiences in new ways, solving problems for them that they may not know they even have. So we started a new newsletter a couple months ago called Jagged Intelligence. If you care at all about AI, and that’s one of the big things happening in higher education, obviously. You should sign up for this newsletter. It’s fantastic. It’s written by Jeff Young, a former tech reporter for us who’s been in the industry for a long time. We just this week launched a new newsletter. It’s called Decision Points. You know, we think about how do we serve leaders in higher education. And we do a pretty good job of, you know, helping presidents, provosts, people at the top of institutions who lead institutions, but we often don’t serve the people below them who hold just as important leadership roles. And so Decision Points helps people understand decisions that other people are making and in sort of a mini case study way, unpack what lessons they learn from those. So it is a lot more useful and utilitarian than what you might read in a normal news story covering what happened at a university. So that’s another newsletter that we’re launching. We have more coming. So we have these niche newsletters that will hopefully serve different audiences within higher education more effectively.

Erin Hennessy

That’s great. One of the topics, and this is just me wish casting, one of the topics that I hope and I think you all are turning more attention to is one that I think is still pretty close to your heart, which is intercollegiate athletics. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

That’s how Brad and I met.

Brad Wolverton 

That’s right!

Erin Hennessy

I know this is very strange for me to be asking the athletics questions, because this is not, beyond men’s college basketball, this is not an area that has consumed a great deal of my life, but I know it consumed a good bit of your earlier tenure at The Chronicle. And to say it’s the Wild West, I think is a metaphor that’s just been overused to the point of ridiculousness. But it is, it’s a different industry than when you covered it 10 years ago, whether it’s conference realignment, the house settlement, NIL collectives, the involvement of private equity in what is now, I think we have to call it an industry. How are you all at The Chron thinking about how you cover athletics? Are you approaching it differently? Are you changing up the way that you all are thinking about this? Is it becoming a larger part of the content and the coverage you’re planning? Just give us some insight on athletics and where you all are seeing it go and planning to chase it.

Brad Wolverton 

Sure. It’s a big issue and one that is, we’re covering differently than when I was reporting on it. I reported on athletics through the lens of the student experience, student well-being, how students were treated, whether they were able to make money off, you know, off the field from their ability to advertise or gain sponsorships or whatever. But I also covered it through the lens of, you know, this was a business at the time and it’s a much bigger business now. I can remember a former president of the NCAA, Myles Brand, who used to talk about how higher education was the front porch for higher excuse me, college athletics was the front porch for higher education. And so it’s a very visible thing, but he also emphasized that, you know, it was only like maybe three to five percent of their overall budgets. Well, that is now double and triple that amount. And when you think about some of these institutions and the multi-billion dollar institutions and enterprises that they are, that’s a lot of money and that’s a lot of exposure. So they’re still the front porch. They still are, and they’re representing an even more increasing amount of revenue for the university or a threat to revenue for the university. And so I think it is an especially challenging time for higher education, college athletics. And part of the reason is that there’s been a real lack of leadership in that space. And there’s not been an NCAA that has had the the power and the wherewithal to be able to kind of hold on to the things that it needs to hold on to to maintain the enterprise and to help grow the enterprise. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Or missed opportunities by the NCAA. I’ll say that so that you don’t have to. 

Brad Wolverton 

For sure. Yes. I don’t mind saying it. I mean, I covered it for a long time. I see a vacuum of leadership across college athletics. But you know, I think there are a lot of things that could still help save it but it is, like you said, it is a bit of a mess right now with college athletes now able to make money, colleges able to pay players to come to play football mostly or basketball at their institutions, sometimes millions of dollars. There are questions around whether athletes who’ve actually played professionally or been part of professional enterprises can come back to college and use up their eligibility. There are just a myriad of things that I think just can’t be solved. And I think until, you know, Congress takes the steps to, you know, maybe make it a little easier for the NCAA to regulate college sports, then I think we’re just gonna be in a bit of a jam there for a long time.

Erin Hennessy

Yeah, and I think we all share a critical view of the NCAA in the last several years, but I also think it’s just such a core governance challenge for institutions. And I think so many boards don’t understand or historically never engaged with athletics because it was over there. It was something else. It’s an extracurricular. Why would we get involved in that? And now it is its own, full-on industry. And I think, I hope we’re starting to see institutions understand that this is from a risk perspective, from a financial perspective, from a strategy perspective. This is core to the fiduciary responsibility of boards. And I’m hopeful that we’re going to see some more robust governance on the campus level, even if NCAA isn’t going to provide the regulation that we need.

Brad Wolverton 

I mean I think the spending, the challenge of how much this is costing colleges and universities to hire the best coaches. You know, my alma mater, Indiana University, went and hired a guy named Curt Cignetti a few years ago. And Curt Cignetti was this kind of unknown coach at the like non-elite levels of college football, and was very successful at the levels he was at, and probably overlooked as a potential candidate for these big time jobs. Indiana hit the jackpot in hiring this guy. He, you know, took a program that was literally had lost the most football games of any major program in college sports and turned it into not just a winner and a team that, you know, made the college football playoff the last two years, but won the national championship and went undefeated last year. Because you have stories like that, there are gonna always be institutions that think maybe they can do the same thing. I think that was the feel-good story, maybe of all time for college sports, of like how this program was kind of never, it’s like the longtime doormat of the Big Ten turned into a winner and a national champion. And I think a lot of schools will be striving to find their Curt Cignetti. And as long as that’s gonna happen, that means they’re gonna be spending a whole lot more money. They have to spend more money on the athletes, they have to spend more money on a whole range of things. When they fire the coaches, they have to pay them out. That is why when we talk to college presidents… 

Erin Hennessy

Yeah. Facilities.

Brad Wolverton

Yeah, when we talk to college presidents, that’s one of the first things they talk to us about. It’s like we’re worried about college sports and the escalating spending there. It was always on a fast path and now the numbers are so big that there are real threats to campuses, you know, and their financial state as a result of it.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Well, and I would say you’re talking about spending, but I think we need to differentiate also. Institutions talk about this as an investment, but with an investment, you can also lose money. And going back to how many institutions lose money, and to your point, if you have to pay out a coach, you’re not just paying out a head coach. Normally they come in and shift all of the coaches. You have a number of payouts. You have such cascading impacts and effects of changes, whether you’re being proactive or reactive, it isn’t just about spending, it’s also about the debt. And that’s the interesting part here. But to Erin’s point, I think the governance of this is so critically important. And she gets to hear me talk about this all the time because I wrote over 200 pages on it. But I think that is so critically important is this relationship between presidents and boards for what the responsibilities are because the stakes are so high.

Erin Hennessy 

Mm-hmm. Yeah, we I mean, we all lived through the Penn State scandal and I think that was the beginning of the conversation, but it didn’t go far enough and it didn’t scare people enough.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

I mean, I would say go all the way back to my origin story, go back to the University of Colorado. We were the canary in the coal mine, and instead we’ve just attracted more canaries into the mine. So I think it’s just an interesting conversation to have. But I’m gonna shift us to other topics that I know my comms colleagues want me to cover with you. So if we’re talking about athletics, obviously that’s one you’re interested in, but I’m curious what national trends you’re following, you’re talking about in your newsroom, and you’re assigning. So what do you consider important in today’s rapid fire news environment? And just as importantly, what are the topics you never want to hear about again? Because it gets pitched to you so many times. You get it. That’s what we’re doing. It’s happening and everybody is an innovator and first and unique.

Brad Wolverton

We’ve touched on some of the issues that I’m thinking about and that I’m following closely and that our newsroom is following. We haven’t gone into great detail about what’s happening with AI and how that’s impacting colleges and universities, but I think the story of that across the academy is one that is, it’s so pervasive. It’s top of mind for people every day and in many things they’re doing. When you travel and you see people at conferences, it has become the conference topic de jour. It’s almost ingrained in every panel. I mean, I’m going to New York next week to speak at the Back to School Summit, which is really a collection of people who lead education across all levels, including higher education, obviously, but also education technology people. Anyway, I have opportunities to talk about AI, even when the panel isn’t about AI. I had a person yesterday call me and say, listen, we got an AI sponsor and could you touch on AI as part of that panel that was supposed to have nothing to do with it? That wasn’t the Back to School Summit, but it was another session I’m going to about how to build audience. So anyway, I think governance and the sort of financial state of higher education are big topics that I’m really following closely. We started another, speaking of like ways that we’re reaching the audience in new ways, we started these things called live blogs on our website to make the site more sort of accessible and more lively. Those have become some of our most popular features on the site. We have one for finance and just what’s happening across higher education. We may not want to spend time and take our reporters’ time to kind of tell these stories in miniature, or go in depth on all of these stories, but there are so many changes happening in higher education across, you know, all kinds of different levels and so we can we can sort of signal what’s happening and those people just almost scroll that as if as if it was a feed. They want to know what’s the latest change, what’s you know, what’s happening that I can learn from? And so I think that’s been something that we do in monitoring our coverage. I think how students learn and how we’re preparing them for the workforce of the future. I mean, obviously that has something to do with AI, but it all has a lot more to do with like the fact that they come in so unprepared in many cases. And the fact that when they leave, we don’t really know the workforce of tomorrow well enough to understand what we need to, you know, what colleges need to be preparing them for. So those are a handful of things that I think about. I’m sure I’ve missed five or six big topics, but I mean we think a lot about what is the audience that we are serving, what’s resonating the most with that audience. And so we sort of, we try to organize our coverage around that and we make changes all the time, but like broadly speaking, we cover issues related to, you know, faculty and, you know, the life of the faculty and how how they’re sort of experiencing this moment and many of the changes that are coming down to bear on them, whether that’s lack of funding or uncertainty around funding, whether that’s what they can teach in the classroom, how they’re preparing their students, whether they have tenure protections. There’s all kinds of things like that.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Yes.

Brad Wolverton 

So that’s a big area of focus for us and one of increasing importance. And we’ve moved people onto that beat, so to speak, so that we do better work there and more work there. I think we are also, trying to think, just covering really finance leadership issues through different lenses, really making sure like when I came back, we had really like one, maybe two people who covered leadership. Now we have five or six people who touch on that. I think we like to tell stories of people. We, you know, back to that, like what, how do we view ourselves? What are good stories that will resonate with people? Profiles of people can tell broader stories about colleges and how they’re changing through more human lenses that I think really resonate.

Erin Hennessy 

I was just gonna praise that Ann Cudd story for the three thousandth time. That was such a phenomenal piece.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Yes. We have talked about that over and over again because the humanity behind that piece and how well it was written and how comprehensively it was covered, David Jesse did a fantastic job.

Brad Wolverton 

David has been covering leadership issues in higher education for 25 years. Did a lot of that work as a reporter and a local reporter in the state of Michigan, tells stories about that state still, but he’s, you know, someone who understands higher education deeply. I think that was, when we met this summer in Anaheim, we were at NACUBO and David had a couple of presentations he did there. So, you know, we just have a such a deep bench of people who can tell those kinds of stories. And I think the thing that I find that I hear a lot from the sector is like you really take time to understand issues. You really cover issues in depth and with a level of nuance that we don’t see in other places. So I think that has been sort of the mark of The Chronicle and one of the great things about The Chronicle for many years. And even as we’re trying to cover things more of the moment and be fast turning, we continue to want to make sure we cover things in depth and with that sort of level of humanity that you’re talking about.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

And I think the respect that you show to the people and to the industry just shines through, which is always appreciated.

Brad Wolverton 

Thanks, we really appreciate that.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

And I should have a conversation with you and David. Erin, you’re welcome to join to talk, specifically talking about Michigan, about game clocks in Michigan and what exactly is going on. 

Erin Hennessy 

That’s a sports reference. I get that.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Whew. Can I just tell you I still think Western Michigan won. But anyway, I want to close with something that we like to pose to those who are in the media because this is what we always prepare everybody for. This is your home run question, Brad. Is there anything you thought we would ask that we haven’t?

Brad Wolverton 

Love that question. It’s a question I would ask as a reporter too. It’s like, what else should I have asked you? And I guess the question I expected you to ask more about, I know a large part of your audience is people who want to get their stories placed or get their institution to tell, you know, The Chronicle to tell their story. I thought you might have asked me a little bit more about that. So I would kind of, I’m on a lot of panels where I talk about this. It’s a common question that I take. So I’m used to answering it. But one of the ways that I tell this, why I respond to this is, it’s important to develop connections with reporters and to understand reporters. I think Teresa, you do as good of a job, as well as Erin, as anyone in the business at like really understanding the needs of reporters. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Thank you.

Brad Wolverton 

What do they cover? I mean, I’ve heard from you levels of detail about what my reporters cover and their expertise that I myself don’t even have in certain ways that I’m still learning. So I think it’s really important that you know that as a reporter you’re looking to develop a source network. And your job is to break news, to tell stories distinctively, to tell people things that they don’t know. And the best way to do that is to build a network of people who know a lot and who are willing to talk to you and they trust you. And you know, I think there’s a lot that goes into making sure as a reporter you have a good network of people who can help you. But for people in your position, it’s important to make sure you understand the people who are writing about colleges and universities because you don’t want to just show up when you need something from them. You want to have a relationship with them and you want to be able to make sure you understand what they need so that you can not just call to sort of peddle the latest story that you want them to tell. But really understand how you can be of service to them. It’s like anything. It’s like, think of social media. How do you yeah, how are you successful in social media? How do you get people to notice your feed? Well, you give back. You don’t just expect, you know, that the audience is gonna take, you know, that you’re gonna get to take from the audience. I mean, you have to make sure that you’re nurturing those relationships. And that’s the way you, you know, can at least have a relationship with someone to know that you understand what they need so that when you’re pitching something, you’re not far out in left field and you know, you at least know this has a fighting chance for us to find interest in it.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

I love that.

Erin Hennessy 

Yep. And it’s, Tim McDonough, who’s a friend and colleague of all of ours, always talked about, you know, you wouldn’t send your advancement officer in to meet with a gift prospect and right off the bat say, we’d love a million dollar gift. You build the relationship, you understand what they’re looking for, you understand their connection to the institution. It’s the same kind of work that goes into building relationships with reporters, which is why when somebody like a, this is turning into a David Jesse fan podcast, but when you get to know somebody like a David Jesse working in Michigan on specific issues, and then they move to a different publication or a different part of the the beat, that relationship carries and it’s advantageous for us but it’s also I hope advantageous for reporters to have long term relationships with PR people, we are not the devil. Although some of the, I mean, we’ve sat in the room for some of those panels where reporters have said, you know, if I pick up the phone when you call me, you aren’t the person I’m hoping to hear from. Which will be forever burned on my brain. But it is a relationship. It can’t be transactional. Transactional might get you one placement. It doesn’t build you a relationship and a meaningful connection over time.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

That we are communications professionals, which we are. But I think one of the unfortunate shifts away from public relations is that term relations, right? 

Erin Hennessy 

Relations. Yup.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

It is about building and maintaining relationships, and that is so core to what we do.

Brad Wolverton

I would only add that, you know, that word relationships, you know, to some reporters might suggest that, you know, that they’re that people want to get too cozy, that maybe they want to influence or that there’s some sort of suggestion of a quid pro quo in this relationship, as we call it. I just think just to be mindful of that as a communications leader, that you’re trying to, you know, better serve your client, but you’re also making sure that you’re, you know, doing so in your interactions with a higher education reporter in a way that is like, no, you’re not trying to curry favor with them. You’re really just trying to understand their needs so that the two sides of what you’re trying to solve, which is your client, their needs, and you know, getting that story placed and working to help the reporter get a story, are both served.

Erin Hennessy 

Yeah, yep, absolutely.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Well said. What a perfect way for us to say thank you so much for spending time with us. We appreciate it and we appreciate all that you’re doing and all that The Chron provides to higher education as The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Erin Hennessy 

Nicely done. 

Brad Wolverton

Thank you both. It’s been a pleasure.

Erin Hennessy 

Thanks, Brad.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Thank you.

Thank you for joining us for this episode. Links and transcripts are available at TVPCommunications.com. You can contact us with feedback or guest suggestions at trustedvoices@tvpcommunications.com. Follow Trusted Voices wherever you get your podcasts and until next time, thank you to Erin Hennessy, Savannah Parrot, and DJ Hauschild for a great episode. And thank you for listening.