Mercury is providing a PR education to The Seventy Four, a non-profit online news outlet founded by education activist and former TV journalist Campbell Brown and set to debut in mid-July.
Brown, who has campaigned against teacher tenure laws and for charter schools, said the start-up is non-partisan and aimed to start an "honest conversation about what works and what doesn't work" in education. It is named after the 74M school-age kids in the US. Brown said it will be "a newsroom with an unapologetic point of view."
Steven Snyder, a digital editor for Time and People, is editorial director of the site. Romy Drucker, a former New York City education official, is CEO and co-founder. In addition to a staff of about a dozen, contributors will include columnist Cynthia Tucker and Michelle Bernard of the Bernard Center for Women, Politics & Public Policy.
The Wall Street Journal reported the site has an annual budget of around $4M from sources like Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Walton Family Foundation, among others who are all proponents of charter schools.
Board members include political PR vet Howard Wolfson, Jonathan Perelman (BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, ex-Google), and journalist Jonathan Alter, among others.
Mercury is a PR and public affairs unit of Omnicom.
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