Futurity.org addresses decline in university research coverage

Rather than relying on traditional news outlets to publicize research on their campuses, members of the group, Futurity, decided to launch their own website to aggregate research news produced by participating higher education institutions.

Led by Duke, Stanford and the University of Rochester, the consortium launched a test version of its website, futurity.org, last March, with Princeton as a charter member. By the time the site officially launched in September, 35 colleges had joined, and the consortium has since grown to include 53 leading research universities in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Each member provides its own finished stories for publication.

The endeavor has two goals, Durkee explained in an e-mail.

“One was to create a website where reporters could learn about the important discoveries being made at the nation’s leading research universities without having to visit each university’s website,” he said. “The other was to provide the same opportunity for people other than reporters to do the same thing.”

In addition to maintaining its website, the organization also sends out a daily e-mail to more than 3,000 subscribers and uses RSS feeds and social networking tools to disseminate information.

University spokeswoman Cass Cliatt ’96, who joins monthly planning calls about the website’s development, said in an e-mail that new efforts to spread knowledge about university research are critical.

“It is a very constant reality that we continue to learn weekly of reporters who used to contact the University for their coverage of higher education, research and the sciences, but who have lost their jobs or been reassigned to other beats,” she said, noting that fewer reporters follow up on press releases, even those about “truly groundbreaking research.”

Cliatt said that the “newsroom model” is not new at Princeton, but that other colleges have had a bigger adjustment in recent years.

“There was a time when some institutions reported that X professor made such-and-such discovery, and here is her number so you can call her,” Cliatt said.

“The number of science writers and newspaper science sections, as well as broadcast coverage of science, has been declining steeply in the past couple of years,” Lisa Lapin, assistant vice president of university communications at Stanford, said in an e-mail. “So have the number of higher education writers.”

Bill Murphy, vice president for communications at the University of Rochester, said that the website was launched because university communications offices “were becoming increasingly concerned about the shrinking space and airtime for coverage of university-based research.” He added that the project’s creators considered the website “a supplement to regular news coverage.”

“We still place the highest value on research coverage by traditional news media,” Lapin noted, “but the reality is we can’t rely on that alone any more ... We have to communicate using all of the available vehicles, including direct communication.”

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Michael Schoenfeld, vice president for public affairs and government relations at Duke, emphasized the effectiveness and accessibility of Futurity’s aggregating format.

“A curious citizen or student might not go to many, or even any, of our university websites to look for the latest discoveries,” he said. “But we have found that people will go to a site that aggregates the best stories in a single place.”

Schoenfeld added that the website’s ability to generate 100,000 visits per month, as well as its partnerships with other major online publications, is evidence that the public is interested in research produced by universities.

Futurity gathers its content through submissions from each individual research university, which Jenny Leonard, Futurity’s editor, considers for publication.

“I work directly with an editorial contact at each university who submits content,” Leonard said in an e-mail.

She explained that she is responsible for both selecting the stories according to content and visual appeal as well as lightly editing them to ensure consistency across all of Futurity’s aggregated research reports.

“This filtering process, if you will, helps distill the content down to the best of the best,” she said. “That’s part of what makes Futurity so unique.”

Just six months after Futurity’s launch, its creators said they are pleased with their progress to date.

“Considering that this project was merely a concept a year ago, I think that we have come pretty far,” Murphy said, citing the introduction of seven British universities into Futurity’s membership as evidence for the project’s increasing international success.

Lapin said that in addition to its growing viewership and international appeal, there is additional — albeit unquantifiable — evidence of Futurity’s success.

“Some of our reach can’t be measured,” she said, “because the content is spreading virally to other sites,” including Twitter and other news aggregation sites.

Lapin expressed her satisfaction at the website’s success.

“We are thrilled at the results,” she said. “We have absolutely been successful, and that success continues to grow.”