PR or Science Journalism? It’s Getting Harder to Tell.
Faced with a shrinking audience of journalists for their press releases, a consortium of universities has launched Futurity, a site that will aggregate edited versions of the best materials produced by university press offices.
In recent years, the economic hardships that have crippled newspapers and hurt other media outlets have taken a disproportionate toll on science journalism. Many news establishments, including CNN, have entirely eliminated their science staff, while others have severely curtailed coverage or handed it off to journalists with no science experience. The net result is that the press officers of major universities, whose job is to help increase the public’s recognition of the research that goes on there, increasingly feel like they’re speaking to an empty room. Their solution has arrived in the form of Futurity.org, a site that aggregates a selection of the releases they used to feed to the press.
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