New Outlet for Sharing Science
September 15, 2009 [from http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/09/15/futurity]
Last year, CNN announced that it was going to eliminate its entire reporting team focused on science and technology.
To a group of public affairs administrators at research universities, it was but the latest sign that science news was going to have a more and more difficult time reaching the public. Many daily newspapers that once had science reporters or science pages have eliminated them, and many traditional print publications are these days struggling to survive.
So the university administrators decided to create a Web site in which they could distribute writing about their researchers and their work directly to the public -- without counting on journalists. The result is Futurity, which today shifts from beta to an officially live site. The site features writing about research at 35 universities in the United States and Canada (all of them members of the Association of American Universities). Among the kickoff articles are pieces on the Arctic climate (from the University of Colorado at Boulder), worm genetics (from Yale University), and nanomedicine (from Northwestern University).
To a group of public affairs administrators at research universities, it was but the latest sign that science news was going to have a more and more difficult time reaching the public. Many daily newspapers that once had science reporters or science pages have eliminated them, and many traditional print publications are these days struggling to survive.
So the university administrators decided to create a Web site in which they could distribute writing about their researchers and their work directly to the public -- without counting on journalists. The result is Futurity, which today shifts from beta to an officially live site. The site features writing about research at 35 universities in the United States and Canada (all of them members of the Association of American Universities). Among the kickoff articles are pieces on the Arctic climate (from the University of Colorado at Boulder), worm genetics (from Yale University), and nanomedicine (from Northwestern University).
The goal of the Web site is not to compete with Science and Nature, but rather to reach interested members of the general public, said Bill Murphy, one of the co-founders and vice president for communications at the University of Rochester. Imagining the intended reader, Murphy said, the founders saw as the typical reader "a person who is not a scientist, but the person who used to read a news magazine or newspaper and look forward to finding the science section."...
No comments:
Post a Comment