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.

We talked to Lisa Lapin of Stanford's University Communications office and Futurity's Jenny Leonard about the new effort. Although the effort may have been started by the decline of science journalism, they emphasized that, although the Internet may be driving the decline in traditional science journalism, it's also providing many new opportunities. "The success of bloggers and social media sites show that people are taking an active role in finding their own news sources," Leonard said. "Futurity give us the chance to reach them."

They'll be reached by the same sort of material that university press offices are already producing, primarily press releases, with a sprinkling of material that might be used in internal publications or newsletters. The material will come from a consortium of partner institutions that are members of the Association of American Universities, an organization of leading research universities. Although it was inspired by problems with science journalism, Futurity will host news about research in the humanities and other areas, as well.

But Futurity isn't simply going to aggregate anything those institutions produce. Instead, Leonard will have an editorial role, choosing the content she feels will be most interesting to the public and making changes to the text that she feels are appropriate, a job that may include toning down the university's self-promotion. "We've ceded editorial control," Stanford's Lapin said. "She [Leonard] will take out multiple self-references and make sure it's news." Leonard says she views her role as "balancing the interest of those involved against the reader's interests. Doing this well is critical to Futurity's efforts."

Blurring lines, or responding to the blur?

The quality of press releases, like the quality of scientific journalism, can be extremely variable, so a degree of editorial control seems essential. Still, Futurity may raise fears that the line between promotional materials meant for journalists and actual journalism will be further eroded. According to both Lapin and Leonard, it's too late for that—the lines have already been blurred.

It's easy to see that they have a case. For an illustrative example, it's worth looking at some of the coverage of the neurobiology of torture story (our own is here). The coverage at Science Daily and PhysOrg is eerily similar, with many instances of identical phrasing, starting with the title itself. That's because both are using mildly edited versions of a press release made by the publisher, Cell Press, which was available via Eurekalert, an aggregator of science press releases. If others are presenting science press releases as news, why shouldn't the universities cut out the middleman?

Or, more accurately, middlemen, as the handling of science press releases has become increasingly complex. Lapin described how Stanford has to pay for the right to post its releases to Eurekalert, but can host them on its own website essentially for free, given the marginal costs of increased traffic. And Stanford's research news site apparently gets hundreds of thousands of hits a month, with a recent release seeing over 60,000 hits. That sort of traffic, she said, has led some private companies to approach the university about getting exclusive access to its content so that they could profit from the traffic.

It's not simply the fact that press releases are being presented as journalism, either—in many cases, they're being prepared by former journalists. Because of the shrinking job market for these specialists, many of them are finding employment in the same places they used to work with in order to arrange coverage of science news. "Lots of the staff used to work in journalism," Leonard said. "They often do a fantastic job."

So, it's clear that there's a public interest in the research stories provided by universities, those stories are often accurate and well produced, and getting them to the public is in keeping with the general educational mission of the universities. To an extent, Futurity seems to little more than an effort to organize a process, the presentation of press releases as news stories, that was already happening. And some of its features, like direct links to the journal articles that the news stories are describing, are a very positive difference between it and many actual news sites.

Still, the process of preparing a press release is necessarily self-promotional, and no amount of editing is going to be able to fully eliminate that. Futurity does credit the press office as the source of the material, but it could do a better job of describing the origin of the content on site, so that the public would be reading with the appropriate caution. That said, Science Daily and PhysOrg do more or less the same thing, and they certainly don't warn their readers. This may be a case where it's tempting to hold universities to a standard we don't hold a private business to.