Why Futurity fails

Born as the idea of a handful of senior university PR officials and billed as an alternative source for science news in a world supposedly hemorrhaging science writers, the Futurity website offers up four or five new research stories daily, fresh from the country's major research universities.

by Earle Holland Born as the idea of a handful of senior university PR officials and billed as an alternative source for science news in a world supposedly hemorrhaging science writers, the Futurity website offers up four or five new research stories daily, fresh from the country's major research universities. Officially christened in Sept. 2009, (although it had been in a beta/trial mode for several months earlier), Futurity shoved its way into the public eye through a major PR roll-out coordinated among the 40-plus institutions that had signed onboard. State and regional newspapers ran stories that the local research university had joined this noble consortium intent on filling an alleged gap in science reporting. The member institutions rushed out news releases, most varying little from an apparently pre-arranged template, announcing that XYZ University was a "founding member" of Futurity. Any fair assessment of the program's kick-off would brand it an exemplary success, marred only by the conflict of two unexpected factors. One was its name. "Futurity" is an odd moniker more akin to Stephen Colbert's lexicon than a web-based science site, and it shared the news spotlight with a wellknown horserace for two-year-old quarter horses — The All American Futurity race — also held in September. The other deflating factor was me. In an e-mail at the end of that month, University of Rochester Vice President for Communications Bill Murphy had written "Every time I turn around, Mike Schoenfeld is sending me a blog entry in which you are blasting Futurity. You turn up in Futurity clips as often as we do." Murphy, Schoenfeld — Duke University's vice president for Public Affairs and Government Relations — and a couple of other peers were the brain trust behind Futurity. Murphy was a friend and former boss and, while I've known many of the project's leaders for years, it was clear I was a major pariah in their eyes. I was following the conversation in the blogosphere and when stories appeared announcing the start of Futurity, I quickly offered an alternative view. While news websites and blogs reported on the project, raising questions of whether it was "news" or "PR," I was commenting on what I saw as shortcomings. Murphy, et al., just couldn't see what my problem was with the project. Why wasn't I onboard? About the time that Futurity was first gaining notice, I got three e-mails from senior leadership at my university asking why we weren't a player in what seemed to be an obvious opportunity to tout Ohio State research. Colleagues at other major research institutions were facing similar questions and the pressure to "get onboard" was mounting. There were, however, substantive problems with how the website worked and with what had evolved over the years as Ohio State's effective research communications effort:

• The Futurity staff was allowed to alter the content of the research stories institutions submitted, based on their own discretion, and no approval of any changes was included in their policies. This meant that stories carefully written and vetted by researchers to ensure accurate reporting could be modified in ways that misrepresented the studies;
• No one on the Futurity staff was an experienced science writer;
• Hyperlinks included in Futurity's versions of an institution's stories initially directed readers to the main institutional website rather than to the institution's original version of the research story, suggesting Futurity's leadership was more interested in driving web traffic to the universities than it was directing readers to the original content;
• The annual cost for participating in Futurity was $2,000, substantially more than annual membership in EurekAlert! and comparable to annual costs for Newswise. Both services distribute an institution's research releases, unaltered, to thousands of reporter-types.

Once my bosses heard these and another half-dozen objections I voiced about Futurity, the pressure to participate evaporated.

In the beginning, the project's backers touted it as an alternative to conventional science reporting, a newswire of sorts to fill in the gap left by laid-off science writers in the national media. Months later, they acknowledged that Futurity was basically an aggregator of such stories, rather than the suggested journalistic alternative.

During a session on online magazines at this fall's NASW workshops, Futurity staffer Jenny Leonard offered an overview of what the project's intentions were. In a conversation prior to her talk, she acknowledged that Futurity originally had linked to an institution's main website, "but that has changed — we now link to the story." Links within the Futurity version of stories now do point to original releases but the links at the end of Futurity's story offerings still point readers back to either the institutional homepage or to the institution's "news" page.

Regardless of other signals, it's hard not to see that linkage decision as anything more than a conscious effort to drive traffic to the institution rather than to the specific research in question.

In his e-mail admonishing me in September, Murphy argued that I needed to "stay up to date" if I was going to continue my criticisms. He wrote: "We have also changed the editorial process to include an e-mail back to a university's editorial contact (if Ohio State were a member, this would be you) as soon as a story is posted so that we can modify a story immediately if there is a problem."

But after-the-fact corrections of errors seems a poor approach to ensuring the accuracy of reporting. The researcher's and the university science writer's credibility is on the line in these cases and is too valuable to risk.

My problem with Futurity isn't what it is. Many other media outlets — conventional and otherwise — work the same way it does. No, my objection rests with what it claimed to be in the beginning and how it suggested it was filling in for the alleged diminution of science reporting. I also object to the suggestion that it offers institutions more than the long-established sites like EurekAlert! and Newswise are offering. Futurity backers argued that it would focus mainly on the general public, but EurekAlert! already can brag about getting 1.2 million hits each month.

In hard economic times, at public institutions at least, it's hard to justify the cost of Futurity participation, given the constraints I see.

But for those who disagree, just climb onboard.

POSTSCRIPT

On Nov. 9, I requested data on hits at the website, total visitors, and subscribers to Futurity's daily e-mail newsletter. By midmorning of the next day, I received the stats for the site's first three months — and they were impressive. Since going public on Sept. 15, the site had 135,000 visitors and 325,000 page views. The daily e-mail (which highlights four stories) has 2,580 subscribers. Futurity also has 557 Facebook fans and 766 followers on Twitter.

Six hours later, Murphy shared similar data with Futurity's members and the followers of a public affairs listserv run by the Association of American Universities. Perhaps the timing was coincidental.

Earle Holland is assistant vice president for research communications at The Ohio State University.

(NASW members can read the rest of the Winter 2009-10 ScienceWriters by logging into the members area.)