The Research University's News Source

I had heard murmurings about Futurity.org over the last few months, but since it's official launch this week on the 15th, it's getting the coverage in the mainstream press it merits. Here's a write up from the Baltimore Sun about the consortium formed by the University of Rochester, Duke and Stanford to aggregate the very best research news from partner universities. (List of participants.)

What's remarkable about this initiative is the acknowledgment that the typical news channels lack the ability to properly cover research and science. The Sun article also talks about the changing motivations of the traditional papers where readers are more likely to read the people and leisure section instead of a science section. Twenty years ago nearly 150 U.S. newspapers had a science section, today fewer than 20 do.

"It's ironic that we have fewer writers in our major media focusing on science, while we have ever more issues that have a science base — from climate change to the health care debate, stem cells, evolution and swine flu — many of which are very controversial," said Cristine Russell, a former Washington Post science reporter who is president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.

Futurity allows universities to feed the online news aggregators and bypass those pesky journalists completely. The top article for today is about germs lurking in showerheads, interesting and relevant enough that I immediately subscribed to the daily RSS feed. I read enough Perez Hilton updates on twitter, so this should balance out nicely :)