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As newspaper and magazine newsrooms clear out, people who depended on getting coverage from those reporters are searching for alternatives. One option is to simply hire the reporters themselves. The Los Angeles Kings hockey team has hired former Los Angeles Daily News reporter Rich Hammond, and Major League Baseball has hired a reporter to cover every team for MLB.com (see NYT story).

Another approach is to create your own publication. That’s what 40 research universities in the U.S. (Stanford, Princeton, U of M) have done. Frustrated by the lack of science coverage, they are collaborating on an online publication called Futurity. Since March Futurity has published over 500 stories covering health, medicine, science, design, earth, the environment, culture and society.

Many of the articles are based on peer-reviewed papers published in academic journals, so the PR departments basically just have to translate the scientific jargon into language everyone can understand. Futurity only publishes papers that will be relevant to a general audience with an interest in science, so there is no slogging through inside-baseball science. The writing is sharp, very accessible, and not so different from what you would read in a typical newspaper.

Jenny Leonard, a writer/editor with the University of Rochester’s communications department is Futurity’s editor. She said that concerns about how PR people can provide “fair and balanced” coverage miss the point of Futurity.

“Futurity was not designed to be a replacement for science reporting by journalists,” said Leonard. “Most of the universities involved would rather turn the clock back and have science reporting flourishing and independent reporters covering their stories. Futurity was conceived not as a replacement for journalism, but as a way for universities to react to the current void.”

Tech and biotech companies are facing a similar situation as technology and science trades lose reporters and the remaining print editions continue to thin. Companies will soon have little choice but to create their own media. And once the trades are online I think the playing field between “corporate journalism” and the journalism we see in trades will level considerably in terms of its ability to pull readers. PR, marcom, online community, social media and customer reference functions will merge and companies will have to find that line between promoting their own products and producing credible content that people will read.

Podcast interview guide:
0:48 — Q: How did Futurity get started?.
2:22 – Q: How many visitors to site?
3:45 – Q: How do you provide “fair and balanced” coverage?
5:30 – Q: What are guidelines for publishing criticism of any of these papers?
7:09 – Q: Are the researchers joining in the online conversation?
8:18 – Q: How many stories have you produced?
9:08 – Q: What has the reaction been from reporters and are you getting more press pickup?

 

 Futurity interview with Jenny Leonard [10:08m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I ran across DotSpots in Jerimiah Owyang’s blog yesterday, which was about SideWiki, a google tool that essentially puts a wiki in a side column on every website if you choose to opt in. Call it a pervasive wiki. Someone mentioned that DotSpots did the same thing. I called up DotSpot founder and CEO Farhad Mohit to see if that was true, to find out what he thought of SideWiki and whether complete transparency on the web – everyone being able to comment on everything, everywhere – was a good thing.

Mohit, who founded Bizrate and Shopzilla, said his business is focused on journalism, whereas SideWiki is focused on the larger web community.

“Our focus will be to enhance the news, their [Google’s] focus will be to enhance all websites. We are already discussing possible ways of sending our data into them and getting their data into us. I think we’re both mutually supportive of each other.”

The DotSpots semantic annotation system allows anyone to attach text, photos or video to any meme (block of text) and to have that annotation instantly distributed to all relevant blocks of text across the Internet. According to Mohit this will bring the “wisdom of crowds” to journalism and help level the playing field between professional reporters and citizen journalists.

If he can get a few thousand citizen journalists, activists and bloggers to contribute, DotSpots will have enough content to sell Dotspot to media outlets as a social media news service, said Mohit. DotSpots gives traditional media a plug-and-play way to incorporate social media into their stories, according to Mohit.

“CNN ended up handling a lot of its Iran election coverage by pointing a camera at a twitter feed. Obviously they are not equipped to handle what is happening here [in social media]. They are worried that people are leaving their site to go to other places on the web for information. Why not just enable a system like DotSpots to bring in information militias to populate your stories?”

There is no solid business model yet, but Mohit said if adoption takes off that he is confident something will emerge. The value for news outlets is people staying longer on the pages and therefor more engaged with advertising

 

 DotSpots' Farhad Mohit on Wikis, Google's Sidewiki and the Future of News [22:35m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download