As a higher-education reporter for The Ann Arbor News, Geoff S. Larcom used to hang out on the campus of Eastern Michigan University, poking his head into professors’ and administrators’ offices to trawl for stories.
But when the 174-year-old newspaper folded, in July, the university had to come up with new ways to connect with the public. It hired Mr. Larcom to help.
At a time when newspapers are slashing their staffs and squeezing out education coverage, it is more difficult for colleges to communicate their relevance and messages to the public. Many are tapping the expertise of out-of-work journalists as they navigate a media landscape that is increasingly moving online.
But the void those reporters leave in shrinking newsrooms has raised questions about whether colleges are being held accountable, and whether too many college news releases show up, almost verbatim, on newspapers’ Web sites.
Media-relations officials, even those as new to the job as Mr. Larcom, say they welcome the scrutiny that beat reporters provide.
“You wish there was still someone who haunted the halls of colleges the way I did, stopping by people’s offices and really getting to know them,” says Mr. Larcom, who in September became executive director of media relations at Eastern Michigan. “You don’t see that much anymore, because everyone’s stretched so thin.”
Mr. Larcom, who has a master’s degree in journalism, spent 25 years as a reporter and editor at the Ann Arbor newspaper, most recently as one of two higher-education reporters. These days he’s on the other side of the fence, tweeting, posting, and pitching to a variety of online, print, and broadcast sites.
Faced with declining advertising revenues and circulation, many newspapers are combining higher education and schools into a single beat, or even eliminating the education beat altogether. In a report released in December, the Brookings Institution found that articles about education made up only about 1 percent of all national news over the past few years. No previous figure was available.
Some newspapers and other news outlets have partially filled the void with blogs and online forums that engage readers in conversations about issues but generally lack original reporting. Among the newspapers that have started higher-education blogs are The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today.
But online forums can be a mixed blessing for colleges. Rumors and misinformation spread quickly on the Web, and public-relations officials often get drawn into monitoring what is being said about their colleges.
On the other hand, sites that publish readers’ comments offer some accountability at a time when fewer education reporters are acting as watchdogs.
Between 2001 and 2008, one in five newsroom journalists lost their jobs, and 14,700 more were cut last year. The losses are the equivalent of closing 11 New York Times newsrooms, according to a statement released in January by the Education Writers Association.
As a result of newsroom cuts and the consolidation of education beats, important stories are going untold, says Richard Lee Colvin, a former education writer for the Los Angeles Times who heads the Columbia University-based Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media.
“What’s not being written are the big stories about issues like cost, college completion, and what students are actually learning,” he says. “What does it mean when a community-college student in California is unable to get the courses he needs because of budget cuts? And what is the consequence for economic recovery in a state when access to college is becoming harder? What are students getting for tuition that keeps going up? These big questions are more crucial now than ever before.”
A number of reporting organizations are stepping in to ask such questions.
The Hechinger Institute, which trains education reporters and editors, announced in October that it had created the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit operation to provide in-depth coverage of national education issues. The report, which is initially backed by $1-million from the Lumina Foundation for Education and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will work on its own and in collaboration with other print, broadcast, and online news outlets. It plans to publish a Web site starting this spring and eventually have two or three reporters and two or three editors.
“The bottom-line goal is to add to the resources that are available to cover the big stories,” Mr. Colvin says.
Without that, says Mr. Larcom, of Eastern Michigan, some accountability is lost: “If there’s controversy, reporters will be there, but they don’t spend as much time on features or stories that detail the fabric of academic life, nor do they have the time to step back and engage in a deep study of important issues.”
Untold Research Stories
The problem of declining education coverage is particularly acute in the sciences. Many newspapers have reduced their science coverage in recent years, leaving universities fewer outlets for stories on breakthroughs in research. (The Chronicle, too, has reduced its coverage of academic science.)
CNN announced in late 2008 that it would cut its entire news staff for science, technology, and the environment, and would incorporate those topics into general reporting. The move alarmed many scientists, who point out that people who read about science are more likely to form educated opinions about issues like global warming and stem-cell research.
To address that problem, public-affairs officers at 53 research universities in the United States, Canada, and Britain have joined a new consortium called Futurity to publicize their own research by going directly to the public. The group was founded by communications officers at Duke University, Stanford University, and the University of Rochester. The editor, Jenny Leonard, is based at Rochester, where she was a writer and editor in the public-affairs office.
She selects news releases from member universities, all of whom are members of the Association of American Universities or its British counterpart, the Russell Group. She then edits them slightly and posts them on Futurity’s Web site. Along with science, the topics include health, the environment, society, and culture.
Critics complain that the reports are little more than distribution channels for news releases, and that they lack the scrutiny that newspaper reporters would provide.
“In the past, we knew we had those gatekeepers who understood the complexity of the research, could evaluate the quality of the work, and serve as checks and balances to what the more eager and aggressive institutions might want to put out there,” says Earle M. Holland, assistant vice president for research communications at Ohio State University.
Futurity’s founders say they aren’t trying to replace traditional science reporting, but are instead supplementing reduced coverage by offering a direct link to university research.
“Our readers know the difference between journalism and the stories we are putting out, with integrity and care,” says Bill Murphy, vice president for communications at Rochester and one of Futurity’s founders.
Mr. Murphy hopes the service’s articles will pique the interest of journalists as well as general readers. “What we value most highly is getting journalistic coverage of our research and getting the third-party validity that comes from a skeptical third party looking at our stuff,” he says. “We hope that newspapers will find new economic models that will allow them to thrive again and have the space for us.” Until they do, “we’ll continue our experiment.”
Last month the National Science Foundation and the University of Southern California announced a partnership, called the Creative Science Studio, which will also provide science news directly to the public. Starting this fall, faculty members and students at the university’s School of Cinematic Arts will work with NSF-supported scholars across the country on multimedia reports designed to entertain as well as inform.
“This collaboration will allow the cinematic arts to gain new insights into the natural world and provide the scientific community with new tools for communicating research to the public,” Thomas Kalil, deputy director for policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology, said in a written statement.
The University of Akron uses a variety of new techniques in response to declining newspaper coverage, says Barbara O’Malley, associate vice president for communications. It has posted news stories on its Facebook page and videos on YouTube and sent multimedia presentations to newspapers.
“It’s sad to see so many newspapers diminishing, because print allows you to convey the details and the complexity of the stories that higher education has to tell,” she says. To succeed in her job today, “you have to be comfortable with constant change at a very fast pace. The media market is fragmenting quickly and will continue to do so.”
Digital Transformation
Responding to the changing industry, the Education Writers Association eliminated membership fees for its approximately 750 members and is opening its online discussions to anyone interested in education.
Even The New York Times disbanded its education desk, in 2008, and has devoted more attention to its blog about college choices.
Other industry shifts have included the financing of news operations by universities and foundations, as well as the introduction of national online investigative units like ProPublica, which plans to expand its higher-education coverage.
“Higher education is a great domain for us to be reporting on,” says Paul Steiger, ProPublica’s editor in chief and a former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. “Many universities are going through periods of stresses and strains because their endowments have been hammered and tuition costs have been rising at double the rate of inflation.”
As colleges beef up their social-networking efforts, they can sometimes extend the shelf life of news stories. Akron resurrected a story about its research on the architecture of spider webs with Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube postings. Feature articles, some with video links, began popping up in newspapers and on radio and television stations, as well as on specialized sites like Medgadget, a journal for emerging medical technology.
“Everyone is finding their way through this thicket,” says Mr. Larcom, of Eastern Michigan. “People still have a hunger for information about education, but the outlets are becoming diffused.”
On a positive note, he adds, “You’re not as much bound by a set relationship or dynamic. If you had a bad relationship with newspaper X, it’s not as significant a roadblock as it used to be in getting your news out.”
In the meantime, he keeps expanding his network of news sites. “In the burgeoning media community, there are potentially more outlets that care about you, but it’s harder to get the big hits,” says Mr. Larcom. “I like to use the analogy that there used to be a huge lighthouse, but now we have a field of 100 candles.”
