Is Futurity.org the Future of Science News?
Is Futurity.org the Future of Science News? Sunday September 20, 2009 Along with the recession and the healthcare debate, another deep-seated worry keeps lovers of science awake: the decline of printed news. Thousands of traditional journalists have gone overboard, with or without lifeboats, as the newspapers list and sink. Now a mere 20 American papers have designated science sections. The science newshole, what’s left of it, is filled mostly with breathless medical and global-warming tidbits without insight or perspective. Thank goodness dinosaurs can still get press. The traditional science news pipeline, running from universities to the press, is going slack; “the mailing lists have become short,” journalism observer Charlie Petit puts it. So a group of major American universities launched Futurity.org, a unified outlet to feed the raw news from their public information officers or PIOs directly to the public through Google News, Yahoo and other s
