Futurity: The Nonprofit News Service Bringing University Research to the Public
Futurity is a nonprofit research news service, based in Rochester, New York, that shares science, health and technology discoveries directly from leading universities with readers and republishing media. Its website, futurity.org, aggregates news articles about scientific research conducted at prominent universities in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Europe, Asia and Australia, and it is hosted and edited by the University of Rochester. It carries no advertising, and its stories are written for a lay audience.
Futurity was launched on 15 September 2009 by a group of leading research universities — 35 institutions in most contemporary accounts, with the University of Rochester's own history recalling 40 institutions from the United States and Canada at launch — in response to a problem its founders stated plainly: as traditional media cut science coverage, it was becoming harder for universities to share in-depth research with the public through conventional news channels. Their answer was to publish together, directly, in a shared online magazine of research news.
Overview
Futurity is best described as a cooperative news channel rather than a conventional agency. Participating universities supply stories about their own research, based mostly on their press releases; Futurity's small editorial team at Rochester edits them lightly for a general audience, presents them with strong photography and design, and publishes them in four broad subject areas. The site's founding editor described its unofficial motto as cool science, cool photos — a formula meant to compete for general readers' attention, not merely to archive university announcements.
The founders were careful to define what Futurity is not. Its founding editor Jenny Leonard, of the University of Rochester, told the Columbia Journalism Review that it was not meant to be a replacement for the reporting and analysis essential to covering science completely, and co-founder Bill Murphy explained that it would be distinct from science wire services aimed at professional journalists, because its target audience was the general public. Futurity is therefore a direct-to-reader publisher and a syndication source for other media at once: stories appear on its own site, in its daily email updates and social channels, and, through deals and republication, in aggregators and outlets that license or carry its content.
History and Founding
Futurity was established in 2009 by senior communications officers at three universities: Lisa Lapin of Stanford University, Michael Schoenfeld of Duke University and Bill Murphy of the University of Rochester. A beta version of the site appeared in March 2009, and Futurity officially launched on 15 September 2009. The founding consortium consisted of leading research universities — Johns Hopkins' contemporary account says Johns Hopkins and 34 other leading United States research universities launched it, while Rochester's later anniversary history recalls 40 institutions from the United States and Canada at launch; the participants were members of the Association of American Universities, and each contributed 2,000 dollars to get the site off the ground, according to reporting in Inside Higher Ed cited at the time.
The launch context was the steep decline of science coverage in mainstream newspapers and magazines, with science sections and specialist staffs being cut. Schoenfeld called it unique to see so many high-powered universities working together collaboratively, describing universities as the world's laboratories hosting bright minds working on urgent questions. Johns Hopkins' communications director Dennis O'Shea added a public-accountability argument: the site would let the public see how federal, state and private funding were being used to address critical challenges. In its first two days, the site attracted 13,800 visits and 46,600 page views.
Ownership and Leadership
Futurity is a nonprofit, collectively owned in spirit by its participating universities and operationally run from Rochester. The University of Rochester hosts and edits the site, its Office of Communications manages the enterprise, and Murphy — Rochester's vice president for communications — served on its governing board. Leonard was its founding editor and remained its editorial voice in anniversary accounts five years later, explaining that universities are incubators of research discoveries with the potential to affect everyday lives, and that Futurity was created to offer a big-picture view of what is happening in research.
That governance model — a university-hosted editorial hub serving a consortium — is Futurity's defining structural feature. The host institution supplies continuity, editing and presentation; the members supply the research news and the founding and sustaining support. It is a cooperative solution to a shared problem, and its founders came from the universities' own communications leadership rather than from commercial publishing, which shaped its nonprofit, no-advertising character from the start.
Services and Distribution
For participating universities, Futurity is a distribution service: a story placed on the site reaches a general audience directly, is organised by subject and by school so readers can browse a university's research in one place, and becomes available for wider pickup. Stories include links to published reports and supplemental materials so readers can explore topics in more depth, and news packages include photographs, illustrations and videos alongside the text.
For readers, the service is a daily research magazine. By its fifth anniversary in 2014, Futurity was publishing an average of 14 new stories per day and had published 10,000 stories in five years, with 8,200 newsletter subscribers, a daily email update readers could sign up for, and active social channels — its anniversary figures listed 14,000 Twitter followers and 72,000 Facebook fans, with half of website traffic already coming from mobile devices. Distribution deals extended that reach: by 2011 the site had set up deals with the news aggregators Flipboard and LinkedIn Pulse to share its content on their platforms, and at launch it was already in partnership talks with major internet news providers and pursuing syndication with large news aggregators.
Coverage Areas
Futurity organises research news into four subject groups. Contemporary launch accounts name them Earth and Environment, Health and Medicine, Science and Design — later rendered Science and Technology — and Society and Culture; current browsing uses Earth and Environment, Health and Medicine, Science and Technology, and Society and Culture. Health and Medicine is visibly the largest stream, with stories on brains, genomes, disease, ageing and treatments; the other sections carry climate and ecology, physics and engineering, and social science and humanities research respectively.
The geographic coverage followed the membership. The site began with universities in the United States and Canada, then expanded globally: in January 2010 its members agreed to expand membership to the Russell Group of leading British research universities, and Cardiff, Leeds, Nottingham, Sheffield, Warwick, King's College London and University College London were among the early joiners. Vanderbilt's account of that expansion noted that in the preceding five months, stories from the then 46 member universities had attracted more than 400,000 visitors. By the fifth anniversary, Futurity counted 62 participating universities from six countries, spanning the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Europe, Asia and Australia.
Clients and Media Partners
Futurity's clients, in the cooperative sense, are its participating universities — institutions such as Stanford, Duke, Rochester, Johns Hopkins, Brown, Vanderbilt, Boston University and McGill, among dozens of others browsable by school on the site. Each joined to solve the same distribution problem, and each benefits from appearing alongside peer institutions: the University of Sheffield's external relations director, welcoming the Russell Group partnership, said it allowed Sheffield's research to reach a wider audience and be showcased alongside leading United States universities.
Its media partners are the platforms and outlets that carry its content onward. The Flipboard and LinkedIn Pulse deals of 2011 put Futurity stories inside the era's leading mobile and professional aggregation products, and its model has always welcomed republication by media that need credible research news. The Russell Group itself was a partner in the global expansion, its director general Wendy Piatt calling the arrangement an excellent opportunity for British universities to tell the stories of their world-class research teams, and its communications head describing Futurity as one of the interesting experiments as media adapted to the decline of traditional newspapers and magazines.
Digital Platforms
Futurity was digital from birth: a website designed for interaction, with commenting on stories, a daily email update, a mobile-friendly version at launch and active Twitter, Facebook and YouTube presences, as Lapin described at the time. Presentation was a deliberate strategy — Murphy emphasised that Futurity put a lot of work into presentation and crafting an attractive website — because the site competed for the attention of a reader its founders described as a person who is not a scientist, but who used to read a news magazine or newspaper science section.
The anniversary data showed that strategy tracking the audience's migration: by 2014 half of traffic came from phones and tablets. The site's structure has remained recognisably the same into the present — subject sections, university tags, featured stories and a newsletter signup inviting readers to receive daily updates — and current section pages show a continuing daily flow of university research stories from institutions across its international membership.
Editorial Approach
Futurity's editorial method is transparent and was debated from the start. Stories are based mostly on press releases disseminated by the universities, written for a lay audience and given light editing to make them appealing to general readers, with no additional reporting. Critics among journalists worried about the implications of universities bypassing traditional news outlets; Futurity's founders answered that the site was not a replacement for independent science journalism but a response to its contraction — a way to keep a stream of research news flowing to a public that was losing its science sections.
The Columbia Journalism Review's contemporary assessment captured both sides: universities banding together to launch their own news channel was an experiment provoked by real cuts, comparable to other responses of the era such as the National Science Foundation's science portal, and it raised genuine questions about promotional material presented as news. Futurity's mitigations were visible in its practice: stories are attributed to their universities, linked to the underlying published research, and presented as discoveries from named institutions rather than as independently reported findings. Readers are told whose research it is; the site's job is clarity, selection and presentation.
Notable Work
Futurity's notable work is the creation of a durable, cooperative channel between research universities and the public at the moment the old channel — the newspaper science desk — was collapsing. Publishing 10,000 stories in its first five years, at an average of 14 per day, it demonstrated that a consortium of universities could sustain a professional news operation of real scale on a nonprofit basis, funded initially by modest equal contributions and hosted by a single member's communications office.
Its international expansion was a second notable achievement. Extending a North American consortium to the British Russell Group in 2010 — on the stated logic that good science is international and much research is collaborative across continents — made Futurity an early model of cross-border science communication cooperation, growing from its founding group to 53 institutions at the time of the British expansion coverage and 62 universities in six countries by its fifth year.
Recent Developments
Futurity continues to publish daily research news at futurity.org in its established sections, with current stories attributed to universities across its membership — including, in recent health coverage, New York University, Tufts, Brown, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Yale, Emory, Texas A&M and the University of Copenhagen, among others — and continues to offer its daily newsletter signup. The mix of American, British, Canadian, European, Asian and Australian institutions in the current file confirms that the global consortium model of 2010 has become its permanent structure.
For worldnm.com, Futurity represents a category of news agency the directory rarely finds: a nonprofit, university-owned cooperative built to supply research news directly to the public. Founded at Rochester in 2009 by communications leaders from Rochester, Duke and Stanford, funded by its members, edited for lay readers and read around the world, it answered the decline of science coverage not by lamenting it but by organising the sources of science news — the universities themselves — into a publisher. Cool science, cool photos turned out to be a durable editorial strategy.
