An exhaustive study of 60 years of stories in The New York Times indicates that, even though the number of stories appearing in the newspaper has been halved since 1946, the number of times a university has been featured or a professor quoted in a story has increased slightly.
However, researchers Kalev Leetaru, a coordinator of information technology at the University of Illinois, and Paul Magelli, senior director of the Academy for Entrepreneurial Leadership and Development, also at Illinois, said in their study, The Soundbite University, that the newspaper is now doing far fewer comprehensive stories focused on a single university than in the early years, more often quoting a professor commenting on a current event.
“In 1946, 53 percent of articles mentioning a research university were about that university, focusing on its research or activities,” the report says. “Today, just 15 percent of articles mentioning a university are about that university: the remaining 85 percent simply cite high-stature faculty for sound bite commentary on current events.
Leetaru, whose research focuses on the role of the news media in how Americans understand the world around them, and Magelli took on the project to ascertain how media coverage of higher education has changed during the last 60 years. What they found was that, as newspapers decreased in size and many – including The New York Times – eliminated their education sections, universities have gone from “news makers to news commentators.”
UConn faculty do a relatively good job in that area, he says, noting that UConn was the 24th most cited university in the study, with the institution or a professor named in nearly 5,700 articles, 129 of which appeared on the front page. The topics of the articles cited by the researchers include athletics, the regional campuses, the UConn Health Center, and the schools of law and social work. They weeded out wedding notices, obituaries, and events, and Leetaru discounts athletics as a major contributor, saying the Times’ sports section is historically small and not given to coverage of college sports.
Leetaru and Magelli conducted their study through the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science and the National Center for Supercomputing Application. To access the material, they used ProQuest Corp’s Historical Newspapers product, a definitive newspaper archive of significant papers dating to the 18th century. Their research examined more than 18 million documents, comprising the entire run of the New York Times from 1945 to 2005.
The duo also looked into university mentions in the online world, an effort which Leetaru says proved too challenging because they could not control for casual mentions, such as a blog mentioning the writer “looked at UConn while in Connecticut. There were simply too many of those,” he says. “Still, a similar pattern was evident when we looked through the material.”
Leetaru says he and Magelli surveyed only Carnegie Extensive Research Institutions, primarily because smaller universities rarely receive mentions in the Times.
He says no single characteristic jumped out as having the strongest relationship to a particular university’s frequency in the newspaper, although enrollment – especially graduate enrollment – clearly is associated. Research expenditures and faculty size also correspond with coverage, as does distance from New York City, albeit to a lesser degree, he says – even though Columbia University was top ranked and New York University was second. The rest of the top 10 included Harvard, Yale, California, Princeton, Penn, Cornell, and Chicago. The universities of Texas, Wisconsin, Washington, Michigan, Illinois, and Rutgers were the only public universities with more citations than UConn.
Leetaru was not complimentary about either university communications officers or faculty when it came to reaching out to media.
“Faculty tend to be really, really bad at promoting their work and keeping their web site current,” he says. “They also tend to describe their research in academic terms, and those are not terms news reporters will use in a Google search. If universities want more media attention, their public relations office has to prepare media guides. They know the terms reporters use, and can rather quickly write a paragraph saying ‘here’s our faculty member and here’s what he does.’ Then, when a reporter is searching on Google for an oil spill expert, that media guide will pop up at the top of their search results.”
Leetaru says university communications departments that continue to pump out “round robin” press releases – a physics release one day, education the next, business another day – need to move into the 21st century, and react more to current events. He says it’s vital they do so:
“Public universities have to justify themselves more than ever in these recessionary times, and press releases not tied to the world’s issues won’t help. But if they can tie the universities’ expertise into current events, and legislators see these professors doing a great job on all these hot topics, that’s going to make them stand up and notice.”
