Press Engagement

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Key Points

• There is no central newswire that carries press releases from across all major universities, making it difficult to perform a cross-institutional comparison of press engagement.
• Most research universities have a decentralized press structure and do a very poor job at aggregating press content from across their institution into a single place.

Discussion

Universities attempt to increase awareness of their research and accomplishments by proactively engaging the media with press releases and news stories. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be a uniform cross-institutional method of measuring the volume of such output. The LexisNexis news archive includes several press release wires such as PR Newswire and Targeted News Service. PR Newswire focuses primarily on commercial press releases, so references to educational institutions tend to occur in the context of an individual's educational experience (such as an executive being promoted), rather than a release from the institution itself. Targeted News Service includes press releases issued by universities, but for the University of Illinois, only a selection of releases from the Springfield campus appear to be indexed by the service, while the majority of news releases are actually issued by the flagship Urbana-Champaign campus. No other newswire appeared to carry a substantial number of press releases from a majority of universities, suggesting that cross-institutional comparisons of press activity would be difficult, making it impossible to gauge the impact an institution's own press engagement has on its ultimate media exposure.

Further complicating matters is the difficulty of actually measuring the volume of press releases issued by a large decentralized institution. At the University of Illinois, only press releases issued by the institutional press office are recorded in its central archives. Many units have their own public affairs staff that contact the media and issue press releases independently, meaning there is no simple way to calculate the total volume of press material generated by the institution over time. To an external visitor, such as a reporter, funding agency, or potential student, it is often impossible to gain a holistic view of an institution's activities, suggesting that institutions should pay greater attention to creating centralized archives aggregating press content from across their units.