The Word of the day is the Web. From most of the presentations at the NASW AAAS workshops, it became fairly clear that if you're not now or soon to be navigating in cyberspace, you might as well crawl into a black hole.
A national study conducted by Columbia J-School in 1995 shows that almost one fourth (23%) of editors report daily use of the Internet and online services in their organizations, up from 16% the year before. Five years down the road, a majority (56%) say they will want all media relations materials submitted online. Statistics from digital guru Nicholas Negroponte indicate that 50 million people regularly access the Net, and 100,000 new e-mail addresses appear each month.
For PIOs at scientific institutions and organizations, a Web presence already seems to have become a necessity in communicating with reporters and with the general public. One of the workshops, organized and moderated by David Jarmul at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, examined how the tremendous growth of the World Wide Web has affected this communication. PIO panelists looked at how a Web site fits into a larger communications program, how it affects the flow of news, and what their experiences have been in developing these sites.
Jeff Witherly, manager of public information at the Jackson Laboratory in Bangor, Maine, led off the panel with a glimpse of the future paperless society with standard hypertext links from online newspapers and other communications vehicles to background documents, audio, photos, and video.
"People who surf the net are expecting what they see elsewhere, video and audio and high-quality graphics, and that is a different type of assignment for a PIOs. It's beyond annual reports and background video.
"It's realistic to expect that all of us will need to have a formal competitive presence on the Web. One of the strategies is to link with the real news story and be a resource for those new stories."
Witherly noted that going paperless is not as easy as it sounds. "But in what you're doing anyway there is a point before you go to paper at which you can convert electronically. Our organization's annual report was on CD-ROM this year, and we put it on the Web."
Craig Hicks, manager of electronic outreach at the National Academy of Sciences, commented that the power of technology can be seductive, but technology is just another tool for communication. He noted, "If your message isn't presented with an eye to the audience on the other end, it doesn't matter what medium you're using because you're probably not going to get through."
"The Web is really a kind of broadcast medium potentially accessible to a widely diverse audience with differing levels of scientific knowledge, from the scientifically literate to those who watch alien autopsies on Fox or believe the Internet was created last year by a ring of child pornographers," Hicks said.
Like many other organizations, NAS developed its site from varying contributions from various departments. When this happens, focus on the broader mission of the organization may be lost.
Hicks advised PIOs setting up a Web site to work with other departments to define the audience and to fit it in with the overall mission of institution and the identity you want to project. " The audience may differ depending on the message you're sending. Recognize differing needs by organizing the top pages of a site with a general audience in mind. Initially the NAS site resembled the organizational chart. Index information in more than one way. Work with the technical people to get a good search engine so people can type in queries.
"The principles of good science writing still apply. The tendency when first building a site is to shove in as much material you have on hand, but it's better to have a few quality items. And build a site that gives a balanced picture of your institution, even if this means you have to give some departments a helping hand, " Hicks said.
He cautioned PIOs to consider technical limitations of the audience. "Assume people have less than what technoids say is standard, e.g., slower modem speeds or text-only gopher capability, so you don't leave people behind."
Ron Sauder, Director of the Office of Consumer Heatlh, Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, described how to retrofit an existing academic site for a wider audience. "Health-care information is one of the leading categories that people look for on the Net. There are more than 1,800 medical sites on the Web. We have an opportunity to do direct public communications on an unprecedented scale with an audience that's trying to get our information and an audience we're trying to reach."
The success at Hopkins in retrofitting a site depended on building a new front door to the information on hand. "We tried to get something that's graphically appealing and that can let users identify themselves by category of person, rather than make them try to fit into the divisions of the organization." Hopkins is now finding that Web can be an important source of patient referrals, a fact that might give other institutions more incentives for developing Web sites.
Sauder pointed out that a Web site may not be a primary means of communicating with reporters--not all reporters have modems. Potentially more valuable may be sites that serve as round-the-clock libraries or online keyword-searchable archives.
How the Web will fit in to an existing public communications program should be carefully thought through before a site is developed, advised Marion Glick, Director of Communications and Public Affairs at the Rockefeller University. "If all you're capable of doing is putting up the news releases you're already doing, you may be wasting your time. A Web site isn't a replacement for the releases, newsletters, magazines you're already doing but a supplement to them. Remember, you can't read it on the train home or cut it up and send it home to Mom.
"Commercial sites are going for the new and different, but if you're just starting out, take what you already have and put it up. Look for existing material, such as student applications, notices for enrollments in clinical studies, calendars of events, campus phone book, and e-mail links on news releases."
Other thoughts on establishing a Web presence: "Where are you going to find the time to learn HTML (hypertext markup language) for programming? Do you need a full- or part-time person to run it, and is there money for it? If you run your shop, you shouldn't be the Webmaster, you've got enough to do! Are you involved as PIO on your institution's Web committee? Working with people who teach journalism and computers is one way to establish a site. And when you get it, publicize it on stationery and Rolodex cards. Start out small, like 15 years ago when we went to PCs, restructure, and reallocate," Glick advised.
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Barbara Hyde is communications director of the American Society for Microbiology, Washington, DC.