• San Jose Mercury News, Wednesday, September 16, 2009 9:58 PM

About three dozen of the nation's top universities will start feeding news about their scientific discoveries directly to top news sites on the Internet, rather than going through traditional media outlets. Princeton, Yale, Duke, the University of Chicago, Stanford and UC-Berkeley are among the schools that are participating.

The universities have essentially formed their own nonprofit wire service, called Futurity, to provide articles to Web sites such as Yahoo News, Google News, MySpace and Twitter. Yahoo will include Futurity content with other news items from sources like The Associated Press, New York Times and San Jose Mercury News. Google has similarly said it will capture the Futurity content for its news section.

"Independent, objective coverage of what we are doing has been declining at major news organizations, which no longer have the resources," says Lisa Lapin, communications executive at Stanford. In many cases, reporters covering medicine, space and environmental issues have taken buyouts or been laid off at newspapers and TV outlets across the nation, she notes.

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