Innovators: Roger Johnson, Founder of Newswise

Thom Canalichio (left: that’s @newswise to his followers on Twitter) and Roger Johnson.

Last week, Jeremiah Owyang tweeted a query to his followers, asking about the first social network that they had used. Jeremiah followed up his tweet with a blog post, in which he asserted:

People often make the mistake that Friendster, Tribes, or some early social site was the first social network. People also make the mistake that Facebook is the largest social network to date, in reality, the largest social networks are email. Let’s run the numbers: … Hotmail has 375 million active accounts worldwide, Yahoo mail is reported at 280mm, and Facebook only has 200 million but growing. Email is the first-and largest-digital social network and will likely continue this path of domination, and hey, that’s coming from me, a social technology analyst.

I really appreciate Jeremiah’s perspective. I’m keenly aware of how email enhanced my own ability to network. [And in some ways, I could argue, email was a more effective bond for social networks than many of today’s options. But that’s the subject of another post.]

Roger Johnson, the founder and currently president and creative co-director of Newswise, is someone who appreciated early-on how powerful email and online forums could be. Before many people used the Internet-and even before Mosaic enabled people outside of a tiny community of researchers to use the Web-proprietary online services like Compuserve and Prodigy provided online communications (and social networking) through email, bulletin boards, and forums.

Roger, who was trained as a scientist, recognized how powerful these tools could be and founded Newswise to allow researchers; PR people from colleges, universities, and other nonprofit organizations; and news media to communicate with each other. According to the Newswise website:

Journalists look to Newswise as a trusted resource for knowledge-based news, embargoed research results, and expert contacts from the world’s leading research institutions: universities, colleges, laboratories, professional organizations, governmental agencies, and private research groups active in the fields of medicine, science, business, and the humanities. Newswise maintains a comprehensive database of current news, searchable archives, subscription wire services, and advanced information-management tools to enhance the value and efficiency of research-based news delivery for both journalists and source institutions. 

Newswise also sponsors PIONet, a listserv (and social network!) for public information officers at colleges, universities, and other research organizations.

We asked Roger to respond to a series of questions about his experience founding Newswise and his observations about how the world of online communications has changed-and remained the same-since its founding.

What experience did you have in higher education before Newswise?
I earned a BS in chemistry from the University of Florida and a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Illinois Medical Center, Chicago. Then I was a postdoctoral fellow at both the University of Texas, Southwestern in Dallas, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. While at Wisconsin, I changed careers from science research to journalism and participated in a science writers training program and courses in communication and writing.

I also later wrote for the National Institutes of Health, which is sort of a higher education institution, and worked for a scientific society (Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology) whose members were scientists at universities throughout the US. I wrote about their research and coordinated my work with theirs.

What gave you the idea for Newswise? How did you get started?
Since buying my first personal computer in 1980 (Osborne with 5‑inch screen and CP/M operating system) I was keen on using computers to improve my effectiveness. In the early days of bulletin board services (1990), I came up with the idea of creating an online, comprehensive source for digital information about science and medical research and started the first such service in 1992 on CompuServe’s Journalism Forum.

This was before the Internet was widely used by academics, much less journalists, and before Mosaic was released [Mosaic, released in 1993, was the first web browser and made broader use of the web possible.]

What were some of the big challenges you faced in getting Newswise off the ground?
When I started Newswise, there was no demand and little perceived need among higher education news offices for digital information or delivery. Few people had email addresses. University news offices were mailing news releases; some were playing around with faxing. I gave our service away for three years because they were unwilling to pay for it.

What are some of the major changes Newswise has made to respond to changes in technology?
There have been many changes, including many operating systems and the move from CompuServe to the web. Now everyone in the profession, both PIOs and journalists, is online and has email. The introduction of video to the web has been big. Probably the most important improvement to the web has been the development of search engines, such as Google.

The media industry is changing; how will Newswise change in response?
The downsizing of major news media will not, in itself, change our service. Journalists are still important and providing the best technology for accessing them with research news by the most state-of-the-art technology will remain a major objective.

However, the decline of news media is correlated to the rise of the “new media,” and that presents a major new opportunity. This is bringing to fruition the goal of taking higher education information directly to the public. Newswise has embraced that new opportunity for helping our clients access a more diverse user base. We’re in the midst of working with clients to reach those users with a variety of social media tools and platforms, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, etc.

What technologies are you tracking as you think about the future of Newswise?
It’s not so much the technologies as the strategies that are important right now. For example, you could say that Twitter is a technology, and most people in our profession have not even begun to try it, much less understand how it could be useful or made to be useful.

At Newswise, we’re pursuing a hypothesis for how Twitter would be useful—how could we create a broadcast channel? It involves two major problems: How do you create the content for the Twitter frame (140 character limit and ephemeral info) and how do you create an audience? These are the cutting-edge issues at this time with Twitter, which is the rave but clearly has unproven value. We are using Twitter to drive users to our clients’ research news on Newswise, and it is working. (Follow @newswise on Twitter.)

What key lessons have you learned from your experience in creating and running Newswise?
This is a tough question. Looking at the issue of relationship, it seems that the critical lesson is that our clients are really two groups with somewhat different-and sometimes even competinginterests. We have to maintain a balance between serving both those clients who pay us to deliver the info, and the journalists who read it. That is occasionally a delicate balance. It requires creativity, and that’s where the fun derives-to maintain the balance while being innovative. Similarly, a lesson is to always listen to feedback, even criticism, as if it were a contribution and the core of an idea for improving. The goal is to create partnership relationships. That is what makes work rewarding. It’s not much fun being categorized as a vendor.

When it comes to the technology part, summing it up seems too early-there’s too much happening right now. But one lesson is that with all of the changes in the medium, delivery, packaging, and platforms communication remains a separate thing, like the difference between brain and mind. For example, with the recent swine flu epidemic and the experience in the news media and the new media, I take a very positive view. It looks like collectivelythe news media, new media, government, and public-handled it very well. With the exception of the slaughter of pigs in Egypt (and I’m not sure that wasn’t an urban myth) there were no horrible outcomes.

Technology has improved communication. It has democratized the process and brought more people into the process. Guy Kawasaki (the Twitter maniac) says he uses information “as a weapon.” I don’t take that view. It can be a weapon, but with public involvement in a responsible system, it brings us all to a higher level of participation, and we’ve passed a threshold where the system has developed learning mechanisms and is behaving like an intelligent entity.

What’s the next big thing that advancement/marketing/PR folks in higher ed need to pay attention to?
Clearly the social media/new media is the big sea change right now. (Maybe this is the cause of the melting Antarctic ice cap?) It’s evolving so rapidly that it is difficult to settle on a plan, so the plan needs to be more of an experiment and rapidly responding system. It is also complex and diverse. Just to use Twitter effectively, for example, requires using at least eight applications. I just read a blog that suggested monitoring your brand with 13 different apps. Relating to bloggers is far more complicated than relating to journalists. Social media is like the web before Google.

What I’m hearing from the majority of higher ed PIOs is that they are novices at social media. Most don’t have a plan to utilize it. What’s more, most don’t understand how to begin to create a strategy or have an idea for what is possible or what they should be trying to achieve. Some are starting a Twitter feed, but they are unclear who is the audience, how to recruit that audience, and what content they provide that audience. I’m not critical—it’s hard to have a plan when the landscape is changing so rapidly and the best approach might be to experiment or even play around. But allocating time to playing around doesn’t seem to resonate well, because people feel pressured to jump in and don’t have time to play around.

We’re in the early days of social media, and just as in the early days of the web, Newswise is trying to provide leadership by creating a strategy based on a collaborative model. I hypothesize that one university by itself would have difficulty creating a content channel that would interest national journalists or thought leaders or knowledge workers. Newswise can add value by gathering the content into a collaborative channel that creates more interest among these users.