Q&A: New Duke Web Site and University Communications

This week's launch of a new Duke's Web site, www.duke.edu, culminates a series of recent efforts to redefine how Duke communicates with its audiences in an increasingly online world. David Jarmul, associate vice president of the news and communications office [which also publishes Dialogue] helped to organize the site, as well as the "eDuke" series of newsletters, a Web-based annual report and an integrated online events calendar. Jarmul came to Duke in October 2001 from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the National Academy of Sciences. Freelance writer Alan Breznick spoke with him about where Duke is heading:

DIALOGUE: How are you trying to change Duke's communications?

JARMUL: I was fortunate to follow in the footsteps of Al Rossiter, who built up the Duke News Service and assembled a wonderful group of reporters to write about university news. We're trying to uphold the news service's journalistic standards while developing a strategic approach to communications that serves the university's goals.

DIALOGUE: Why did you redesign Duke's Web site?

JARMUL: We've tried to make the site a richer resource to reflect Duke's intellectual vitality and help users find information more easily. Our new web manager, Ben Riseling, led the effort, along with Blake Dickinson, Dennis Meredith and freelancer James Todd. Together, we met with faculty, students, administrators and groups all across campus, asking them what they wanted and how we should organize Duke's information. Ben quietly posted the new site a few weeks ago and asked a group of "beta testers" for feedback. He got lots of comments, mostly positive. More recently, we began previewing the site off the existing home page, which sparked still more comments. Finally, after making numerous changes, we pulled the trigger this week and went live. We did the whole project for less than $50,000 out of pocket, which is a tiny fraction of what these efforts tend to cost.

DIALOGUE: The changes all seem to be on the home page and the highest-level pages. What about everything else?

JARMUL: You're right. We're not looking to centralize everything. Individual schools and departments are still responsible for their own sites. Many of them are doing nice work but there are also lots of people looking for help. Tracy Futhey [Duke's vice president for information technology] and I have been discussing this and she's now establishing a central office of web services that will offer Duke offices development support, design templates and technology, in close cooperation with my office and others. This new operation will take advantage of a new Duke-wide "content management system," that will make it easier for web developers to share information and coordinate their efforts. Also, [Provost] Peter Lange has agreed to head a new group to provide some much-needed oversight for web activities.

DIALOGUE: Besides enhancing Duke's Web presence, what are your other strategies?

JARMUL: Communications needs to be a lot more than press releases. You need to build it into programs from the outset rather than scrambling at the end to tell people about the good work you're doing. For instance, we've been working recently with Hunt Willard [new director of the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy] to integrate communications more closely into his program activities. Likewise with Cathy Davidson at the Franklin Center, Bruce Jentleson at Sanford and others.

DIALOGUE: Your office takes the lead on all of this?

JARMUL: We tend to play more of a consulting and coordinating role. Over the past year, we've done a lot to revitalize Duke's campus communicators group, which includes communications specialists from the medical center, the law school, the business school and so forth. We've turned this into a real community and undertaken a number of joint projects, such as an online clippings service, a web-based distribution system for news releases, a "rapid response" team that tracks the news and a new TV studio.

DIALOGUE: Didn't Duke already have a TV studio?

JARMUL: Well, sort of. We were doing TV interviews out of a distance education facility in the North Building, which had real technical problems. We finally worked out an agreement to put a new studio in the basement of the Bryan Center. Now, using backdrops for both Duke University and Duke Health, and new satellite uplink equipment, we can get our experts on the air quickly. Within the first two days, we placed Duke experts on CNN and the CBS Evening News.

DIALOGUE: How much did the new studio cost?

JARMUL: About $11,000, which is a bargain, given the payback to the university in terms of reaching national audiences. We split the cost with the medical school, the business school, the law school and the Sanford Institute, so we all came out ahead.

DIALOGUE: How about other electronic media?

JARMUL: We continue to use our own radio studio to connect faculty and administrators with NPR and other national radio outlets -- both for live interviews and taped radio feeds. In the future, we plan to use digital audio and video to send sound and pictures to Duke.edu and other Web sites. Cabell Smith is leading these efforts.

DIALOGUE: You mentioned a "rapid response" team. What's that?

JARMUL: It's a major effort we've launched to track the news cycle of the outside world rather than just sending out news releases on our own schedule. Almost every morning, Keith Lawrence in our office leads a group that combs through the morning paper and identifies stories on which Duke faculty have expertise -- whether it's corporate financial scandals, war in Iraq, the budget debate in Washington or something else. We move quickly to get these names and ideas before the news media.

DIALOGUE: What kinds of results are you seeing?

JARMUL: Good results. Within a few hours after the space shuttle exploded, for instance, we reminded reporters that Duke's Alex Roland is an expert on the shuttle, and he received a long list of media requests. The law school's Scott Siliman has been interviewed a lot about the war on terrorism, Jim Cox on the Enron scandal and so forth.

DIALOGUE: Duke prides itself as a leading research institution. How can it promote its research efforts to the public?

JARMUL: We've overhauled Duke Research to be more concise, more attractive and more closely integrated with what we're doing online. The magazine now covers a lot more topics in fewer pages, which makes it easier for non-experts to read. Dennis Meredith led this redesign and is now turning his attention to presenting Duke research online more effectively.

DIALOGUE: What about other fields, like the arts and humanities?

JARMUL: The underlying problem is the same. You have lots of schools and departments producing their own magazines, newsletters, web sites and so forth. Some of their work is terrific, some not so terrific. But little of it is accessible to a large audience. I want Duke's new home page to provide an "intellectual commons" to begin pulling this work together. We also need to be cross-promoting each other's material, collaborating with groups outside Duke and generally thinking strategically about distribution. The arts community here has begun doing this in a serious way, with excellent results.

DIALOGUE: How about improving communications for Duke's staff?

JARMUL: That's another big need. Here again, you have lots of departments all producing their own material. But guess what? The same employee who's interested in HR news is probably also interested in news from OIT, or Auxiliary Services or others. I've begun talking with Paul Grantham in Human Resources and others to see how we might pull all this information together, to save money and better serve Duke's staff. Clearly, the web will be part of this. We're also pondering how Dialogue might become a one-stop shopping site for this kind of "news you can use." Dialogue's editor Geoffrey Mock is working on this.

DIALOGUE: Sounds like a busy agenda.

JARMUL: Well, it is, and I'm trying to do it all in half a day since I'm also filling in this semester for [Senior Vice President for Public Affairs and Government Relations] John Burness, who is taking a well-earned break. I work at the news office in the morning and then spend the afternoon in the Allen Building, helping the senior administration work through the endless issues and crises that John usually handles.

This interview was done with Alan Breznick.