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|5 min read

Why communications teams become accidental publishing teams

Communications teams in research organizations have a clear mandate: get the research in front of the people who need to see it. That means media outreach, stakeholder engagement, executive briefings, social strategy, launch planning, and narrative framing.

But in practice, communications teams spend a surprising amount of their time doing something else entirely: publishing. Formatting HTML. Fixing heading hierarchy. Uploading PDFs. Checking mobile layouts. Running accessibility audits. Managing download links.

They become the de facto publishing team — not because anyone decided that was their role, but because the work has to get done and nobody else is picking it up.

What comms teams should be doing

A well-functioning communications team at a research organization should be spending their time on:

  • Media strategy. Pitching stories, building relationships with journalists, preparing spokespeople, writing press releases, handling embargoes.
  • Stakeholder communication. Briefing government contacts, funders, partners, and board members before and after a report launch.
  • Launch planning. Coordinating timing across channels, managing social campaigns, sequencing announcements, building anticipation.
  • Narrative framing. Translating complex research findings into clear, accessible language for different audiences. Writing executive summaries, social copy, and briefing documents.
  • Audience development.Growing the organization’s reach, building mailing lists, cultivating relationships with key audiences who will amplify research.

None of these tasks involve formatting HTML or fixing broken table layouts.

What they actually end up doing

Here is what communications staff at research organizations actually spend hours on every time a report launches:

  • Formatting and layout. Rebuilding tables in the CMS, fixing line breaks, adjusting image placement, cleaning up heading styles that imported incorrectly from Word.
  • Accessibility compliance. Running WCAG checks, adding alt text to dozens of images, fixing color contrast on charts, making sure the reading order is correct for screen readers.
  • File management. Exporting PDFs, naming files correctly, organizing downloads, making sure the right version is linked from the right page.
  • Quality assurance. Clicking every link, testing on mobile, comparing the web version to the PDF, catching errors that appeared during conversion.
  • CMS wrangling. Fighting with content management systems that were not designed for complex, long-form research documents with tables, footnotes, and multiple download formats.
  • Revision tracking. When a typo or data error is found post-approval, updating both the web version and PDF, re-uploading, clearing cache, and confirming the fix is live.

The opportunity cost

Every hour a communications professional spends on publication production is an hour not spent on the work they were hired to do. The cost is not just the salary — it is the missed outreach, the journalist relationship that goes cold, the stakeholder who did not get briefed before the launch.

When a report launches and no media pick it up, the organization rarely blames the publication workflow. But the connection is direct: if the comms team spent Tuesday afternoon fixing table formatting instead of pitching the story, fewer people will see the research.

This is invisible work. Nobody tracks how many hours the communications lead spent in the CMS. Nobody measures the stories that did not get pitched because the launch prep consumed all available time. The organization just notices that readership is lower than expected, and wonders why.

How organizations handle it

Research organizations typically deal with this problem in one of three ways:

Option 1: Accept it internally

The communications team absorbs the publication work as part of their role. They get good at it. They develop templates and checklists. The downside: their capacity for actual communications work permanently shrinks. They become a team that does both strategic communications and production work, and neither gets full attention.

Option 2: Build internal capacity

Some organizations hire dedicated web or digital publishing staff. This works well at scale — if you publish 50+ reports a year, a dedicated publisher makes sense. But for organizations publishing 10-30 reports, it is hard to justify a full-time role for work that is intense during launch weeks and quiet the rest of the time.

Option 3: Use external publishing support

A growing number of research organizations use outside specialists for the production layer. The communications team hands off the approved report and receives a publication-ready deliverable. They stay focused on the work that requires their institutional knowledge, relationships, and judgment — while the mechanical production work is handled by someone who does it every day.

This is the model that lets communications teams be communications teams. The publication work still gets done, and done well — it just stops consuming the calendar of people who should be spending their time getting research in front of the right audiences.

The real question

The question is not whether your communications team can do publication work. They clearly can — they have been doing it. The question is whether they should be doing it, given what it displaces.

If your organization measures the value of research by how many people read it, cite it, and act on it — then the people responsible for getting it read should not be spending their limited hours on formatting, accessibility checks, and CMS uploads. That work matters, but it does not require their expertise.