Comment by graemep

They should not being doing a lot your first list, and should have specialist help available for some of the rest.

I am not suggesting they become PR managers, and the writing skills I am suggesting they acquire is simply that required to do things like blogging. I am not suggesting they achieve the standards a professional writer would have, just the ability to write clearly and make the effort to do so.

Academics should be highly skilled people.

In fact a lot of the problem is not they cannot do it, but of distribution. A lot of universities to have academic blogs and subsites about departments and individuals research. Its not anything like as visible as the journalists write ups about it