I recently attended a panel discussion at the National Press Club, titled “Using New Media to Promote Health & Medical News.” Although most of the presentations were interesting on a tactical level (Lee Aase of the Mayo Clinic and Sanjay Koyani, who manages FDA.gov and FDArecalls, are doing cool things online), the discussion itself was pretty straightforward and more geared for organizations not already immersed in digital technology – nothing wrong with that.
For me, though, the most significant takeaway was a report published by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), titled “The State of Health Journalism in the U.S.,” which was handed out prior to the discussion but wasn’t brought up, unfortunately. The report is based on a literature review of about 100 published pieces of research on health journalism, a survey conducted jointly by KFF and the Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) and one-on-one interviews with more than 50 health journalists.
The report is essentially an extension of Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism’s 2009 State of the News Media Report, but obviously more focused on health reporting. The findings in both reports aren’t extremely groundbreaking, but interesting and somewhat disconcerting nonetheless. According to the KFF-AHCJ report:
Interest in health news is as high as it’s ever been, but because the staff and resources available to cover this news have been slashed, the workload on remaining reporters has gone up. Many journalists are writing for multiple platforms, adding multimedia tasks to their workload, having to cover more beats, file more stories, and do it all quicker, in less space, and with fewer resources for training and travel. Demand for ‘quick hit’ stories has gone up, along with ‘news you can use’ and ‘hyper-local stories.’ As a result, many in the industry are worried about a loss of in-depth, enterprise and policy-related stories.
It’s true, as the U.S. faces significant health reform in the coming months and years, interest in health news and demand for thorough coverage of health policy will continue to increase substantially. The question is, how does the news industry respond in light of its current situation and/or has the “news hole” for health already been filled by talented bloggers like Maggie Mahar over at HealthBeat, Merrill Goozner at Gooznews and others?
The report also noted that although one of the major challenges facing health journalism is the importance of Internet publishing, digital technology has the “potential to expand the news hole for health exponentially and introduce a ‘golden age’ of health journalism, allowing for depth, scope and links that are not possible in other media” – as seen in the coverage by Mahar and Goozner, to name a few.
This is not to say that there aren’t challenges and consequences to publishing and exclusively consuming news online – that’s a whole other post, or two – however, I’m inclined to agree with the assertion that digital technology – and its ability to democratize news dissemination, publication and consumption – and bloggers like Mahar and Goozer will expand the reach of needed and wanted health news, benefiting health journalism in the long run. What do you think?
Chris Rottler, Digital Strategist & Account Executive
