I just got back from a great trip out to Los Angeles for a thought provoking roundtable discussion centered on health journalism and the health blogosphere. The event was sponsored by the California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships/University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication. I absolutely love meeting new people and learning from them – so the fact that this was my first time to L.A. and with a group of health/medical bloggers, it was double the icing on the cake! The Langham-Huntington hotel in Pasadena looked like something straight out of a movie (I guess that would make sense given where it’s located).
Before the big day on Monday, I had the pleasure of having dinner with a few of the other invitees including: Dr. Val Jones, Matthew Holt, PalMD, Dr. Jan Gurley and Doctor Pundit – all of whom are actively involved in making changes in healthcare. I was proud to represent the public health interest at the table!
The day of the brainstorm, things got kicked off with opening remarks from Michelle Levander, Director of the California Endowment and an introduction of the very well informed Lisa Stone, cofounder of the hugely successful BlogHer network and our moderator for the day. The discussion was filled with great ideas and commentary on best practices in the health blogosophere, mainly to inform USC’s communication school on how to develop a new media focused program for current and future health journalists. There is no getting around it – the way we receive news, what constitutes as news and reporting methods have all changed over the past few years. The 2.0 world isn’t just about having news republished and formatted online, but it’s about making content relevant for the people who are being informed.
Many of the participants at the event were from physician/medical backgrounds who were involved in blogging and other forms of social media. I’m happy to say that a few of us public health folks were represented, including Jody Ranck, Nedra Weinreich, Erin Edgerton (of CDC/White House new media team), and Jeni Miller of the Partnership for the Public’s Health. This discussion really showed the different issues that medical bloggers have to deal with versus those in public health trying to impact change for the masses. I also enjoyed that nursing was represented with Kim from Emergiblog. All very important roles.
Throughout the day we discussed the importance of persuasive writing in health journalism and how storytelling creates genuine impact. Other topics included information accuracy/fact checking, transparency, translating medical information into layman’s terms and creating a system of standards to reduce sensationalism. I would have to say that one of the main highlights for me was meeting the distinguished Dr. Tony Iton, former Director of the Alameda County Health Department and now Senior Vice President of Healthy Communities for The California Endowment’s California Living 2.0 Initiative. Not only does he have 3 degrees in medicine, public health and law – he was very personable and down to earth. I’m now most definitely a fan.
He spoke about issues that are most definitely priorities for public health: health inequalities/disparities. He made me realize again why I got involved in public health rather than going to medical school. His focus was on the correlation of poverty and life expectancy in certain areas around the country. I never realized the amount of data that a death certificate gave until Dr. Iton pointed it out – cause of death, age, race and where they lived. Based on these points, he laid down fantastic insight on the elusive phenomenon of length of life being tied up in poverty, barriers to opportunity (good housing, education, etc.) and the location of where people live. I would encourage you to check out the well produced video series Unnatural Causes as well as reading the book Life and Death from Unnatural Causes (PDF).
The day ended for me with great opportunities to continue making connections with these amazing folks and expanding my network of great Health 2.0 proponents. I’m definitely looking forward to what comes out of this brainstorm and to continue being in touch with the California Endowment people to move health journalism forward into the new media realm.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Sounds like a fun conference! Thanks for passing along this info, I’m definitely going to check out the video series. These days, I’m helping produce films for a website that uses short videos to insight discussion about public health. Essentially we hope our non-profit helps folks think critically about culture’s and behavior’s relationship to health. You might really like it. We just got the thing up and running (finally!), and would welcome your ideas!
~c