New Health Website to Measure Newspapers, TV and Magazines, But Not Blogs?
U.S. News & World Report talks about a soon-to-be-launched website that "judges coverage by top newspapers, TV networks, and weekly news magazines of major treatment-oriented studies and evaluates the studies themselves." According to the article, Gary Schwitzer of the University of Minnesota’s health journalism program will lead the effort and model it after Australia’s Media Doctor.
Media Doctor’s approach includes analyzing "news stories… identified by daily reviews of the major media outlet websites using a hand-searching approach." In order to be eligible for review, an article should, among other things, "be published in the mainstream media of the source country."
Media Doctor serves an important function (as I’m sure the new site will also), and I intend to visit regularly. But I can’t help wondering why blogs aren’t included on the "major media" list, or at least given a special mention as disseminators of health information. Do none of them discuss medical research and studies? According to Shahid Shah, there are at last 200 healthcare bloggers. Hard to overlook, wouldn’t you think?
Additional Information: For some of the best medical blogs out there, see medGadget’s nominees for The 2005 Medical Weblog Awards (via lexBlog).
Update: In the comments section, Gary Switzer of the soon-to-be-launched HealthNewsReview.org explains why he isn’t planning on reviewing blogs. Thanks for letting us know why Gary.
Andrea,
Thanks for the post about the plans for our new MediaDoctor-like website. Ours will be called HealthNewsReview.org and will launch in mid-to-late February.
The reason we don’t include blogs is that we have enough difficulty managing the volume produced by 50 newspapers, a wire service, three weekly newsmagazines and TV networks. This is a very labor-intensive process.
So while I agree with you about the importance of blogs, we don’t have the time or the people to monitor and evaluate them following the strict review criteria we’re employing.
Hope you visit the new site once it’s operational.
Gary Schwitzer
Director of health journalism grad program
University of Minnesota
School of Journalism & Mass Communication
Gary, thank you for sharing more information about HealthNewsReview.org. I hope that at some point in the future you will be able to add blogs to your review list. Best of luck with the launch.