Web outlet pumps out dozens of stories on prescription drug abuse
Filed under: Health journalism, Health policy, Hot Health Headline, Pharmaceuticals, Public health
In partnership with USC’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism and a number of other organizations, Santa Barbara online news outfit Noozhawk (about), put together “Prescription for Abuse,” an exploration of the misuse and abuse of prescription drugs in the Santa Barbara area.
In the extensive, online-only series, the reporters take a look at the problem and its underlying causes, then go a step further by exploring possible solutions as well.
In a uniquely meta twist, the series even looks at how journalism such is advancing public health goals and explains how the project came together. The series features at least 36 individual articles, by my count, and every health journalist who takes the time to browse the full catalog will come across at least a few easily localizable ideas, but in this space I’ll just highlight those stories that deal directly with the series itself:
- USC, California Endowment Unite to Support Health Journalism at the Source
- Bill Macfadyen: Prescription for Abuse Project Is a Series of Opportunities
- Santa Barbara Teen News Network Adds Another Dimension to Prescription Drug Abuse Series
- Annenberg Fellowships Take a Diverse Approach to Community Health Journalism
- Bill Macfadyen: Noozhawk Earns a USC Annenberg Health Journalism Fellowship
- Noozhawk Journalists Recount Lessons Learned from Prescription Drug Abuse Series
Where health and journalism education meet
Writing for U.S. News and World Report, Menachem Wecker examines the proliferation of health-focused programs at journalism schools across the country, many of which are affiliated with medical schools and/or medical institutions, and how they may or may not benefit both journalists and health professionals.
This recent influx of programs has raised questions from journalists and doctors about the degree to which the collaborations benefit medical and journalism students. Some say that M.D.’s can help journalists better understand the health beat, while others prescribe a “healthy ignorance,” rather than medical school credentials, to reporters. Others say that aspiring physicians can improve their bedside interactions with and empathy for patients by studying journalism.
Wecker writes that while, according to AHCJ treasurer and Reuters Health executive editor Ivan Oransky, M.D., a medical degree appears to have become almost a requirement for broadcast health journalists, there are big-picture views and tools of the trade that those with an exclusively medical education may struggle with. Here, Wecker quotes former AHCJ board member Andrew Holtz, M.P.H.:
“I often compare asking a doctor about health policy to asking an auto mechanic about transportation policy. Maybe they have something useful to say, but it is generally not from what they learned in their training program,” he says.
Peter Fiske, author of the recent article “Unleash Your Inner Dummy” on the website of the journal Nature, says a reporter with less health expertise may find it easier to connect with readers despite the increasing complexity of the medical field.
And, given the difficulty of explaining health to a lay audience, the exchange goes both ways, Wecker writes. Several of his sources, journalists and medical professionals alike, suggested that it might not hurt physicians to improve their communication skills and media savvy.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this post incorrectly attributed Fiske’s comments to Holtz. We apologize for the error.
Welcome AHCJ’s newest members
Please welcome AHCJ’s newest members. All new AHCJ members are welcome to stop by this post’s comment section to introduce themselves.
- Bobby DeMuro, student, University of Memphis, Davidson, N.C. (@BobbyDeMuro)
- Renee Dudley, reporter, The Post and Courier, Charleston, S.C. (@Renee_Dudley)
- Tamara Jeffries, assistant professor, Bennett College, Greensboro, N.C. (@tamjeffries)
- Larry Koz, freelance journalist, Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
- Lomi Kriel, freelance reporter, Houston (@lomikriel)
- Thomas Maeder, senior editor, Medical Device Summit, Narberth, Pa.
- Kellie Schmitt, health reporter, The Californian, Bakersfield, Calif. (@schmitt_k)
If you haven’t joined yet, see what member benefits you’re missing out on: Access to more than 50 journals and databases, tip sheets and articles from your colleagues on how they’ve reported stories, conferences, workshops, online training, reporting guides and more. Join AHCJ today to get a wealth of support and tools to help you.
Reporters spend 10 weeks immersed in end-of-life care
Filed under: Health journalism, Hospitals, Hot Health Headline, Nursing
Toronto Globe and Mail reporter Lisa Priest and photographer Moe Doiron spent two-and-a-half months embedded in a 20-bed critical care unit at a Toronto
Photo by quinn.anya via Flickr
hospital, following four patients and their families and chronicling life in an environment where, Priest writes, “death is a constant, almost routine event, claiming one in five patients who enter.”
Their assignment was to find out “How does one prepare for the end of life?” and explore the medical, ethical and economic challenges of that stage of life.
The result is a sprawling, intensive report on the state of end-of-life care in Canada, heavy on anecdotes. Priest’s centerpiece is subtitled “Spending 10 weeks with patients facing death“) but remains cognizant of big picture issues like cost and quality of life.
New outlet to cover food, environment outlet opens with story on N.M. dairy regulation
Filed under: Government, Health journalism, Hot Health Headline
Under Editor-in-Chief Sam Fromartz, The Food and Environmental Reporting Network has published its first story, a look at pollution and the New Mexico dairy industry which ran in the High Country News.
In the story, the first of several collaborations set to publish in the near future, reporter Stephanie Page Ogburn profiles a New Mexico activist whose efforts have influenced how the state regulates manure runoff and dairy water regulation.
FERN’s mission statement is “To produce investigative journalism on the subjects of food, agriculture and environmental health in partnership with local and national media outlets.”
According to the press release, the new network is “A registered 501(c)3 non-profit corporation based in New York, the Food and Environment Reporting Network was founded in October 2009 and began operations in January 2011. It is funded by the generous support of the The 11th Hour Project, McKnight Foundation, Clarence Heller Foundation, Columbia Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.”
More health journalists join AHCJ’s ranks
Please welcome AHCJ’s newest members! All new AHCJ members are welcome to stop by this post’s comment section to introduce themselves.
- Blair Thomas, public policy reporter, The Lund Report, Beaverton, Ore.
- Mike King, independent writer/editor, Atlanta
- Aretha Yarak, reporter, Veja.com, Sao Paulo, Brazil
- Rosa Ramirez, independent journalist, Berkeley, Calif. (@rosamramirez)
- Allyn Gaestel, independent journalist, Pasadena, Calif. (@samayxalaat)
- Ju-Don Marshall Roberts, vice president & editor in chief, Everyday Health, New York (@jmarroberts)
If you haven’t joined yet, see what member benefits you’re missing out on: Access to more than 50 journals and databases, tip sheets and articles from your colleagues on how they’ve reported stories, conferences, workshops, online training, reporting guides and more. Join AHCJ today to get a wealth of support and tools to help you.
Calif. center, ethnic outlets partner to examine elderly day care’s demise
Filed under: Aging, Health journalism, Health policy, Hot Health Headline
The California HealthCare Foundation’s Center for Health Reporting partnered with no fewer than nine different organizations to produce a sprawling story package examining the impact of the looming closure of many of California’s adult day health care centers. (Since the project launched, California reached a legal settlement that will allow adults most at risk of institutionalization to continue to receive services previously provided by adult day health centers. Existing centers will be able to provide services through the end of Feb. 2012. See this write-up in California Healthline.)
Jocelyn Wiener’s centerpiece stands alone, but the package really gains steam when you take the time to consider its full breadth and depth.
For those new to the issue, here’s Wiener’s primer and a hint as to why the package grew out of a collaboration with a kaleidoscope of ethnic media organizations.
Los Angeles County – especially its many ethnic minority communities –will be hit hardest by the closures. According to state data, the county is home to more than 60 percent of the program’s 38,000 enrollees statewide. One quarter have dementia. Forty percent are incontinent. Nearly half have a psychiatric diagnosis. More than 70 percent do not speak English.
The centers provide them with transportation, meals, exercise, medication management, physical and occupational therapy, as well as robust social programs that many participants say have renewed their will to live.
Health journalists will find Richard Kipling’s “how we did it” piece to be a natural entry point. Kipling unspools the narrative of how a brief suggestion became an anything-but-brief compendium of multilingual, multicultural, multigenerational reporting. Kipling’s blog also serves as a useful roadmap to the project.
Watch the AHCJ website for more about how this project was reported.
If the video doesn’t appear on your page, please click through to :Bibiana Viernes: Her Center, Her Life” from CAhealthReport on Vimeo.
Welcome to AHCJ’s newest members
Please welcome AHCJ’s newest members! All new AHCJ members are welcome to stop by this post’s comment section to introduce themselves.
- Diane Atwood, independent journalist, Gorham, Maine (@Diane_Atwood)
- Christina Boufis Peterson, independent journalist, Oakland, Calif.
- Matthew Brady, senior staff writer, Angie’s List, Indianapolis
- Jody Charnow, editor, Renal & Urology News, New York
- Bobbi Conner, producer/writer/host, Parents Journal, Mount Pleasant, S.C.
- Myiesha Demery, student, Suffolk University, Dorchester, Mass. (@sicklecellsista)
- Margaret Dick Tocknell, online reporter/editor, Healthleaders Media, Jacksonville, Fla.
- Tom Dickey, digital content editor, Remedy Health Media, New York
- Marissa Donovan, student, Syracuse, Rensselaer, N.Y.
- Matt Drange, reporting fellow, Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism, Rosemead, Calif. (@mattdrange)
- Susie Fagan, writer, editor, Kansas Health Institute, Topeka, Kan. (@KHIsusie)
- Glenda Fauntleroy, independent journalist, Carmel, Ind.
- Bianca Fortis, reporter, The Chronicle, Centralia, Wash.
- David Freeman, managing editor, CBSNews.com Health Channel, New York
- Anita Fritz Phillips, independent journalist, Orange, Mass.
- Karen Herzog, reporter, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Milwaukee (@HerzogJS)
- Alison Knopf, independent journalist, Carmel, N.Y.
- Kim Krisberg, independent journalist, Austin, Texas
- Danny Kucharsky, independent journalist, Montreal
- Bev Lucas, executive editor, Remedy Health Media, New York
- Stephanie Myers, independent journalist, San Diego
- Louise Radnofsky, reporter, The Wall Street Journal, Washington, D.C. (@louiseradnofsky)
- Gerald Secor Couzens, managing editor, Remedy Health Media, New York
- Jane Stevens, independent journalist, Winters, Calif.
- Diane Umansky, Remedy Health Media, New York
- Barbara Van Tine, editor, Remedy Health Media, New York
- Mark Wert, data & investigations editor, The Cincinnati Enquirer, Cincinnati (@mwert)
- Winnie Yu, independent journalist, Voorheesville, N.Y. (@Writerwinnie)
If you haven’t joined yet, see what member benefits you’re missing out on: Access to more than 50 journals and databases, tip sheets and articles from your colleagues on how they’ve reported stories, conferences, workshops, online training, reporting guides and more. Join AHCJ today to get a wealth of support and tools to help you.
Feds indict doc whose abuses were detailed in 2010 WSJ series
Filed under: Government, Health data, Health journalism, Public records
In The Wall Street Journal, John Carreyrou reports that a physician the paper spotlighted in a data-driven series on Medicare abuses has now been “indicted by a federal grand jury … for allegedly submitting more than $13 million of false claims.”
The article marks the first time the Journal has been able to print the physician’s name (Emma Poroger), even though they’ve been aware of it for more than a year.
The Journal identified Dr. Poroger, a doctor of osteopathy, as having suspicious billing patterns by mining the Medicare claims database, a computerized record of every bill submitted to the program. But her name was withheld in the October 2010 front-page article because Medicare keeps information pertaining to individual doctors confidential under a three-decade-old court injunction.
That injunction stems from a 1979 lawsuit filed by the American Medical Association, the doctors’ trade group, to keep secret how much money physicians receive from Medicare. At the time, the court said doctors’ privacy trumped the public’s interest in knowing how tax dollars are spent.
The Journal’s publisher, Dow Jones & Co., filed court papers this year seeking to overturn the injunction. In September, a federal judge in Florida ruled that Dow Jones’s case could proceed.
Carreyrou also called out a few other physicians featured anonymously in the series whose names had also been made public in various official proceedings.
Related
- Effort to make Medicare data public advances
- WSJ exposes flaws of Medicare’s pay now, investigate later culture
- WSJ explains why Medicare data is hidden
Journalists discuss reporting from the heart of a pandemic
Filed under: Europe, Government, Health journalism, Public health
Recently, New York Times health and science reporter Donald McNeil joined the National Journal’s Maggie Fox, the Nieman Foundation’s Stefanie Friedhoff and the Canadian Press’ Helen Branswell on a Global Journalist radio panel to discuss reporting on international pandemics and global diseases. The full episode is available to download, listen or watch online.
Host David Reed
McNeil provided his take on everything from what he packed to keep himself safe from SARS to his take on the accuracy of the movie “Contagion,” but his most relevant thoughts for AHCJ readers were in response to questions about sourcing and a journalist’s obligations in an outbreak situation.
GJ: What are some of the ways you, as a journalist, verify the information you receive, and where do you get that information?
McNeil: … it all depends on the disease. But generally, you get fairly accurate, careful information out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva. There are times when you aren’t happy with the information you are getting or the decisions they make, but most of the time, I think they are both extremely careful science-driven organizations.
GJ: In reporting on the potential danger of flu and warning people to stay vigilant, are you ever concerned that some reports from the media might cause panic among people?
McNeil: I don’t see my job as being a public health official; I see my job as a journalist. So my job is to tell the truth, and the truth is basically the one goddess I serve. Obviously, people care about this stuff, so in the same way another journalist who covers the White House wants to tell people accurately what the president did or didn’t do yesterday and what it means, I am trying to tell my audience how dangerous the virus is if it’s a virus, and how many people are killed, and what can be done about it. My job is telling the truth and getting the news out.
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