The University of Southern California has announced the staff of its newly formed California HealthCare Foundation Center for Health Reporting. That includes the editor-in-chief, the managing editor, and three senior writers.
If you're looking for the names of some of our distinguished colleagues among the new hires, look no further. They're not there. Only one of the five new hires is said to have any background in health reporting, and she seems to be more of an environmental writer than a health reporter.
Michael Parks, the former editor of the Los Angeles Times, who did the hiring, knows science writers. I don't know how close he was to the science staff at the Times, but he was on the advisory committee for the Marine Biological Laboratory summer journalism fellowships (with me) for several years, where he worked with science writers.
This hiring seems misguided. It's like staffing a new reporting initiative to cover cricket with American reporters who'd never seen a game. They'd file something, I'm sure, but it wouldn't be pretty. Nor would their stories benefit from any experience or insight into what they were covering.
This amounts to the same thing, doesn't it?
*Update 3/25: I should have said that I mean no disrespect whatever to the reporters and editors who've been hired. They seem like capable people. I'm just arguing that they might not be the right people for the job, however capable they are.
- Paul Raeburn
Comments
Thanks, Paul. I surely respect your Informed views on this and, as I said earlier, have tremendous admiration for the contributions to journalism of science/health specialists. We will be drawing on this talent pool as we move down the project road.
Will we be all that we might be? I guess only time will tell. But we have a great opportunity here and I like our chances.
And thanks for your good wishes. We'll welcome your feedback on our future work.
David,
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, which tells all of us much more about this new venture than what we could have learned from the press release that prompted my post.
I'd like to reiterate that, as I said in my post, I'm not taking "a slap" at the staff. We agree that you have a good team.
But your reply confirms what the press release said: That you and your staff have experience in public policy, environmental issues, immigration and natural disasters--but not health or science coverage. I continue to think that's a mistake.
You say that you don't need health reporters because your mission is "health care and health-care policy," not "medical science journalism."
How would you divorce the two? How could you report on public health without reporting on the legitimacy of the scientific studies that give rise to public health policies and practices? Stories on diabetes, doctor shortages, and Medicare reimbursements all turn on whether the care involved is scientifically sound, or not.
Health journalists and science writers specialize in those areas and would bring a wealth of experience to the kinds of stories you're doing. And it's selling them short to suggest that all they cover is medical science. Many of them cover many of the subjects that you're tackling.
I wish you all the best, but I think you're missing something by not including science and health writers in the mix. You can't cover health care policy without covering the science that underlies it; you risk missing something important.
And if you think I'm wrong, wait until you tackle the policies coming out of the stem cell initiative in California. Try doing that story without including medical science journalism.
Paul
Paul, I think the world of trained science and health reporters, and the contributions to public understanding they bring. So I have no interest in an us vs. them argument.
But it's important to lay out the mission of the Center for Health Reporting. It's not medical science journalism. Our focus is health care and health-care policy as experienced in communities throughout California. It's doctor shortages in Santa Cruz, hospital governance in San Diego County, firefighting techniques that affect public health in northern California, diabetes in the Central Valley, the wisdom of starting a medical school in Merced -- all projects the center has completed in its early months, all deeply rooted in a sense of place in California, all done in strong partnerships with local media. These and other works have already had results. The Forest Service has changed the way it fights forest fires, for example. Medicare reimbursement rates have gotten new national attention. And we're only getting started.
Your slap at our staff is off-base. We have a terrific team to take on this mission -- reporters and editors with extensive experience in public policy at state, national and local levels, with expertise in environmental issues, demographics, immigration, natural disasters and so on. Perhaps just as important, they're proven critical thinkers, digging reporters and great storytellers, all of which are also vital parts of our work. They will pinpoint health problems to be sure, but they'll also think about possible solutions.
In the months and years to come, we will partner with news organizations across the state to provide depth reporting that will add immeasurably to the public's understanding of health issues in California. That to me is far and away the headline here. I have joined the Center for Health Reporting as editor because I believe it has great promise. We're more than happy to live with a future assessment of our work that shows whether we've lived up to it.
--David Westphal, editor, Center for Health Reporting
I disagree with Eric (who either is, or shares the same name as, a former colleague of mine.)
I once asked a very senior host in my organisation about a very dodgy medical study that they were doing on their show. I asked if the results were "statistically significant". She said, "Well, a reputable journal wouldn't publish results that aren't significant." She had no idea what I had meant.
Most senior reporters, without specialised training, could not tell you the difference between relative and absolute risk, have never heard of a confidence interval, a cohort study, or dose response.
They might "do just fine" - but not without some serious training.
Most health reporters start out as general assignment reporters, and even the best beat reporters are regularly called upon to write about elements of their beat with which they are completely unfamiliar. They get by as good reporters. As it is, these health reporters are starting out as very good reporters. They'll do just fine.