Community news, sometimes called hyperlocal news, has become a hot topic among journalism foundations in recent years. You can get a sense of the enthusiasm by browsing the website of Block by Block, a network of online community news sites, or by checking...
Category: Health & Medicine Stories
Show only health & medicine story posts
Community news, sometimes called hyperlocal news, has become a hot topic among journalism foundations in recent years. You can get a sense of the enthusiasm by browsing the website of Block by Block, a network of online community news sites, or by checking into the work of the Knight Foundation's "$100 million plus Media Innovation Initiative, which seeks new ways to meet community information needs in the digital age." This is big money talking.
This belief in the importance of local news is not new. It reminds me of the old joke about the Los Angeles Times in the 1940s and 1950s, when a critic said that the paper was so locally oriented that ...
The Association of Health Care Journalists has announced the winners of its 2012 journalism awards, and the winning stories should be an inspiration to anyone who wonders whether it's possible to do good journalism during this...
The Association of Health Care Journalists has announced the winners of its 2012 journalism awards, and the winning stories should be an inspiration to anyone who wonders whether it's possible to do good journalism during this time of upheaval and transformation in the news business.
Among the winners were Sheri Fink for beat reporting for coverage of hurricanes in New Orleans and New York City; Lisa Krieger of the San Jose Mercury News for consumer reporting at large news outlets; The Boston Globe for reporting on contaminated drugs; and about three dozen others, including some familiar names and some new ones.
AHCJ reports that it received 400 entries--a record number. "Entrants dove into complicated and sometimes heartbreaking issues to produce excellent pieces that...
A new website devoted to reviewing science ebooks is not so new anymore. Download the Universe is celebrating its first anniversary. And one of its founders, Carl Zimmer,...
A new website devoted to reviewing science ebooks is not so new anymore. Download the Universe is celebrating its first anniversary. And one of its founders, Carl Zimmer, has a dim view of much of what happened with ebooks during that inaugural year.
After mentioning two ebooks he liked, Zimmer writes, "We were also dismayed to discover a lot of wasted opportunities." He takes a shot at a couple of books that grew out of TED talks, which, he says, are based not "on solid science" but rather "a thin cracking skin of ice." He mentions others, not from TED, that also suffered from "absentee editing"--that is to say, no editing.
He likewise mentions some ebooks that he liked, but notes that they are "few in number and small in size."
Zimmer reserves his most...
The automatic federal spending cut known as the sequester that goes into effect today will have profound adverse effects on U.S. scientific research, cutting "past fat, through muscle and into bone," writes Tom Levenson in...
The automatic federal spending cut known as the sequester that goes into effect today will have profound adverse effects on U.S. scientific research, cutting "past fat, through muscle and into bone," writes Tom Levenson in a guest blog post at Scientific American.
Levenson, an MIT professor of science writing currently on leave to write a book, gives us a thoughtful analysis that argues that it's not the youngest researchers or the most established researchers who will be hurt by the cut, but those who've just established themselves and are seeking funding. A newly tenured research faculty member "competes for grants against the entire population, Nobel laureates, National Academicians, and all," Levenson writes. First-time winners of a standard National...
[Update: adds mention of Time magazine story.]
A team of researchers who analyzed genetic data on 33,000 people with mental illness and 28,000 controls discovered that the five most common mental illnesses--depression, autism, attention-deficit disorder, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder--share...
[Update: adds mention of Time magazine story.]
A team of researchers who analyzed genetic data on 33,000 people with mental illness and 28,000 controls discovered that the five most common mental illnesses--depression, autism, attention-deficit disorder, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder--share some of the same genetic abnormalities.
The finding, while it does not immediately lead to better treatment for any of these severe illnesses, does move researchers closer to understanding their causes. As Lauran Neergaard wrote for the AP:
"These disorders that we thought of as quite different may not have such sharp boundaries," said Dr. Jordan Smoller of Massachusetts General Hospital, one of the lead researchers for the international study appearing in The Lancet.
...
If there is anyone around to cast doubt on this week's story that a Mediterranean diet can cut heart disease by 30%, he or she is hard to find. (As we'll see below, however, I did find one post that thought much of the rest of the coverage was wrong-headed.)
In Gina Kolata's...
If there is anyone around to cast doubt on this week's story that a Mediterranean diet can cut heart disease by 30%, he or she is hard to find. (As we'll see below, however, I did find one post that thought much of the rest of the coverage was wrong-headed.)
In Gina Kolata's story in The New York Times, the heart association raves about the findings, and even Steven E. Nissen, chairman of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation--as tough a critic as you're likely to find--said the results were encouraging. Low fat diets, he told Kolata, don't work well, because people can't stay on them. But this study changes things. "Now along comes this group and does a gigantic study in Spain that says you can eat a nicely balanced diet with fruits and vegetables and...
26Feb 2013
It's Tuesday, and I'm remiss in not mentioning last Friday's On Science Blogs by Tabitha M. Powledge, as I usually do on Fridays or Mondays.
I was particularly interested in...
It's Tuesday, and I'm remiss in not mentioning last Friday's On Science Blogs by Tabitha M. Powledge, as I usually do on Fridays or Mondays.
I was particularly interested in her discussion in this issue of a philosophical point that I could summarize, I suppose, by saying that we are all Jonah Lehrer. (He's the disgraced journalist who is trying--and so far failing--to resuscitate his cold, dead journalism career.)
Yes, the crack about Lehrer is an overstatement. But here's the point: We're talking not just about the transgressions of a journalistic fabulist, but of the distortions inherent in all of journalism:
...this is not only a failure of the entire field of science reporting, whether on blogs or in published outlets (or both), but of the very field and profession of journalism itself....
It's been about three months since National Geographic announced that it was starting a new blog network called Phenomena, and so it seemed like a good time to drop in and...
It's been about three months since National Geographic announced that it was starting a new blog network called Phenomena, and so it seemed like a good time to drop in and see how things are going.
The design is a little different from the usual blog setup, in which each new post rests on the shoulders of those that came before, as with the Tracker. The posts are in reverse chronological order--with the newest at the top--but each page contains a horizontal space at the top with a teaser for a post, and then eight vertical tiled teasers below that, each with a photograph. I can't decide whether this design is an improvement on the usual design, or a minor distraction. In either case, the design is secondary to the quality of the posts--which is superb.
One could hardly have...
As Jonathan Cohn points out in the cover story in this month's The Atlantic, creating systems to store medical records electronically "has...
As Jonathan Cohn points out in the cover story in this month's The Atlantic, creating systems to store medical records electronically "has been a frustratingly slow process, spanning at least the past two decades. And even today the project is a mess: more than 400 separate vendors offer EMRs [electronic medical records], and the government is still trying to establish a common language so that they can all 'speak' to one another." Too often, doctors with state-of-the-art medical-records systems still have to print, fax, and scan them when transferring them to another institution.
If doctors can't solve the relatively simple problem of keeping records and making them transferrable (writers and editors, not known for their technical prowess, managed this with Microsoft...
The lead story in the opinion pages of yesterday's New York Times was a fine reflection on children and gun violence by Alex Kotlowitz...
The lead story in the opinion pages of yesterday's New York Times was a fine reflection on children and gun violence by Alex Kotlowitz, a distinguished reporter formerly of the Wall Street Journal, and the author of the acclaimed bestseller "There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America," about a violence-plagued public housing project.
Kotlowitz's Sunday piece was entitled "The Price of Public Violence," and it deals with the problem not of children who are murdered, but of those who are wounded or who witness violence. "What is the effect...
The New York Times magazine does not have a good record lately with regard to medical stories. From its misguided profile of the man who falsely linked autism to vaccines, to its goofy claim that...
The New York Times magazine does not have a good record lately with regard to medical stories. From its misguided profile of the man who falsely linked autism to vaccines, to its goofy claim that jellyfish might hold the key to immortality, and a number of others, the Times magazine has appeared misinformed or naive. I went easy on a Times magazine story earlier this month about a boy with severe arthritis who appeared to improve on an alternative therapy, but Michelle M. Francl sharply criticized it in ...
Next week, Time magazine features a cover story that it says is “the longest single piece ever published by a single writer” in the magazine. Entitled "Bitter Pill: Why...
Next week, Time magazine features a cover story that it says is “the longest single piece ever published by a single writer” in the magazine. Entitled "Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills are Killing Us," it is an exhaustive, morbidly fascinating, and ultimately deeply discouraging story about the almost unimaginable financial excesses and distortions in the U.S. health care industry.
It was written by Steven Brill, a journalist, lawyer, and entrepreneur and the founder of Court TV, American Lawyer , and Brill's Content. Brill's most recent book was Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools (2011). ...
After an experiment in which we opened comments to allow anyone to comment on Tracker posts, we have decided to require registration once again.
We found ourselves deluged with spam, despite the use of CAPTCHA schemes, and we didn't see a corresponding increase in legit comments. In fact, we were in...
After an experiment in which we opened comments to allow anyone to comment on Tracker posts, we have decided to require registration once again.
We found ourselves deluged with spam, despite the use of CAPTCHA schemes, and we didn't see a corresponding increase in legit comments. In fact, we were in danger of missing legit comments in our sweeps to clear out the spam.
Sorry about the inconvenience; we are working on a new way to do this, and we will open comments again as soon as we can.
In the meantime, if you are not registered, please register! And sign up for our daily alert regarding new posts!
We don't give away premiums for joining the way NPR or your local station does, but the cost of becoming a member of our station is zero. Can you find a better deal?
Cheers.
-Paul Raeburn
Papers often profess to be interested in serving their readers. They are also interested in news, and the two things do not always go together.
Many papers err on the side of providing too much service ("How to tell when an avocodo is ripe" or "Five tips for better sleep"), a trend...
Papers often profess to be interested in serving their readers. They are also interested in news, and the two things do not always go together.
Many papers err on the side of providing too much service ("How to tell when an avocodo is ripe" or "Five tips for better sleep"), a trend that has unfortunately accelerated in recent years. Others, mindful of their journalistic independence and unwilling to even appear to be too close to their sources, run away from such stories, arguing that they are not news.
Today, 17 medical specialty societies--allergists, radiologists, rheumatologists, and the like--released a list of tests they say are commonly ordered, but not always necessary—and which "could cause undue harm" (press release).
Some news organizations might argue that this...
Donna Gordon Blankinship of the AP wrote a story yesterday in which she did a wonderful job of explaining why she should not have written the story.
The study was about children...
Donna Gordon Blankinship of the AP wrote a story yesterday in which she did a wonderful job of explaining why she should not have written the story.
The study was about children's TV watching, and her lede was, "Teaching parents to switch channels from violent shows to educational TV can improve preschoolers' behavior, even without getting them to watch less, a study found." She goes on to write that "the results were modest and faded over time, but may hold promise for finding ways to help young children avoid aggressive, violent behavior, the study authors and other doctors said." Or not--a study with modest results that quickly faded probably doesn't offer promise of anything.
Then she explains how the study was done. Parents filled out diaries recording what their children watched...
©2010 Knight Science Journalism at MIT. All Rights Reserved.