News-Record.com

From one of my listservs: Liz Donovan, retired researcher for the Miami Herald -- and an assistant to Woodstein during Watergate when she was at the Washington Post -- has died of cancer. (She had retired to Murphy, N.C.)

I knew her only online, but some of her thoughts informed some of what we did during the early days of our Town Square initiative. A former co-worker at the Herald, Tim Henderson, had this to say:

A stellar and modest and laser-sharp mind in the tradition of Katherine Hepburn in Desk Set, a film she loved, ironically about an early attempt to computerize research. Liz embraced computers and saw what they could do for newspapers, but also realized they were no substitute for an inquiring and skeptical mind. Today, Heaven has all the facts.

As you might have noticed, this blog doesn't generate many comments. I can think of a number of possible reasons for that, including this blog's specialized nature, how busy medical professionals are, the lack of awareness of this blog and my suckitude at medical blogging.

But there's at least one other possible reason: [irony] Everybody who might otherwise gather here is blogging him/herself. [/irony] Via the Health Care Blog comes this report (*.pdf file) on the medical blogosphere, which apparently contains more than 13 million blogs. It focuses primarily on docs who blog and looks at such issues as patient privacy, blogger anonymity/psedonymity and whether medical bloggers are disclosing possible conflicts of interest.

There are all sorts of medical blogs, however, including those posted by hospital administrators, insurance folks, laypeople (patients or relatives of patients, particularly) and health journalists.

I've got a set that I look at daily for general news about the profession and its major issues, but that's perhaps a half-dozen. Looking them over takes some time, but the payoff is story ideas and invaluable background. I'm open to suggestions if you're familiar with a medical blog you think I would particularly benefit from reading.

The Kaiser Family Foundation has scheduled a seminar on the rise of health-care blogging for 1 p.m. Eastern today. The keynote address will be delivered by Michael Leavitt, Secretary of Health and Human Services, followed by a roundtable discussion that will include these folks:

• Vicky Rideout (moderator), Vice President, Kaiser Family Foundation and
  Director, Program for the Study of Media and Health


• Jacob Goldstein, Wall Street Journal


• Michael Cannon, Cato Institute


• Ezra Klein, American Prospect Magazine


• John McDonough, Office of Senator Edward Kennedy and formerly of Health Care for All in Massachusetts


• Tom Rosenstiel, Center for Excellence in Journalism

It's being webcast here if you want to listen in.

Back in January, I invited local doctors and other interested health-care professionals to help the News & Record improve its coverage of medical and health-care issues, via e-mail to me and participation on this blog. Through the good graces of Dr. John Lusk and Wilma Bailess of the Greater Greensboro Society of Medicine, that invitation is being extended more formally today through the society's newsletter.

That participation could take the form of commenting on stories we've published, but I'll also try to post here about stories that I'm working on so that you can offer suggestions on angles to look at, sources to talk to, records to peruse and questions to raise. I am trying to create a dialogue between me and you local health-care professionals to improve our journalism, but I also hope that the dialogue will sometimes take the form of a discussion among commenters, with this blog serving as an online gathering place for you.

The GGSM newsletter goes primarily to doctors, but I'm interested in hearing as well from nurses, office managers, psychologists and anyone else working in the field of health care. You can leave a comment here or e-mail me. I look forward to hearing from you.

In looking for an article just now at the Web site of the Journal of Medical Practice Management, I came across a long list of available articles, almost all of which cost $19. But I found one that costs a whopping $227, and its title is:

"Spandex is a Privilege, Not a Right! Dress Codes in the Medical Practice"

OK, I follow the link and find that it's an audioconference led by a lawyer, not a print article. And it goes into some of the legal issues involved in regulating employee attire. But still. $227 for what sounds to me like just a lick of common sense?

There's an interesting experiment in civic journalism going on right now. It's called beat blogging, and it's an effort by 13 beat reporters nationwide to build social networks into their beat reporting. (The effort has a blog, and JR blogged a little about it here.) I'm not clear on all the details as to exactly how they're going about it, and they're not all going about it in exactly the same way. But as the N&R seeks to expand its community journalism, it seems like a good idea to try.

I think the approach could be particularly valuable for the paper's readers on a beat like this one, where there's a lot of specialized knowledge involved that I don't have. If you're a medical professional and want to take part, please leave a comment or e-mail me.

(To try to facilitate this process, I've started a Twitter feed.)