Kaiser Family Foundation To Launch Health Policy News Service
The Kaiser Family Foundation will launch a Washington, D.C.-based news service called Kaiser Health News to produce in-depth coverage of health care policy for an independent Web site and in collaboration with mainstream media outlets, the New York Times reports. The Foundation has hired Laurie McGinley, former deputy bureau chief for global economics at the Wall Street Journal, and Peggy Girshman, a top editor of Congressional Quarterly and previously at National Public Radio, to run the news service. McGinley said she and Girshman plan to recruit full-time reporters and contract with freelance journalists with the goal of starting to produce original stories about health policy in early 2009.
Kaiser Family Foundation President and CEO Drew Altman two years ago made establishing a news service the Foundation's highest priority for expansion, according to the Times. He said, "I just never felt there was a bigger need for great in-depth journalism on health policy and to be a counterweight to all the spin and misinformation and vested interests that dominate the health care system," adding, "News organizations are every year becoming less capable of producing coverage of these complex issues as their budgets are being slashed" (Sack, New York Times, 11/24).
Kaiser said the news service will be nonpartisan and produce in-depth stories to provide context to health policy debates (Sack, International Herald Tribune, 11/23). It will not accept advertising and will provide its content for free (Kaiser Family Foundation release, 10/29).
Also, Kaiser and the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism have released a study of the front pages of newspapers, television news outlets, Internet news sites and radio programs that found less than 1% of news stories in 2007 and the first half of 2008 were about health policy (New York Times, 11/24). Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew journalism project, said, "That 1% is a low number; that is not a media priority." He added, "That falls in the range of things the press feels some obligation to cover but doesn't really spend much time on" (New York Times, 11/24).
According to the study, health news made up 3.6% of all content analyzed. Within health-related coverage, 42% was about specific diseases or conditions, 31% was about public health issues, and 27% was about health policy or the health care system (Rubenstein, "Health Blog," Wall Street Journal, 11/24). Kaiser's Senior Vice President for Media and Public Education Matt James said, "At a time when health care ranks near the top of the public's list of concerns, there is relatively little coverage of health and health policy in the news media" (Kaiser Family Foundation/Pew release, 11/24).
The study is available online.
Other Health News Projects
Several other foundations and entrepreneurs have launched health policy-related news services, according to the Times. The California HealthCare Foundation is sponsoring a six-month pilot project called the Center for California Health Care Journalism that will report on state health issues. It will be overseen by Michael Parks, a journalism professor at the University of Southern California and former editor of the Los Angeles Times.
Also, Carol Gentry, a former newspaper reporter, has started Florida Health News, which provides original reporting and collects stories from the state's media outlets. In addition, Kansas Health Institute has its own news service. According to the Times, several other Web sites "pay substantive attention to health issues," including MinnPost.com.
Louis Freedberg, director of the California Media Collaborative, said, "In terms of these new journalism ventures, there's more activity in health than in any other areas." He added, "It may be because there are so many foundations focused on health. And perhaps it reflects the fact that this is such a critically important issue" (New York Times, 11/24).
