Big changes for HealthNewsReview.org

In the past 3.5 years, we’ve reviewed more than 900 stories – always reviewing them the same way, applying the same ten standardized criteria. It’s an approach that has caught the eye of journalists, health care consumers, health care communicators and many others.

The approach won’t change, but which stories it is applied to is changing.

Now under review

Starting today, this is the list of news organizations that we will review on a regular basis, accepting for review only those stories that include a claim of efficacy or safety in a treatment, test, product or procedure.

We will review the website of these top circulation newspapers every day.

1. USA Today
2. Wall Street Journal
3. New York Times
4. Los Angeles Times
5. Washington Post
6. Chicago Tribune
7. Houston Chronicle
8. Arizona Republic
9. Denver Post
10. Dallas Morning News

We will review one of three wire services every day, rotating among these three:

Associated Press health news
Reuters Health
HealthDay

Also on our list for regular inspection of what appears online:

National Public Radio website health & science page
Reader’sDigest.com health page
MSNBC.com health
CNN.com/health
WebMD.com
Time
Newsweek
US News & World Report

We announced a few months ago that we had stopped applying our daily rigorous review to network television news stories for a variety of reasons.

But we will continue to make periodic comments on things we see on TV, as well as things we see in magazines (besides those mentioned above).

New (old?) blog voice

We will introduce a daily blog within www.HealthNewsReview.org – a blog that has been maintained by publisher Gary Schwitzer in a different location for the past 5 years. It is one of the longest-running and most highly-recognized health blogs on the Web. Through the blog we’ll comment on issues, angles, and themes that go beyond the scope of our news reviews. And we’ll often have guest perspectives from our reviewers, medical editors and from health care journalists.

We welcome your comments on our blog and look forward to hosting a meaningful discussion about health journalism and about patient decision-making.

Our transparent ten criteria

We’ve built a new section of the site to more fully explain the importance of the ten criteria we use to evaluate stories. Each of the ten criteria is explained in more depth, with thumbs up/down story examples for each of the criteria, and with patient or physician video clips explaining the significance of the criteria in a patient’s fully informed decision-making.

This is only an introduction to some of our new features. Look around. Learn. Comment.

We welcome you back to our remodeled home.

Gary Schwitzer
Publisher

Comments

Tanya Copeland posted on December 11, 2009 at 3:32 am

You and your team have done a very nice job enhancing the site features this year; thanks for all of your hard work.

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