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
Opinions on other issues in news, journals, PR, advertising, marketing
We’ve written about the hype of liquid biopsies for years (see link in comment below). And now this…. https://www.statnews.com/2022/01/12/medicare-shouldnt-cover-liquid-biopsies-early-cancer-detection/
Case counts still matter. “(There) are stories that may not be told adequately if only hospitalizations and deaths are emphasized.” @garyschwitzer interviewed by @dbauder of @AP. https://apnews.com/article/omicron-changing-news-outlets-covid-data-da9272f7c4c8a109c3bfb56bed9e9c76
My friend Gary @garyschwitzer wrote to his city council representative in a Minnesota town about a Viva Las Vegas event scheduled for January.
The response he got seems to perfectly capture where we are now.
https://www.healthnewsreview.org/2021/12/2021-ends-with-covid-craziness-in-sports-and-politics/
Comments
Please note, comments are no longer published through this website. All previously made comments are still archived and available for viewing through select posts.
Tanya Copeland
December 11, 2009 at 3:32 amYou 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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