Category: Conferences

Bulldog Reporter on Facebook, Twitter

I’m attending the Bulldog Reporter Media Relations 2008 Summit at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco today and tomorrow, and tomorrow I will be part of a panel about using Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks. Our focus is particularly on media relations applications, but I’m sure that some of our participants will be relatively new to social networking sites, so we’ll touch on some other uses for social networking sites, too.

Thanks to Critical Mention, I believe we will have wireless internet in the meeting rooms, so I’ll be live blogging as many of the sessions as I can.

One way I like to do this at conferences is by setting up Facebook groups, so attendees can experience social networking first hand, without leaping in and setting up a brand “fan” page. So I’ve set up a Bulldog Reporter Media Relations Summit 2008 Facebook group. This will be an opportunity for attendees and exhibitors to continue their networking after the summit is over.

I’m less experienced a live-Tweeting through Twitter, but will be using the hash tag #mr2008 for my Tweets. For more information on hash tags, see this fan wiki. I also understand I can get live updates from other Tweeters by using track mr2008 (provided any others use that same tag.) If I find out that others are live blogging or Tweeting and using other tags, I’ll post those, too.

The conference agenda looks great, with continental breakfast starting in about five minutes. Time to grab some coffee!

Multimedia Reporting

I’m at the Association of Health Care Journalists’ annual conference, called Health Journalism 2008, in Washington, D.C. I just met Scott Hensley from the Wall Street Journal‘s Health Blog, who is one of the panelists in this session on new media tools for telling stories. Appropriately, his presentation is going to be a blog. He set it up here free on WordPress.com.

Other panelists include Amy Eisman, director of writing programs, American University School of Communications, and Joy Robertson, anchor/reporter, KOLR-Springfield, Mo.

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Amy sees the following trends in news:

  • need more video, more pictures, better presentation
  • Better text – SEO
  • Social networking
  • More readers finding content “sideways”
  • Hyper-link off site
  • Mobility (information on mobile phones)
  • Transparency
  • Experimentation

She also said you need to think about what you can do on the web that you can’t do in print. Think interactivity, links to archives and multimedia. Covering an event for users who can’t attend, via liveblogging.

She recommended Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think” as a handbook for writing and web design.

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Scott Hensley says the WSJ Health Blog has over 2,000 posts in the last year, and more than 21,000 comments. You really should check out his presentation on the blog he set up for this purpose. Here are some highlights:

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Elizabeth Edwards at Health Journalism 2008

Elizabeth Edwards, wife of former Democratic Presidential Candidate John Edwards, gave the keynote address at the Saturday awards luncheon at Health Journalism 2008, the annual meeting of the Association of Health Care Journalists.

Elizabeth and her husband formed the Wade Edwards Foundation after he was killed in a tragic car accident. Her personal breast cancer story made lots of news, and she says that when his campaign was active she spent lots of time criticizing her husbands’ Democratic opponents. So she spent her whole a major chunk of her speech attacking Sen. McCain, apparently on the grounds that her criticisms of Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama were “old news.” How conveeeenient.

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Health Reform Panel at Health Journalism 2008

Julie Appleby, USA Today, moderated this panel and asked each member to give a three-minute solution to health reform.

David Himmelstein, a promoter of single-payer government health insurance, is a primary care M.D. in Cambridge, Mass. He says we need to reform the insured as well as the uninsured. He says by spending what we currently spend on health care more wisely (31 percent for administration.) He says $80 billion insurance overhead would be eliminated.

Karen Davis from the Commonwealth Fund has five principles: Coverage for all, payment reform, a more organized health care system (a “medical home” that ensures access, not just coverage), narrowing the variation in quality and efficiency and bringing everyone to the highest level of quality, national leadership with the private and public sector working together.

Julie Barnes from the New America Foundation’s Health Policy Program has a mission to “preach hope and dispel fears.” She urged journalists to include solutions in their reporting. Their goals: cover all Americans, reduce costs and improve quality. She says these are inextricably linked. Covering everyone means we need to change how we pay doctors, paying not for quantity but quality. She says it can’t happen without bipartisan support, and that we need to encourage conversation.

Tom Miller from American Enterprise Institute says we need to introduce incentives that move us toward a sustainable, value-based health system. We need to encourage healthier behavior by consumers. More emphasis on primary prevention. He says he will “revise and extend his remarks” on the AEI web site.

The Davis/Commonwealth proposal sounds a lot like what the Mayo Clinic Health Policy Center has been advocating. Many of the principles are similar.

Miller says the mismatch between what we spend and what we receive is the fundamental problem. We can’t tax ourselves enough to pay for a program when overall costs are increasing faster than the economy.

Miller and Himmelstein got into a discussion that was, at the very least, “spirited.” Julie Barnes got her wish for “conversation,” I guess.

Julie Appleby asked each of them to suggest story ideas for the assembled journalists. Their suggestions:

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Economics of Health 101

I’m live blogging this session of Health Journalism 2008, with panelists including:

I’ll possibly have some video of Dr. Fronstin later; he gave a good overview of the basics of private health insurance.

Dr. Wilensky says the basic problem is that health spending is growing by an average of 2.5 percent more than the rest of the economy. Over the long term, she says, Medicare growth approximates growth for all health care. If overall spending continues to increase at the rate it has, and if Medicare essentially mirrors that growth rate, we will see Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security consume all of the federal government’s current revenues before 2030. She recommended what she calls some sensible next steps for Medicare:

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