Connection of newspapers and public health

In my earlier post "Black, White, and Dead" I discuss potential changes in the way news organizations report the news, and news-reader software.

The question came up as to how this relates to public health, and the answer is important, so I'm making a whole new post on that.

Recently my wife Cheryll and I attended the Knight-Wallace Fellows Ninth Annual Conference on Journalism, focusing on Journalism and Women's Health, at the University of Michigan (November 7, 2005). (see previous post here.) There were two major take-away messages we got from that conference.

1) We were very frustrated by the lack of a way to follow up on the topics that captured our interests.

2) There was universal agreement from the panel that journalists are key players in getting public health messages out to the public, and out to government officials, but that the process was basically broken because public health issues are complex, and reporters don't have the time or space to get into that complexity. And, if they did get into that complexity, they'd lose most of their readers that wanted something easier to grasp, and a better "sound bite."

This second problem parallels a subject I've raised here before, that the complexity of problems is becoming larger than what we have to cope with them. ( Health Policy's Core Problem. )

So, Michael Kinsley's article got me thinking about news readers, and the "shape" of a news release in an abstract sense, but with some concrete conclusions.

I think what we need is to make news items more like multi-layered pyramids, with several different levels of detail and complexity available, but initially hidden.

So, like any manager, readers want something very short and sweet (the "sound bite") as an anchor for the reference. But then, when they have time to come back and pay attention to it, they are going to want to "drill down" into the story.

Journalists, authors, educators, writers have been trying to accomplish that task through structured linear text, but the truth is that just isn't very effective. First, no one today has read Mortimer Adler's classic "How to Read a Book", and we have generations that are clueless about top-down comprehension of complex topics, or how to start with the major headings and work their way down into the details. This isn't a skill we can assume.

Secondly, for many people, actual reading literacy and fluency is not very high. They simply get tired out after reading "X" words, where X is a number that's smaller each year. No one has time or mental energy, after getting the paper out of the bushes, to finish reading long articles, at least not at that time. They get put aside for "later", then discarded when "later" just doesn't seem to come any more as much as it used to.

So, we have functional specs here that say we need three changes:

1) "articles" need a top surface level that's fast and easy, but they need "drill-down" capacity to expand, or recursively expand details when the reader is "ready to copy." The details have to be hidden or re-hidable when they are just clutter. This is is classic task of "hypertext."

2) The "articles" need to persist until it's a good time to "get to" them for each reader, which may not be the day they are issued.

Readers need a "point-and-click" way to say - "save this for later, tag it this way, put it in this "inbox", where later might mean 3 weeks from now.

3) Many readers are not sufficiently organized to have their own inboxes set up and organized to support this process. It would be good, along with a "clipping service", to provide a very easy way to end up, after clipping, with more than just a heap of things to read that now looks more like a burden than a resource.

So what's the vision? Journalists, working with say researchers who have new "findings", put together a pyramid news release. There's the 100 word version, the 300 word version,
the somewhat in-depth version, and the full-version. The shortest, sweetest, sound-bite version probably is what's visibly published, where space is short - but it has a link to the drill-down versions. Maybe the deeper versions are assembled by the researchers and the research organization's public relations department, working with the journalist.

The point is that, once the news item has caught people's attention, it has to be trivial for them to find this again, get to it, and drill down into the actual complexity and details in a carefully supported way.

Maybe we could think of this as "just in time" publication of fragments of text-books, one tiny topic at a time.

Since these items will persist, they also need to be updated, annotated, and kept current by some other process. As with any classroom subject, it actually might be nice to have 20 other people say "Well, I didn't understand the teacher's explanation, but here's what brought this home to me in my own words, that might help you understand it ..."

I don't know exactly where these items would persist, but weblog space seems suited for that, as it's free, and publicly accessible globally.

Journalists could spend their effort at thetop of the pyramid, making hooks to bring these topics into the public view at the right time. Researchers could spend their time at the bottom of the pyramid, adding detailed technical content, journal articles, etc. Academic educators could spend time in the middle, cleaning up the flow-lines from the simplistic sound-bite to deeper and deeper levels of understanding the complexities of the subject matter, and making those accessible to, say, the aides to the Governor who actually are tasked with following up on something.

And schools of Public Health could adopt these public pyramids of knowledge and work to keep them current and refreshed and to find ever better ways to make each successive layer of detail more accessible to people, where the people range from students to politicians to the general public that is trying to inform itself on what is really going on in the world and why.

If anything would be worthy of federal funding, the catalyzing of this sort of public resource, as a value-added layer on top of our electronic library system, would seem to be justified as having a high impact per dollar spent. It tackles directly the problem that knowledge is increasing "over there" while the decision-makers are operating "over here", and the two never meet.

To me, that describes a powerful ecology of journalism, research, and public health that can work to slowly make even very complex topics accessible.

The pyramid can be adorned with podcasts, video-clips, tutorials, links to free on-line courseware, links to on-line discussion groups, etc. for those who want to educate themselves further on subjects.