Wanted: A Social Network for Global Health News

Towards building a social network for real global health news on the cheap.

The promise: the Web allows anyone to have a voice.

The reality: the Web is actually narrowing the bounds of conversation. We’re recreating in the digital world the same categories and divisions that exist in the real world—only stronger. (See James Evans' recent analysis in Science for supporting evidence in scientific publishing online. On a related note, check out this study about "the winner's curse.")

Case in point: global health news coverage. This topic always falls between the cracks in the mainstream press—somewhere between “world news” and “health news.” Those offline categories are simply getting stronger in the online world. News categories are not yet miscellaneous enough, as David Weinberger describes.

In my experience, most global health news is actually promotional, not journalistic in nature.

A possible solution and the reason for this message: organizing the folks who are already writing about global health news online for free. Note: this is not going to pay anybody’s bills but since we are doing it anyway (as a way of keeping online notes for a book, learning, self-promotion, etc.), why not make it as powerful as it can be?

Some background: the fact that we were able to cover global health news at all was a happy result of the inefficiencies in the advertising model that financed most of the news business until very recently. Yes, most of the health advertising in TIME Magazine, for example, came from pharmaceutical companies but the firewall between edit and the publishing side, my own interests and those of several colleagues plus the fact that drug companies were okay with the fact that their ads reached both people who wanted their medications as well as those who did not, allowed us to write about global health and other less obviously remunerative articles. Keyword-based advertising has changed all that but that’s a topic for another post. (See Ethan Zuckerman for a really clear introduction to the value of advertising inefficiency, especially the part about how Bloomingdales underwrites the New York Time's Africa coverage)

After spending a lot of time thinking about this and talking to lots of people, I’m starting to accept that foundations are NOT going to pay for global health news coverage. And there probably is not a very good business model for it either. Oh yes, certain sections will get peeled off—anything having to do with mobile phones, pharmaceuticals or risk management. Plenty of opportunities for targeted advertising, subscriptions or commercial contracts there.

But the same market failures that have hobbled the development of new TB drugs over the past 50 years also affect the production and coverage of in-depth global health news.

Note, I am not talking about creating an educational service—like Kaiser’s globalhealthreporting.org. Nor am I envisioning a PR newswire for global health—like globalhealthtv.com (which was developed by a PR company for the Global Health Council).

Both are necessary but not sufficient to what I would like to see, which is an independent editorial voice in global health news.

The news industry as we know it is undergoing radical transformation. It is too busy focusing on survival to care what happens to global health news. The Knight Foundation and others are focusing on local community news and investigative journalism. The foundations that fund global health are taking some baby steps—like the Gates Foundation funding NPR, PRI and the Jim Lehrer show—but they won’t do something bigger, I think, because they don’t want to give up control of the message.

So that leaves the people who are doing it for little or no money, out of passion or as an adjunct to other paying projects. (Heaven help us.)

Meanwhile, how do we get the values, the best of what we aspire to as journalists, as global citizens, baked into whatever the new systems are? I'm going to try buttonholing as many of my fellow participants at the meeting of the Association of Health Care Journalists in Seattle April 16-19 about this as I can. This is not something anyone can do on their own. But is there a critical mass willing to try? That's what I would like to know.

I welcome your thoughts.

Related posts:
Sharing and Global Health Blogging
Update on the Global Health Blogging Experiment
Community Organizing Meets Global Health Blogging
Looking for Context in Global Health Reporting