Does it matter who writes medical news stories? | NOVA. The University of Newcastle's Digital Repository

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Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/917918

Title: Does it matter who writes medical news stories?
Author/Creator: Wilson, Amanda; Robertson, Jane; McElduff, Patrick; Jones, Alison; Henry, David
Description: The media can influence health literacy and health seeking behaviours, but few studies have looked at the quality of news stories. We examined whether experienced specialist health reporters write better stories than other categories of journalists. We compared the quality of stories written by specialist and non-specialist journalists, and those sourced from major news organisations, in Australia from 2004–08. We found that it does matter who writes news stories that cover the benefits and harms of health care interventions. Stories written by specialist health journalists working for a single media outlet scored more highly than those written by less experienced writers. Our findings are important because this source of health literacy is currently under pressure as falling revenues threaten the future of the traditional media.
Relation: PLoS Medicine Vol. 7, Issue 9
Publisher Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000323
Date: 2010
Publisher: Public Library of Science
Keyword(s): medical journalism; health literacy; mass media; Australia
Resource Type: journal article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/917918
Identifier: ISSN:1549-1277
Language: eng

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