By Scott Hensley
From the Spring 2007 issue of HealthBeat
In March, The Wall Street Journal launched the Health Blog, the latest in the Journal's growing band of blogs on subjects ranging from mergers and acquisitions to how people balance work and family life.
In addition to being timely and convenient, blogs offer readers the chance to become writers by commenting below the posts. In the Health Blog, we aim to meld the Journal's traditional standards for reporting and writing about health care with the immediacy and community that blogs make possible.
Jacob Goldstein
We wanted an experienced health-care reporter to be the main voice of the blog, and we were fortunate to lure award-winning medical writer Jacob Goldstein from The Miami Herald to do the job. "I jumped at it," Goldstein says. "It seemed like a great way to do something creative and new, but with the old-school credibility of the Journal." Goldstein joined the ranks of other full-time bloggers at the paper, including Peter Lattman of the Law Blog and Dana Cimilluca of Deal Journal.
So what's the point of the blog? We're trying to point readers to the most important and interesting health news of the day. We often look at stories through a business lens and always try to add some analysis or context. Sometimes, a story serves to tee up a question to readers, such as whether the FDA should approve a treatment.
Besides summarizing news, we report and write our own items. The blog also runs posts from other reporters from the paper, WSJ.com and Dow Jones newswires. We broke a story from the American College of Cardiology that stents were disappointing in a study comparing the devices and drugs to drugs alone for treatment of patients with stable heart disease. The ACC and the New England Journal of Medicine lifted embargoes a day early on the results, after our report on a stent advocate's premature public remarks about the study. We landed the first media interview with Hank McKinnell after he left drug giant Pfizer. The Health Blog has delved deeply into compensation of executives in health care. There are frequently has five or six postings each day on the blog.
Still, we don't want to blog to feel like homework. We keep the posts concise and readable. And we try to have as much fun as the material allows. One of our most popular items so far was a fantasy pharmaceuticals mergers bracket that ran the morning of the first round of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament.
We encourage AHCJ members to email us about their significant stories as soon as they're available for consideration for the blog. Please send suggestions to healthblog@wsj.com.
Scott Hensley is news editor in The Wall Street Journal's Health and Science Bureau. Hensley, who covered the drug industry as a reporter for the Journal for seven years, is the editor and a contributor to the Health Blog.
