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What Health Care Journalists Are Looking For

By: Nathan Allen | 08/03/2011

Health care and the issues surrounding it can be personal and complicated. Because of the complexities surrounding the world of health care, health reporters often rely on representatives from health care organizations, including hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, medical information technology organizations and the like to supply comprehendible information.

As Maggie Brandt noted in a recent blog post, media relations can play a large role in what a strategic communication agency does. Because of the often confusing nature of health care topics, it is essential for the media relations practitioner and reporter to have (at the minimum) an understanding of each other.

A University of Missouri study released in February surveyed 309 health journalists around the nation to examine attitudes those journalists had towards corporate pharmaceutical media relations (specifically, from agencies representing pharmaceutical companies). The study looked at intrinsic and extrinsic factors that could potentially play a role in journalists' attitudes towards an agency's media relations efforts for a pharmaceutical company.

Some interesting (and potentially helpful) results are below:

• Gender, personal interest in health care, journalistic experience and educational background do not play a role in health journalists' attitudes towards media relations. However, female journalists are more likely to use media relations materials than male journalists.
• When a health journalist relies on a study from a journal for their story, they are more likely to have a positive attitude towards media relations materials.
• Health journalists' attitudes on reporting on heart disease, obesity, mental illness and health care policy correlated with press releases sent from public relations agencies but the results were not significant.
• When health journalists get the majority of their story ideas from other media outlets, they are likely to use pitches from public relations agencies to formulate stories.
• Health journalists working in metropolitan markets (as opposed to national or small community markets) were most likely to have positive attitudes towards using a news release for the formulation of a story.

According to this study, the journalists most receptive to media relations materials from corporate pharmaceutical sources are journalists in a metropolitan market. It also can't hurt when pitching to make reference to a study from a journal or recent news that pertains to the topic being pitched.

Posted in Health Care, Public Relations