Christiane Truelove is the editor of Med Ad News and R&D Directions. In addition to supervising her staff, she also spends some time writing. In fact, she writes one of the most interesting e-newsletters in the pharmaceutical marketing business, called “Pharma Blogs: Week in Review.” If you don’t want to spend the time reading blogs all week, that’s where you can get the gist of what is going on in the drug-related blog world.
Because Christiane spends all week reading health-care blogs and then reviewing them, arguably there could be no better person to talk to about the future of pharmaceutical blogging and how the Internet world will impact mainstream medical media. With a solid journalism background and experience at Med Ad News since 1999, she knows more about the healthcare industry than many other writers.
Christiane also has a secret — she isn’t just a journalist; she is a blogger herself. In fact, she writes several blogs on social network sites such as Livejournal and Tribe. But those are personal, and can’t be accessed by outsiders, only by a select group of people she trusts.
So it was only natural for her to propose to her boss that Med Ad News start a blog. Instead, she was told, “do a blog review; you already read all those blogs.” And based on that conversation “Pharma Blogs: Week in Review” was launched as an e-newsletter in April 2007.
“My biggest surprise when I started writing about blogs was finding that so many people were willing to open up to bloggers and tell their stories” Christiane says. She also says bloggers are more willing to use anonymous sources than regular journalists, for better and for worse.
“I fear that a blogger who doesn’t have a solid journalism background can get into trouble and get the story wrong, if they don’t do good fact-checking,” she says. “That’s the worst about blogging.” But she is also very happy that regular journalists, such as Ed Silverman of Pharmalot and former business reporter for the Newark Star-Ledger, have gotten into blogging. “Ed is someone I really admire; he is a very, very good journalist,” she says. “He knows what stories to write, and more importantly, what not to write.”
Christiane thinks the media landscape will change because of blogging. Companies, politicians, and others, will have to reevaluate how they approach bloggers and journalists. “Ten years ago it was easy to call anyone and get a response,” she says. “Since then, the number of PR agencies has exploded and they’ve infiltrated everything.” And that is not a good thing, neither for the writers, nor for the people they represent.
Christiane wryly notes that most journalists, under deadline pressure or for other reasons, have to be content with letting a PR person get back to them with a canned statement, carefully crafted and rife with what she calls “weasel words and dead language.” “Bloggers don’t do that, they simply run with the story, and then make fun of the PR agency or the way the statement was said,” she notes.
But regular media shouldn’t change their approach, Christiane says: “We report more unbiased stories, with views from both sides.” But she thinks bloggers will shape how some stories are written and how some journalists do their jobs.
And she is concerned about the future in the media business — not the future of specialty publications like Med Ad News because “they will always have an audience” — but she worries about the future of the general media industry: “I think a lot of quality will disappear. Local news will disappear. The Internet has made everything seem close to us but local newspapers are cutting back and people will not know what’s going on in their own backyards.”
Blogging, she thinks, will become part of mainstream journalism. For example, blogging is already covered in the News and New Media course taught at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. “I expect that blogging will be taught at every journalism school in the future.” she says, “Some bloggers will become really good journalists and some journalist can become great bloggers.”
Click here for a free subscription to Christiane's "Pharma Blogs: Week in Review."
- Peter Rost, M.D. is a former VP of Pfizer and the author of Killer Drug and The Whistleblower.
Is it just me, or are the journalists all circling the wagons around themselves and referring only to other journalists when they talk about blogs?
Journalist bloggers may be dominating the opinion pages of trade publications and trade conferences, but they are not what "traditional blogging" -- never thought I'd see that in a sentence! -- is all about.
The true blogger is outside the mainstrean media which have tremendous resources behind them to gather information; the true blogger doesn't have a staff of fact finders/checkers, graphic artists, and ad people helping them; the true blogger does not have huge advertising incomes that are at risk when they write a story that offends a hand that feeds them.
In spite of all that, the true blogger COMPETES with the journalist blogger for readers and often is rated higher in credibility and usefulness by their readers than journalist bloggers!
Only a journalist with such resources can get on their high horse and bemoan the fact that bloggers sometimes don't get the story right! As if journalists are infallible that way (remember Dan Rather?).
I also note that journalist bloggers have so much time to devote to blogging, they virtually shut out all the other voices with multiple posts every day! This is blogging diarrhea of the worst sort!
Once bloggers have all the resources and income that journalists have, they cease to be bloggers and are just journalists writing blogs like the guys over at the WSJ Health "blog." They are so bland, I cannot tell which guy wrote today's posts.
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it IS a duck.
Posted by: John Mack | August 02, 2007 at 04:10 PM