Most people learn about healthcare by going to school. I got my health education by running a publication for PR people.
In 2003, I began working for Infocom Group, best known as the publisher of Bulldog Reporter. This was a family of subscription newsletters that offered “media placement intelligence” to public relations professionals.
One function of a PR person is to persuade journalists to write about their clients. This is easier if they have some idea of each journalist’s PR preferences — what kinds of pitches are welcome (or at least tolerated), versus the 99 percent or so that go straight to the trash folder.
At Bulldog Reporter, we obtained this information by interviewing the journalists themselves. I spoke with thousands over the course of more than 15 years.
In addition to getting these “pitching tips,” as we called them, I served as news editor, tracking job changes involving journalists along with other media news.
Branching into Healthcare
In 2004, the company decided to launch a new online publication for PR people in health and medicine. At the time, health was the single largest category of PR. I had some prior experience with publication launches, so I was tapped to lead the new venture.
Bulldog Reporter’s Inside Health Media officially launched in 2005. Most subscribers worked for PR agencies or academic medical centers.
This was a high-priced subscription product, so the challenge was to provide information that readers were willing to pay for. The content consisted primarily of journalist profiles, media news, and a searchable database of media outlets.
However, the site also included roundups of health news and press releases, the latter organized by category. It proved to be one of the most popular features, because it gave readers a quick way to keep up with the news.
Compiling the news stories would have been time-consuming, but I streamlined the process by loading them into an Excel spreadsheet. Using VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), I wrote functions that automatically extracted keywords and applied HTML tags. This allowed me to produce the roundups in minutes.
The website was updated daily. I also produced a daily newsletter summarizing each day’s content.
My Health Education
When the site launched, I knew relatively little about healthcare. I used to joke that I thought a clinical trial was something you watched on Court TV.
But I’m a fast learner, and my “instructors” turned out to be other journalists.
Shortly after launching the publication, I spoke with a pharma industry reporter for Forbes who casually mentioned that he liked getting reminders of upcoming PDUFA dates.
When I drew a blank, he explained that it’s the deadline for the FDA to make a decision on a drug approval. Soon, my vocabulary was brimming with all kinds of industry jargon.
In addition to covering large outlets such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, I spoke with editors at niche publications serving medical specialties or allied health professions. Others worked in health-related industry segments such as pharmaceuticals and medical devices.
Day by day, as I spoke with these editors, I gained little bits of knowledge about the professions they served.
One, who edited a publication for physician assistants, complained that PR people frequently got his readers mixed up with medical assistants (a vastly different occupation).
An editor of an ophthalmology publication told me that we were in the midst of a “myopia epidemic” among young adults, as they spent too much time staring at smartphone screens.
I learned about “alarm fatigue” from the editor of a magazine for critical-care nurses.
Joining AHCJ
My education took a step forward in 2011 when I joined the Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) and went to their annual conference in Philadelphia. It was the first of many AHCJ meetings that I attended.
I saw the event mostly as a chance to meet journalists face-to-face, but the conferences also offered an opportunity to learn a thing or two about the craft of health journalism.
Each conference included an extensive workshop on how to write about medical studies. This is important because many news stories are based on studies, and some journalists fall short when writing about research — for example, by over-hyping a mouse study or one based on a tiny clinical trial.
Conference speakers included luminaries such as former president Jimmy Carter (Atlanta in 2012) and Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick (Boston in 2013).
Infocom Bankruptcy
When I joined Infocom Group back in 2003, the media business was in the early stages of a steep decline. This was driven largely by the internet, as people became accustomed to getting information for free and advertisers found new ways to reach their customers. Social media would later accelerate the trend.
As the news editor, I was tracking this almost in real time, as newspapers and magazines announced round after round of layoffs and buyouts. Others ceased publishing all together, or moved from print to online-only publication.
My own employer wasn’t immune. In October 2014, after years of declining profitability, Infocom Group ceased operations and later filed for bankruptcy.
As I was sorting out my next move, a company called MediaMiser, based in Ottawa, Canada, came in and decided to acquire “certain assets” of Bulldog Reporter. Those assets include Inside Health Media, and within weeks I was doing the same job (remotely) for a new employer. MediaMiser later rebranded as Agility PR Solutions.
This continued for another five years or so. But as media companies continued to struggle, it became more and more difficult to get journalists on the phone.
I wasn’t privy to what was happening on the business side in Ottawa, but it wouldn’t surprise me if subscriptions were declining, or at least not meeting the company’s targets. I really don’t know. But in spring of 2019, I was informed that I had been laid off.
It was the start of a difficult period for me, out on the job market as the media business was in shambles. But I can’t complain, as the folks in Ottawa gave me five more years at my very own healthcare university.
