Tom Grubisich: August 2009 archive
Where are the tribunes of the people in the health-care debate?
August 28, 2009
Every day, the debate over health-care reform grows hotter – but newspapers and their websites are doing little to shape the outcome. This is not just journalistic failure, but also abdication of public responsibility. For all their cost cutting, newspapers still have the editorial resources to take ownership of how big local issues are covered – and health care is, above all, local. As four doctors who are health-care-reform advocates wrote in a New York Times op-ed on Aug. 13:“...all medicine is local. And until a community confronts what goes on in its own population — to the point of actually seeking the data and engaging those who can solve the problem — nothing will change.”
The doctors examined 306 “Hospital Referral Regions” – which cluster hospitals used by most residents in their metro areas – and found that 74 of them met the doctors’ criteria for “more effective, lower-cost care.” Rich documentation about wide disparities in costs in hospital referral regions can be easily accessed at the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care. Thedata can be repurposed into charts and other easy-to-grasp visuals that pinpoint high costs at one or more hospitals and lower costs at other hospitals within the same metro area. This should be the starting point for newspaper coverage helping people to locate one of the crucial drivers of runaway costs: the availability of doctor-owned care-referral centers.
But go to newspaper websites today, and you won’t find them helping their communities understand this economic calculus of health care. I recently browsed five sites in metro areas that have the highest cost care, and only one site – the Miami Herald -- was even taking a stab at owning coverage of the issue. More...
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LA Times redesign doesn’t quite click
August 21, 2009
The LA Times website used to remind me of an old-fashioned hardware store – things were plopped wherever there seemed to be space. That changed when Meredith Artley took over as editor of the site in early 2007. Under Artley, latimes.com quickly became a leader in design and featuring content that celebrates the special qualities of its metro area. So why is the site’s new design, despite some welcome improvements, specked with so many mistakes?The gray (screened) type is gone, thank goodness, but it has been replaced by type that, because of the limited way it’s used, produces an even grayer look that extends to the entire layout:
The new typeface is Georgia, a serif version of Verdana, which Microsoft commissioned early on for its online readability. Georgia, which was inspired by Times Roman, is fine, but not when, everywhere, it is uniformly presented in regular font. More...
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Newspaper websites offer no cure on health-care reform
August 5, 2009
Helpless to stop their print world from being pulped, newspapers are blowing a golden opportunity to use the Web to recapture relevance and audience. The occasion is a story that impacts every man, woman and child in America – health care and how to universalize quality without busting the entire U.S. economy.News about health-care reform is, obviously, all over the media, including newspaper websites, 24/7, but too much of it has a Washington dateline when, in fact, the issue is basically local. People seek care where they live, not on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue NW or on K Street NW in Washington. Newspapers and their websites, with their still formidable local resources, should own this story as the locus shifts to their backyards. More...
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