PH: No. That accounting has never happened before as far as I know. So what we’ve done is started to talk to academic researchers, like Sharon Dunwoody at the University of Wisconsin, and ask them: All right, now if we wanted to find out who’s doing what and whether just moving, or what they’re doing, can you help us do the research. So we’re starting to do research so that at some point we’ll be able to say to the young journalists, hey, it’s not so bad, there are jobs out there, they’re just in different places—or give them the bad news that actually, in fact, you better go do something else. I don’t know which is the case. You think about The New York Times—they’re losing bodies on the newspaper staff, but gaining bodies on the online side, and pretty soon those reporters are going to start looking the same. There’s going to be no distinction between whether you’re an online Times person or a newspaper Times person - I think many staffs are going that way. But is there a net gain or net loss? We have to find out.
CB: Is this how will you put your own stamp on the fellowships program?
PH: The assessment will be part of it. What it will actually be making sure that the fellowships keep up with the new media. We’re also going to have our Web presence grow and make our site destination. For example, at MIT, all of the 1,800 courses here are online. If you want to take a course in physics you go to the open courseware and you find the physics professor on video, teaching, and all his course materials there. On our end, we have to do the same thing. Our Medical Evidence Boot Camp is in about its eighth year, and now we’ve taken the person who does the statistics lecture, the basic stuff on epidemiology — how does this work, what do you have to look out for as a journalists, what numbers to you have to pay attention to — she is now on video, online there, if you want to learn epidemiology for journalists. We also had this Future of Science Journalism conference in February, so now all those audio talks are up and online. We’re going to have more blogs. The Knight Science Journalism Tracker will be gradually built up so that it’s worldwide. You’ll be able to look every week and see, in the Spanish-speaking world for example, what’s being covered in science journalism.
CB: What do you hear specifically from fellows in terms of what they want to learn?
PH: Each fellow is a little different. Some of them come in blogging already, and others say “Hey, I want to learn that.” We’re going to try to make sure that we have teachers available for them for whatever they want to learn so that when their employers say “You need to do a blog or you need to do a podcast,” they can do it. But the main thing, still, is that they take any classes they want at Harvard and MIT. That’s what they spend most of their time doing—going to classes, finding scientists, talking to them, getting sources, getting their stories.
I'm heartened to learn about the robustness of the program and the breadth and depth of quality in the talent pool.
However, I nosed around the website and did my usual searching for reportage which includes professional nursing and nurses and came up with zero.
Neither MIT nor Harvard field nursing programs, and unless reporters are actively seeking out expert nurses, they aren't overly likely to bump into them on those campuses. They would be able to find them at Boston College, Univ. of Massachusetts at Boston and Amherst, and farther afield, at the Univ. of Connecticut, Yale, Columbia and NYU.
However, it is critical that health and science reporters learn about the profession of nursing, its fundamental practice precepts, and its ethics and extant issues.
As a case in point, no reporter has yet to investigate the use of nurses as agents of abuse and torture on immigrant detainees and prisoners. However, nurses practice primarily as employees and obedience to employer directives and the mandate to be "good nurses" causes many nurses to act against the interests of patients when their means of livelihood is threatened.
Moreover, it's nursing care which directly affects patients' morbidity, mortality and degree of suffering in the most immediate sense.
Reporters are allowing nurses to fly under the radar in investigating abuse and torture, and everyone loses.
But so far, it doesn't appear that including nursing in health reportage is even on the curriculum for journalists. I hope that changes.
Home of the Brave is where I have more to say.
Posted by Annie on Mon 18 Aug 2008 at 12:17 PM
Annie, Thanks for the comment. We're not limited to MIT and Harvard for our speakers. We get them from all over the country, and we are planning one on nursing. I think you're right, and would love to hear more from you about who's the best to talk on these issues.
Posted by Phil Hilts on Mon 18 Aug 2008 at 01:48 PM
Thanks, Phil, for your interest. Email me at aek2013 at columbia dot edu at your convenience to explore further.
A good source primer for nursing demographics and position papers/policy statements is the American Association of Colleges of Nursing website.
The other essential reference is the website of the National Institute of Nursing Research (one of the NIH institutes).
The Code of Ethics for Nurses with Interpretive Statements may be found on the American Nurses Association website, but it's buried and still proprietary - a problem itself, in my view.
Posted by Annie on Mon 18 Aug 2008 at 04:40 PM
View from the sticks:
MIT's Open Courseware course list has only 1 hit for the word "journalism" - " Documentary Photography and Photo Journalism".
Plenty of courses on writing, but the focus seems to be technical writing, not journalism.
Also - a writing class is suboptimal if there's nobody to give feedback on the assignments a far-flung visitor might otherwise be tempted to complete.
So, for Open Courseware, would it perhaps make sense to have "Mechanical Turk" type teaching fellows for each course? We could remunerate them with beads and trinkets from our native lands, also perhaps with grants from Craig Newmark.
(yes, i realize the Fellowships are about science for journalists and not journalism for scientists, so as a critique this is rather off base. But it is mostly sincere nonetheless.)
Posted by Anna on Wed 20 Aug 2008 at 01:03 AM
I don't think that journalism for scientists is off base; one increasingly finds scientists as the authors of op-eds in areas of expertise. This cross-fertilization has the potential to improve the situation in which journalists are reluctant to 'shout out' the actual state of climate change understanding, and instead revert to dueling quotes. Not sufficient to supply essential context.
Posted by Stan Wiggins on Thu 28 Aug 2008 at 03:29 PM