Health Journalism – At Risk in Crikey Cutbacks.

I have a story in the Crikey email today about the cuts in the Crikey contributor budget. The post before this one talks about the ticklish nature of writing about one’s employer.

But much more important is some of the content which may be lost. For the last two years, freelance journalist Melissa Sweet has supervised the Crikey Health and Medical Panel (CHAMP), and for the last twelve months written almost a piece a day for the Croakey health blog.

Sweet  is a journalist with a speciality in health, and a particular concern for all the public health and policy issues that rarely get discussed in the mainstream media. To get the declarations out of the way right at the start, Sweet is both a mate of mine and co-founder, with me, of the Foundation for Public Interest Journalism. We both sit on the board.

But I think any fair minded survey of the content she has been providing and organising would result in the conclusion that it is valuable. If it can’t be done at Crikey, it deserves a new home. Sweet and her collaborators began the Croakey and CHAMP project with the aim of encouraging a more open, transparent and informed public debate around health, and boosting  coverage of under-reported and disadvantaged areas, such as indigenous health, rural health and mental health.This article in the Medical Journal of Australia describes the background to Sweet’s Crikey work.

Outcomes have  included the Crikey Register of Influence documenting links between experts and marketing campaigns, and the Croakey Register of Unreleased Documents, which records the details of evaluations, plans, reviews and so forth that should be released  in the interests of  better informed policy, practice and debate.

There are now 181 members of CHAMP, including leading figures in public health and health policy. Together they have written hundreds of stories for the Crikey email over the last two years on issues otherwise neglected by the mainstream media. CHAMP is an innovative project that has had a significant impact upon debate, and there is increasing interest in the health sector in engaging with CHAMP and Croakey.

Professor Simon Chapman, Professor of Public Health, University of Sydney, has said of his experience writing for CHAMP:

“I was particularly interested in the responses that came in
on the Howard Indigenous health ‘blitz’ in the [Northern Territory]. It
seemed that Crikey was the main voice putting alternative views on
the wisdom of what was happening. As a result of contributing Crikey
articles, I have been threatened with a writ; done numerous media

interviews; received many emails; and received both positive and negative feedback the next day via Crikey.

Professor Guy Maddern, Professor of Surgery at the University of Adelaide had this to say:

“The one article I contributed to Crikey . . . had . . . considerable
feedback from a range of sources, including the state Minister for
Health, colleagues I have not heard from in decades, and my local
butcher! Indeed, the article led to a number of radio interviews and, I
believe, gained useful and productive exposure to the issues that were
highlighted in it .

Other contributors to CHAMP have included the nutritionist Rosemary Stanton,  who sparked off a debate when she called for food to be included in carbon trading schemes.

Sweet has done  all this – moderating Croakey, writing for it most days, and coordinating CHAMP – for the modest retainer of $1000 a month. Croakey is not a high traffic blog, but in the last mongh has achieved over 19,000 page views and just over 17,000 unique visitors: not enormous, but as those in independent media know, not be be sneezed at either, particularly when they are such a tightly targetted group of professionals.

Now Sweet’s retainer has been cut. For the moment, she is still doing the work for nothing, but this cannot continue indefinitely. She hopes to find alternative means of funding the project.

Her email address is on her web page if anyone wishes to get in touch, and she Twitters as @croakeyblog.