The Article of the Future

Scientific publishers Elsevier and Cell Press have released a long-in-development prototype of what they call the “Article of the Future.”

It represents a thorough re-thinking of what an “article” is.

The press release details key features:

• A hierarchical presentation of text and figures - readers can elect to drill down through the layers based on their current task in the scientific workflow and their level of expertise and interest.
• Bulleted article highlights and graphical abstract - readers can quickly gain an understanding of the paper’s main message and navigate directly to specific sub-sections of the results and figures.
• The graphical abstract encourages browsing, promotes interdisciplinary scholarship and helps readers identify more quickly which papers are most relevant to their research interests.

What’s significant here is the way the developers essentially started from scratch, with the needs of an online user in mind.

Yes, the core is essentially an old-school journal article.

But from the bulleted list of key findings on top, to the multiple points of entry based on different use cases and learning styles, to the hyperlinks galore, the developers have identified ways to make it work better in the form a vast majority of readers now encounter journal articles–online.

An irresistible question for students of mainstream media’s reluctant, stumbling transition to the web: [Please forgive my intemperate language and use of capital letters]

WHY IN HOT SCREAMING HELL HAVE MAINSTREAM NEWS PUBLISHERS NOT DEVELOPED AN “ARTICLE OF THE FUTURE” BASED ON USE WEB CASES LIKE THIS OVER, OH, I DON’T KNOW, THE LAST 15 YEARS OR SO?

Ahem. Thank you. I feel better now.

A video walkthrough of the Article of the Future, voiced in a wonderfully British manner, can be found on the press release page.

Social Media, Health IT and Gov 2.0

I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at Driving the Adoption of Health IT Through Innovations in Social Media on  Thursday.

The half-day Washington meeting was held in response to two trends:

(1) the $40 billion [give or take] that will be spent over the next 10 years [give or take] to fund the medical system’s adoption of health information technology–electronic medical records, clinical care deliver systems and telemedicine, mostly.

(2) the increased use of social media in the worlds of health care and federal public-health agencies

The hoped-for outcome? To ensure the innovations in social media technology are integrated into all this spending and system reform–to keep the public involved with health care reform, essentially.

My role was to warm up the crowd. I did my best to convince them, essentially, that what they were gathering to do was very good and important. And also really, really hard.

For instance, while the use of social media to elect Barack Obama is always cited as evidence of the power of social media, frankly that may be easy compared to a lot of what people are hoping to use in health care.

Getting millions of people to go to a polling place on one specific day to pull a lever, touch a screen or mark a ballot using social media really isn’t all that complicated.

Using social media to get one obese 68-year-old man who lives alone to test his blood sugar three times a day for the rest of his life? Now that’s a social media challenge.

Anyway, the panels were full of people working on this stuff.

I learned the most from leaders of the federal government’s social media teams in the Health and Human Services sphere. The meeting drew the A-list. Here’s a quick run-down:

Andrew Wilson [@AndrewPWilson], head of Health and Human Services’ Center for New Media.

His main point: Now that some groups are using things like Twitter, blogs and widgets to respond to public health crises, it’s time to spread social media mojo across departments, agencies and the government.

He, like other federal web leaders, is also trying to figure out how to use these same tools to get meaningful input from the public without being overwhelmed by it–and to turn it into something valuable.

• Wilson invited input from the meeting’s audience to hear their ideas for how HHS can use social media in new ways.
• The agency recently signed an agreement with Facebook, allowing agencies to use the platform to do public outreach.

Sanjay Koyani, FDA Director of Web Communications

Koyani leads the FDA’s effort to reach the public with health alerts, including a recent social media campaign to get the word out about the recall of peanut products. The widget alone got 19 million page views and placement on 20,000 sites with very little promotion, he said.

• When the peanut product recall kicked in, he went to launch a Twitter profile–and learned for the first time that that agency already had one.
• The agency is providing webinar briefings for bloggers, to ensure that this group of increasingly influential web communicators is educated about the process, risk, science, etc.

Koyani’s presentation.

Erin Edgerton, M.A., CDC Senior Social Media Strategist

Edgerton leads, among other things, the CDC’s effort to use social media to respond to public health emergencies. She said her team’s role is to “invent ways” to get public health messages out. Check out this gallery showing the tools available for the H1N1 flu outbreak.

• CDC now offers e-cards you can send to loved ones reminding them to. . .wash their hands to avoid spreading the flu.
• The CDC’s main page is closing in on 1 billion [!] annual page views.

Edgerton’s presentation.

David Hale, @lostonroute66, NIH Information Specialist

Hale’s work blew me away. He leads the National Library of Medicine’s effort to do semantic and national language processing of Twitter traffic to sift out the noise and find evidence of emerging public health concerns. They’re also looking for trends in misinformation.

• He’s also leading something called Pillbox, a tool that would identify drugs based only on their physical appearance.

His presentation

What Was the Post Thinking with Its “Salon”? This:

Among the many questions being asked about the Washington Post’s disastrous plan to charge lobbyists and executives for a private “salon” among “the powerful few”:

WTF were they thinking?

Thanks to the Post’s “Shoptalk” employee newsletter [posted on an employee alumni website not affiliated with the Post] we now have some idea. In the June 16 edition, Charles Pelman, the staffer who organized the salons, was interviewed by Shoptalk staff about his new job.

This interview came long before the Post had to backtrack and aver they had no idea what was being said about the salons. If only we’d known. . ..

The “money” quote from the interview, as it were:

What goals have you set?

We’re thinking of doing eight to eleven salons, five to six day-long briefings and one major leadership summit per year. The salons are two-hour dinners with reporters, editors, policy makers, politicians, advocacy groups and other people who have a stake in a particular topic.

How will you measure success?

Profits. We want to drop some money to the bottom line. We want to be one of the engines of growth.

Well, there you have it. WTF?

Here’s TF.

Washington Post’s “Salon” Disaster and Health Care Reform

As a former citizen of the Washington Post newsroom, the recent disaster about the newspaper’s “salon” project is heartbreaking and embarrassing.

I won’t belabor the issues many others have so thoroughly covered, including today’s  “apology” by publisher Katharine Weymouth, which feels a bit short of fulsome. 

Instead I want to point out something that’s gotten lost in the media frenzy: That the topic of the first “salon” [sorry, I find I have to use quotes when referring to that] was to have been health care reform.

As an independent journalist [among other things] and participant in the “health 2.0″ movement, I find this particularly distressing.

The fact that Weymouth and her team identified health care reform as the first ripe target for a scheme to bring together “the powerful few”: CEOs/lobbyists, “Congressional and Administration officials” and Washington Post health care reporting and editorial staff” demonstrates the peril faced by the group with the biggest stake in health care reform.

I refer, of course, to patients.

Significantly, Weymouth did not invite to her “salon” anybody living with a chronic disease, or someone who lost her health insurance when she lost her job, or anyone who has declared bankruptcy under the burden of paying for a loved one’s brain surgery.

Now I suppose the patient community could have raised $25,000 to sponsor the event and buy a seat at the table. [We could have all chipped in for some nice clothes and a haircut, so our rep could fit right in.]

Imagine how the conversation would have been different if that patient advocate had co-sponsored the meeting of members of Congress and Administration officials, to say nothing of the top leaders in the Washington Post newsroom!

A fatuous fantasy, I know, laughable on its face.

But it illustrates how once again that–despite what appear to be sincere efforts to introduce patient-centric healthcare reform by some members of Congress and the Administration–the very people who are the ultimate beneficiaries or victims of healthcare reform are offered no seat a the table.

Not even Katharine Weymouth’s dinner table.

Three weeks ago, a number of other “stakeholders” in healthcare reform created something called a Declaration of Health Data Rights, a statement that spells out what rights patients have to the electronic information about their care to be gathered as part of any healthcare reform plan. [Interest revealed: I signed onto it and agreed to blog on it as part of a publicity campaign.]

As I’ve argued before, things like the Declaration are necessary because patients don’t really have access to the process when the difficult, ethically complicated, legally messy and often sneaky and malicious work of making healthcare law takes place.

There are many reasons to be disgusted with the Washington Post’s salon misadventure.

The fact that it demonstrated a reflexive Washington habit of gathering an exclusive cabal of the most powerful and moneyed interests to discuss such an important issue may be the most disgusting of all.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Patients are going to have to force themselves into this debate against the resistance and indifference of the Washington establishment. Patients cannot afford the luxury of deference and e-mail.

And so I repeat the rallying cry: Patients: Aux barricades!

Health Journalists on Twitter: Not Entirely Well, Thank You

I’m going to be hosting a webinar on how health journalists use social media soon.

So I thought I’d check out the health reporters on Muckrack.com, a website that aggregates Tweets of our nation’s journalistic corps.

It can be fascinating to see what sort of brain-lint the media produce minute-by-minute on the world’s tiniest news platform.

As I began writing this entry, for instance, there were dozens of Tweets not so much reporting, but wondering aloud what was up with, the “fact” that Gov. Sarah Palin seemed to be resigning, or at least not running for re-election, or something.

It was an enlightening moment in journalistic pop anthropology. You could see the complex thoughts of inside-the-Beltway sophisticates taking shape right before your  eyes.

Tweeted Howie Kurtz of the Washington Post: “Something must be up, I guess. Kind of weird.“

Talk about your first rough draft of history.

The Health Journalist Twitterers

But anyway, I was there to check out the Health niche. The health reporting corps has not for the most part discovered Muckrack yet: Only 10 health reporters’ Tweetstreams were aggregated on the Muckrack’s Health page.

They comprised three Baltimore Sun reporters, two from the Chicago Tribune, and one from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. [All Tribune Co. properties]. Then there is one each from CNBC, CBS News, the Montreal Gazette, and the New York Times.

And how were they using social media? The mixed bag you might expect.

Journalists on Twitter: Seeking Sources, Thinking Out Loud, Promoting Self, Getting Personal

Julie Deardorff of the Chicago Tribune, for instance, used Twitter to conduct some of source-fishing, cogitate about topics in her notebook, promote her own articles and, like all public-spirited Tweeters, reveal some personal information.

In Deardorff’s case, at least, the personal was professional.

• On Thursday June 25 she reported that she “injured my intercostal muscles by coughing for a week straight.”
• Two days later she reported she’d been diagnosed with pneumonia.
• And two days later she was back on the beat, trolling for sources to discuss the Nuval nutrition rating system.

Best-of-Class: Mike Huckman of CNBC

The most prolific health Twitterer on Muckrack–and, with over 3,000 followers, the most watched–is Mike Huckman, the pharma reporter for CNBC. Anybody interested in the bloodsport in the drug trade should follow Huckman’s sluice of reports, rulings, research and rumors about the companies that make America’s meds.

There is also insight into the life of a business journalist, such as this ripe observation about dealing with flacks. [Note the #prfail hashtag]:

mhuckman #prfail Just got call from PR person.I pick up phone,as always,”This is Mike.”They say,”Mike Huffman?”Pitching pvte co anyway,so 0 interest
a day ago by Mike Huckman, Pharmaceuticals Reporter, CNBC

Doctor!!!! Doctor!!!!!

CBS medical correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton Tweets about her comings and goings conducting interviews. Fairly routine stuff for journalistic Tweetle.

But for someone who is both a journalist and an M.D., she can be unusually enthusiastic. Within the stretch of 5 Tweets she managed to use 10 exclamation points. That may be a record of some sort.

New York Times and Twitter: Not a Healthy Situation

The smart set says that it’s poor form to use Twitter simply as a “push” device, as a tool to inflict yourself on the world. Everybody who participates in Twitter [it is said], even journalists, should expect to give more than they take, share tidbits with people who may appreciate them, develop relationships, etc. This is the spirit of the social web, it is said.

The biggest violator of this principle among the health reporting set on Muckrack is the estimable Tara Parker Pope, author of the New York Times’ Well health blog.

Her Tweetery consists almost entirely of two things: Links to her own blog entries and acolytic admirations of the fine work of her fellow Timesfolk. [i.e., "Interesting slide show on NyTimes Lens blog of homeless transgendered teens. http://bit.ly/14POwF"]

It’s true that Pope also gets personal; she Tweets about her preparation for the New York City Marathon.

taraparkerpope My 5.4 mi run tonight spent 630 calories according to http://www.gmap-pedometer.com . But now I’m 800 calories worth of hungry.
Tara Parker Pope, Well Columnist, New York Times

But that’s professional self-promotion too: Pope is the proprietor of RunWell, an online community for distance runners the Times launched recently.

Clearly Pope hasn’t gotten the Tweet about social media ethos. Another Twitter profile bears Pope’s name and likeness. nytimeswell is nothing but a botstream that’s triggered every time her blog updates.

Actually it’s triggered more often than that. Check out the series of simuTweets on celiac disease.

I found it peculiar that the New York Times was using Twitter is such a graceless manner compared to its peers.

The Times, after all, recently hired Jen Preston as its first Social Media Editor. Her task, presumably, would be to help staff make enlightened use of social web tools like Twitter.

So I clicked over to Preston’s feed in Muckrack to see how she is faring.

Not all that well, it turns out.

The Times’ social media doyenne hadn’t updated in about 3 weeks, and only three times since this one:

Working on response to 1,000 replies to last week’s question, how can @nytimes better use Twitter. MediaBistro conference later.
12:15 PM Jun 3rd from web

Dataviz of the Week: Show, Don’t Tell

This is the most remarkable resume I’ve ever seen.

Talk about the-medium-is-the-message. Marshal McLuhan should be thrumming happily in his grave like a turbine.

Note how this compares to the home page of reigning datavisualist demi-god Edward Tufte, whose bio appears about three screens down, stacked below several sedimentary layers of seminar promotion. Granted Tufte is a demi-god whose acolytes follow him around like Photoshop Deadheads, so doesn’t need to work that hard to sell himself. But still.

I often yammer about how infographics can convey more information–can tell a story–better than prose.

Compare Anderson’s self-presentation to a conventional resume’s gray blocks of letters that most of his peers depend on. It’s clear which document makes a better argument for hiring Michael Anderson.

Maybe before you hire Edward Tufte?

Update: I poked around Anderson’s site and found his old-school PDF resume. It sucks. Sucks wind. Hot, tornadic wind. Dude: What’s with the cursive font? Who the hell would hire you for an infographics job?