Kaiser Family, Other Non-Profits Launching Independent Health News Services
This story was written by David Kaplan.
Sensing a void in health care policy news coverage these days, the non-profit Kaiser Foundation is jumping on a recent trend and starting its own web-based news service, NYT reports. Kaiser, which focuses almost exclusively on the subject of national health care concerns, plans to form content sharing arrangements with a variety of media outlets. The service will build on Kaiser's existing site, which includes aggregated news reports and policy papers. That site has about 100,000 daily pageviews and 55,000 subscribers.
-- Filling the void: Health care legislation is expected to be a top priority for the incoming Obama Administration, which is one reason for the foundation's interest in launching the service quickly. The partnership with newspapers also is, in part, a reaction to a perceived lack of attention by the press; a joint Kaiser/Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism study reported that discussion of health care policy has come up in only 1 percent of news stories between early 2007 and 2008. That could be related to the waves of layoffs and buyouts at news organizations over the past few years. In any case, Kaiser isn't the only one rushing to fill the void: the Kansas Health Institute also has its own news service and former Florida newspaper reporter Carol Gentry recently launched Florida Health News with $185,000 in seed money from seven health-related foundations. The Florida site is trying to drum of ad support as well as donations. In California, USC professor Michael Parks, a former LAT editor, has a $239,000 budget for a six-month pilot project to report on health care issues in the state. Parks told the NYT a multi-million budget is in the offing if the pilot project is successful.
-- Possible conflicts: Menlo Park, CA.-based Kaiser's idea for the online news service was first introduced two years ago, but the economic downturn slowed efforts down. The issue of financial support could prove tricky for some of its potential newspaper partners. Kaiser's service will operate without any ad support. Instead, Kaiser will turn to other non-profit institutions, such as the SCAN Foundation, which is concerned with aging issues and is backed by another California non-profit that promotes Medicare Advantage policies. That could cause conflict of interest problems for professional media outlets intending to use Kaiser news feeds tied to that group.
By David Kaplan