FluPortal.org

[Flu.gov on Facebook]

Andrew Wilson was until recently Flu.gov’s new-media strategist. Several months ago, we described how he used social media to revamp the Flu.gov site when H1N1 hit and also to get information out to the public more efficiently. Now you can hear Wilson outline the process himself — and its effectiveness — in more detail in a final excerpt from FluPortal’s latest webinar. (Previous excerpts here, here, and here.)

Wilson explained that the online interest in H1N1 last spring was so significant (equal to or greater than current interest in Haiti) that it “posed lots of challenges [...] from a communications perspective.” It meant that Flu.gov had to reinvent itself and its outreach in the middle of the crisis.

Enter social media. Wilson used it to evaluate who was coming to the site and why. (Learn how he did it here.)

Armed with this information, Flu.gov redesigned its site, collaborated with other organizations working on flu, and improved its public outreach using social media like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Flu.gov’s blog. The social-media outreach, Wilson said, has been key for two reasons: it increased Flu.gov’s responsiveness to news; and it made the information “as shareable as possible.” The end result: more information to more niche audiences more quickly.

Wilson also used social media to continue improving Flu.gov. At one point, for example, he noticed chatter on Twitter about a Canadian H1N1 vaccine recall. He was then able to explain on Flu.gov — and back on its Twitter channel — that the recall didn’t affect the U.S.

Here’s Wilson’s presentation — complete with helpful and interesting slides:

[FluPortal]

The full webinar is available here.

]

Minnesota Public Radio was able, during the height of H1N1’s second wave, to devote one reporter full-time to the story. In FluPortal’s recent webinar, that reporter — Lorna Benson — described how her station has approached swine-flu coverage — and what she’s learned from it. (This is the third excerpt from the webinar; first is here and second is here.)

Benson explained that before H1N1 appeared last April, she happened to attend a weeklong CDC workshop for journalists that included a section on pandemic flu. Once H1N1 struck, she found “that experience was very helpful.” It had introduced her to CDC flu experts, and she had a “good understanding” of how state and federal officials would work together during a flu pandemic (on medical testing, school closings, etc.).

During the summer H1N1 lull, anticipating a bigger outbreak in the autumn, MPR “took some time to sort through [its] pandemic coverage plan.” Benson also attended another CDC briefing — this time focused entirely on pandemic flu. And then a similar Minnesota Department of Health briefing. As a result, she was up-to-date on virus and vaccine details that helped her enormously when H1N1 resurged.

Among other things, Benson used the briefings to create an online swine-flu Q&A — which became one of MPR’s most-viewed web features. It received, Benson said, three to four times more hits than most. One lesson she drew from this and from audience questions during online H1N1 chats: there was a huge appetite for very basic H1N1 information.

Swine flu also taught Benson to stretch herself as a local reporter. She began listening to the CDC’s flu-update conference calls — which was, she said, “the first time that I had done something like that.” Prior to H1N1, she had thought these government calls were mainly for national media, but she learned that they included lots of information relevant to local H1N1 stories. As swine flu has tapered off in the last month or so, Benson has started reporting even farther afield: calling flu experts around the world to investigate the possibility of a third wave of H1N1. In other words: she found that national and international elements were indispensable for the best local reporting on pandemic flu.

To hear more about Benson’s experience reporting on H1N1, click on the “play” button below:

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[FluPortal]

You can also find links to much of Benson’s H1N1 reporting here. MPR’s H1N1 page is here.

Watch the entire webinar here.

Joe Neel [NPR]

In FluPortal’s latest webinar, NPR Health Editor Joe Neel pulled back the curtain on NPR’s health & science desk to reveal how it has reported on H1N1 — and how it plans to continue in the months ahead. Using social media, he said, has been a lynchpin. There are interesting lessons here for all health/science reporters.

Neel summarized the current global H1N1 situation by showing the graphs and data sources that NPR relies on for its information. He then explained why NPR was ready to cover H1N1 when it emerged in April 2009: the network had been reporting on pandemic flu since the H5N1 bird flu of 2004 and therefore had “amassed a lot of reportorial experience in this area.”

The other significant element that has allowed NPR to cover the story in depth: social media. Specifically, Shots (NPR’s health blog) and Richard Knox’s Twitter stream. Neel explained that through sheer coincidence, he had started a Shots prototype just days before H1N1 emerged last spring. So the health desk was able to “turn on a dime” and get the blog up and running immediately. Why has it been so useful? First, Neel said, there was simply too much news to put on the air; the blog was an additional outlet. Second, the news environment was so competitive that the hour between newscasts seemed an eternity — and the blog allowed the health team to post breaking news immediately. Here’s how Neel summarized the centrality of social media in NPR’s H1N1 coverage:

Our experience with the blog really changed the orientation of the journalists on our desk to see the usefulness of a blog and of social media. Dick Knox has started tweeting and really starting to use it as a journalistic tool as other journalists are doing. It really brought us into this age. It’s one of the most exciting things I’ve seen happen here at NPR.

Neel wrapped up with ideas for future national coverage and for future local coverage (these are screenshots of his webinar slides):

[Joe Neel, FluPortal webinar]

It’s well worth a few minutes to watch Neel’s full presentation:

[FluPortal]

You can see the entire webinar here.

Last week, in our webinar on crisis reporting, FluPortal’s tech whiz Josh Andrews outlined some of the newest resources available on this site.

He highlighted our revamped “Reporter & Program Resources” page, where among other things you’ll find our curated list of the best H1N1 news articles; he laid out the new guides to web tools and social media available on our “For Station Websites” page; and he emphasized that we continue to offer H1N1 story angles regularly on our blog.

The new web tools Josh outlined include the Public Media H1N1 Widget. It automatically displays the latest H1N1 reporting from public media, and you can easily customize its size and appearance so that it fits the look of your website.

Josh also explained that you can use many of the tools available on FluPortal in other crisis reporting — or to enhance your coverage of any subject. Learn more in this clip from the webinar:

[FluPortal]

You can watch the full webinar here.

The renowned Mayo Clinic offers not just clinical medical care but also health information — both for individuals and for the media. I spoke recently with Lee Aase, who manages Mayo’s social media and much of its news, and with Joel Streed, who produces Mayo’s free syndicated daily medical-news podcast. They explained how to find health news and information on Mayo’s several websites — and the various ways it might be useful to journalists.

There are two main places to look: mayoclinic.com and mayoclinic.org. Each has a different focus. Mayoclinic.com, Aase explained, provides free consumer health info — “analogous to webMD.” (Search here by disease, here for podcasts, or here for videos.) It also offers syndicated “health content” for a fee.

Mayoclinic.org works a little differently. Its information arm focuses primarily on medical news — and especially on news relevant to the practice of medicine at Mayo. Its natural primary audience is therefore the communities surrounding Mayo’s three clinics, though in reality much of the information is also useful to a global audience. Its news blog and Medical Edge videos and podcasts are good places to start. Medical Edge content is freely usable and embeddable by anyone.

Aase and Streed explained a couple of ways that the news blog and Medical Edge could be useful to pubmedia journalists: they can be a source of story ideas and leads for guests, their content can be embedded or linked to directly from station websites, and the audio/video resources can be a quick way to vet possible Mayo experts — to judge, for example, whether they’re good talkers or camera ready. (If you book a Mayo guest for a show, it’s possible to use Mayo’s in-house ISDN and satellite uplink facilities free of charge.)

Because much of the technology that Aase’s team uses is nimble — a WordPress blog, Twitter, Facebook, Flip cameras — it’s able to react quickly to breaking news, which is especially useful during public-health crises.

Here are some examples of their work on H1N1:

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["Dr. Greg Poland and Dr. Bill Marshall on H1N1 and Seasonal Flu," 24 Oct 09]

["H1N1 Flu and Asthma in Kids", 17 Nov 09]

["Mayo Clinic Physician: 'H1N1 Vaccine Is Safe'," 28 Oct 09]

["Swine Flu FAQs," 27 April 09]

[Eva the Weaver / cc (usable on your site) / Flickr]

Over the course of the FluPortal project, we’ve been putting together “how-to” guides that explain various web tools and social media you can use in your reporting.

And now we’ve assembled them all in one place: here!

Heard of Twitter and Delicious but haven’t had time to figure out how they might help your newsroom? Trying to work out how to host live chats online? Wishing you could combine various RSS news feeds and display them on your website? Look no further than the FP Guides. They explain what the tools are and how to use them — to inform your reporting and your audience.

We wrote them all with H1N1 in mind, but it’s easy to generalize from them and apply the tips to any story you’re working on.

One of the Flu Fighter characters
[Facebook]

We recently featured the “I’m a Flu Fighter!” Facebook app that allows/encourages you to spread the word about the H1N1 vaccine to your FB friends.

Health and Human Services (HHS), which helped develop the application, has actively been using social media to fight H1N1. So we thought there might be an interesting backstory about this app — and interviewed its creator, Ben Reis.

Reis is an expert on health data. Working at Harvard Medical School and Boston’s Children’s Hospital, he thinks hard about how to collect data and how to model it to make it useful to doctors and public-health officials. In 2007, he noticed that people were spending “hours a day” on Facebook, and he thought “maybe we can use this for good.” So he cooked up HealthySocial to “leverage the power of social networks to improve health.” It’s a growing collection of FB apps (including “I Saved A Life!” and “Get Well Soon!“) that combine fun with public-health messages.

When Reis created a barebones flu-shot application for HealthySocial, he pitched it to HHS’s Andrew Wilson*, who was the New Media Strategist for Flu.gov. Together with their colleagues at HHS and HealthySocial, they expanded and tailored it for H1N1 and launched it recently in time for National Influenza Vaccine Week.

Reis is looking forward to “watching how it grows” and hopes to have good stats on how well it’s being received within a month or two. He also wants to learn from user feedback so that he can improve the application for next year’s flu season.

* PS: Andrew Wilson will talk today about using social media during FluPortal’s webinar on crisis reporting. Sign up (for free) to hear him. The webinar begins at 11 am PT / 2 pm ET.

WHO logo
[EadaoinFlynn / cc (usable on your site) / Flickr]

The World Health Organization has been accused recently, largely in Europe, of hyping the danger of H1N1 as a result of pressure from the pharmaceutical industry.

WHO has fired back.

In a statement released a few days ago, it explains that its work necessitates “global cooperation with a range of partners, including the private sector,” but that it “guard[s] against the influence of any improper interests”:

Numerous safeguards are in place to manage conflicts of interest or perceived conflicts of interest among members of WHO advisory groups and expert committees. Expert advisers provide a signed declaration of interests to WHO detailing any professional or financial interest that could affect the impartiality of their advice.

(More details on the safeguards here.)

WHO’s Dr. Keiji Fukuda defended the Organization this week in front of the Council of Europe. He explained that WHO’s “influenza pandemic preparedness plan,” which “provide[s] recommended actions to be taken by countries and WHO depending on the real world situation” — a public document — was “based upon the collective input of public health and scientific experts from around the world.”

He also stressed that International Health Regulations assure an “orderly, rules-based framework for detecting, assessing, reporting, declaring and responding to public health emergencies,” and that they offer “a system of checks and balances to ensure that no one, including the WHO Director-General, has unfettered power when making decisions.”

Finally, Fukuda emphasized that H1N1 unquestionably meets the definition of a pandemic:

This current influenza pandemic is a scientifically well-documented event in which the emergence and spread of a new influenza virus has caused an unusual epidemiological pattern of disease throughout the world. This is not an arbitrary matter of word-smithing, definitions or polemics. The labelling of the pandemic as “fake” is to ignore recent history and science and to trivialize the deaths of over 14,000 people and the many additional serious illnesses experienced by others.

WHO enumerates elements of this “scientifically well-documented event”:

Lab analyses showed that this influenza virus was genetically and antigenically very different from other influenza viruses circulating among people

Epidemiological information provided by Mexico, the US and Canada demonstrated person-to-person transmission.

Clinical information, especially from Mexico, indicated this virus also could cause severe disease and death. At the time, those reports did not indicate a pandemic situation, but taken together sent a very strong warning to WHO and other public health authorities to be ready for one.

As the pandemic evolved, clinicians identified a very severe form of primary viral pneumonia, which was rapidly progressive and frequently fatal, that is not part of the disease pattern seen during seasonal influenza. While these cases were relatively rare, they imposed a heavy burden on intensive care units.

Geographical spread was exceptionally rapid.

WHO has also pointed out that it “has consistently assessed the impact of the current influenza pandemic as moderate.”

Whether you’re reporting on H1N1 or an earthquake or thinking ahead about how your newsroom should respond to future crises, FluPortal offers information resources and web tools you may need.

If you’d like to learn some innovative ways of getting news from and to your community during a fast-breaking crisis, sign up for our webinar on Thursday, January 28th. We will serve up FluPortal’s latest tips on covering H1N1 — and also explain how you can customize many of FluPortal’s offerings for reporting on other emergencies.

Andrew Wilson, formerly the New Media Strategist for Flu.gov, will describe how to use social networks to gather information from — and get it back out to — the public during a crisis. Here’s a quick preview of the ways Wilson deployed social media for the Department of Health and Human Services when H1N1 was at its peak:

And here are a couple of examples of FluPortal resources that are easily adapted to reporting on any crisis:

The webinar is free and offers time for you to ask questions. Click here to learn more about it and here to register.

FluPortal and NPR have teamed up to produce a new widget that aggregates public media H1N1 coverage. The widget provides local perspectives on the swine flu pandemic from public media outlets across the country. Stations (and the public) are welcome to embed this widget on their websites and blogs.

The widget is powered by Daylife, a content syndication and curation service, which is used for the topics.npr.org section of the NPR website. For this widget, Daylife scrapes content feeds from public media outlets and auto-updates the widget to display the latest stories related to the H1N1 pandemic.

There are a number of configurable display and style settings in the new widget. Learn more about the new public media H1N1 widget and get the embed code. The FluPortal team will be happy to assist configuring the widget to meet the needs of your station website — just contact us if you would like some help.