FluPortal.org

But there’s still lots of road ahead
[funkandjazz / cc (usable on your site) / Flickr]

Today is FluPortal’s last day as an active H1N1 project. As of tomorrow, the National Center for Media Engagement will host the site as an archive. An archive, however, that remains useful into the future! Here’s how FluPortal can continue to inform your journalism — on flu and any other issue.

Many of the flu resources aimed at reporters are relevant to seasonal flu — and of course to a possible third wave of H1N1. FluPortal puts government info, scientific studies, and flu-reporting tips all in one place to save you time when you’re on deadline.

Also: all of FluPortal’s tech tips are applicable to reporting on any kind of crisis. In fact they’re relevant for reporting on any topic at all.

Have you been wanting to learn how to use Facebook, Twitter, and Delicious on your station site or in your newsroom? FluPortal can get you started (here, here, and here). You can also learn how to use social media to report and illustrate stories.

Would you like to host live chats on your site? Check out our guide to CoveritLive. Have you wondered how to display various RSS feeds? Here’s a quick tutorial on using Yahoo Pipes.

Finally, this blog also contains a good number of posts outlining “evergreen” flu and tech resources. You can search for posts that might interest you by scrolling through the blog, entering keywords in the search box, or using the category or archive links in the sidebar.

Thanks to your feedback and collaboration, we learned a lot, throughout the project, about how to improve FluPortal. We hope some of these lessons will be useful for any future “crisis portals” modelled on this site. You can read more about the FluPortal project — and recommendations for pubmedia crisis coverage — in our final report: “Crisis Coverage by Public Media: A Review of FluPortal and Recommendations for the Future.”

You can also find a brief introduction to FluPortal here.

Snapshot of FluPortal’s Delicious bookmarks on 25 March

In looking back over the FluPortal project, I felt we probably hadn’t featured our Delicious bookmarks prominently enough. But whether or not we promoted them well, Delicious is a powerful tool. You might be interested to learn what we did with it — so that you can start using it yourself, either publicly on your station’s website or internally as a reporting tool.

Every morning after scanning for H1N1 news and leads, we’d use Delicious to bookmark the best reporting, press releases, studies, etc. These bookmarked pieces showed up on our Delicious page — and also in the box at the top of our “Reporter & Program Resources” page.

The main point, here, was to provide a one-stop shop of the best reliable news about H1N1. We spent time searching for it online to save you time. This required an editorial eye, but it ensured quality — something automated aggregators don’t always supply.

Some of the nitty gritty: We learned, partway through the project, to make prominent the source of each bookmarked piece — so that you could judge quickly that it was reputable. We also used a consistent stable of tags to label each piece — so that you could search for information by topic. Finally, we inserted a sentence or two from each piece that summarized its most important information — so that you could decide whether or not to click through.

To learn more about how we used Delicious for FluPortal, check out our final report. To learn how you can use Delicious on your station’s website — or in your reporting — try this FluPortal guide.

“The ultimate blogger’s kit”
[m-c / cc (usable on your site) / Flickr]

If you blog for a pubmedia station — or would like to start — here are a few tips we can recommend. They’re based on what we practiced and learned blogging here at FluPortal.

• Think hard about your blog’s purpose — develop a clear niche and voice.
• Don’t limit your posts to tight finished reporting. You can use your blog to report — by asking questions to solicit story ideas, leads, etc.
• Keep posts concise and scannable. If you don’t hook readers rapidly, they’ll move on.
• Establish a regular blogging schedule. This will let people know what to expect — and increases the chance that they’ll return to your blog.
• Look for leads everywhere online — not just in mainstream media. See our social-media guide for ideas.
• Make post titles literal and Googleable. In other words: use keywords that people are likely to enter in Google searches. This will increase the chance of someone landing on your blog.
• Break up long quotations into small chunks and write into and out of them.
• Use links as footnotes. They’re a really handy way to back up statements you make.
• OK, just use links a lot. Linking out is the generous thing to do. It will also encourage other bloggers to link back to you (which can increase your traffic).
• Attribute photographs, videos, etc. — with links. Use a consistent style for the attributions.
• Use a search box, tags, and categories to help readers find older posts.
• Decide on a commenting policy (and make that clear on the blog).
• Interact with commenters in the comments section — this can help develop a regular community on your blog.

To find details about some of these tips — and some of the difficulties we had with FluPortal’s blog — check out this section of FluPortal’s final report.

FluPortal will be winding up as an active project at the end of March. So we’ve recently been trying to evaluate what the site has done well and what its shortcomings are — with the idea that FluPortal might be a model for future “crisis portals.” (You could imagine a generic CrisisPortal or something more specific like EarthquakePortal.)

A few days ago, I spoke with Katie Donnelly, Associate Research Director at American University’s Center for Social Media. Donnelly focuses specifically on the intersection of social and public media. She featured FluPortal a couple of weeks ago in a blog post and told me she feels it’s a “really good solid model” for helping pubmedia to report on crises. So I pushed her on what she really thinks — on what constructive criticism she might have.

Donnelly had two main recommendations.

First: She suggested encouraging more direct interaction among stations. This could happen in a forum on the site, for example, or in something like a webinar or an online chat. The idea here, she said, would be to “improve ways for stations to connect with each other” to share ideas about crisis coverage.

FluPortal did experiment early on with a Google Group for just this reason, but very few people signed up. Perhaps it was the wrong technology for convening pubmedia people — or perhaps it indicated that station staff are simply too busy for this sort of thing.

I also mentioned to Donnelly that the FluPortal blog was a possible place for stations to interact (in the comments section). She observed that for some reason pubmedia people very rarely seem to comment on blogs — that blogs probably aren’t the right place to persuade stations to talk to each other.

Second: Donnelly felt that FluPortal is “lacking first-person accounts” about H1N1. She suggested soliciting crowdsourced information and encouraging the general public to tell their swine-flu stories on the site. Donnelly understood that FluPortal is aimed at public media — and not at a general audience — but felt it could be a good place for reporters to make contacts with regular people who are part of the H1N1 story. She acknowledged, however, that any public forum on swine flu would require active moderation to avoid “propagating inaccurate information.”

During the FluPortal project, we’ve searched the blogosphere for good H1N1 stories but haven’t found much that stood out. (Most posts and tweets were of the “I’m on my couch and I feel terrible” variety.) For other types of crises, however — earthquakes or storms, for example — personal narratives offered up online might indeed be more provocative.

What would you add to Donnelly’s critique of FluPortal? And what improvements could you recommend for future crisis-reporting sites modelled on FluPortal? (If you prefer not to comment directly on this post, you can email us!)

The Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) recently hosted a talk evaluating how well journalists and health officials communicated H1N1 information to the public.

Dr. K “Vish” Viswanath
[Viswanath Lab]

One of the speakers, Dr. K “Vish” Viswanath, runs a lab at HSPH dedicated to researching health communication. Viswanath highlighted some particularly difficult aspects of transmitting the H1N1 story:

• Health journalists have to straddle two cultures: the world of medical complexities and uncertainties; and the world of deadlines and commercial pressures.
• “More information does not necessarily mean more communication”: even if scientists and journalists do an exemplary job during a health crisis, the internet makes it impossible to control the spread of misunderstandings and misinformation.

One interesting positive lesson: Viswanath noted that whether or not the subtleties of the H1N1 story were getting through to the public, people seemed to be following recommended behaviour — if it was easy to follow. He tracked sales of hand sanitizer during the pandemic, for example, and saw that they went up significantly:

[Dr. Viswanath, screenshot from lecture on H1N1 communication]

Finally, Viswanath made one more very important point: different social groups — whether based on “class, race, ethnicity, or language” — differ widely in their access to information and where they go to look for it. This “communication inequality” is hugely significant during a public-health crisis.

Not everyone, for example, has equal access to online information — or the skills to learn from it or act on it. As he put it, while “it’s exciting to see social media being exploited [...] not everybody uses the internet.” If media and public-health departments rely too much on the web, he says, this can actually widen disparities in access to reliable information. In a survey done in April 2009, only 19% of people reported getting “the most information” about H1N1 online. The lesson here: local and ethnic news sources in traditional media — whether broadcast or paper — remain critical; it’s not just all about Twitter and Facebook.

I asked Viswanath whether he feels there’s a dearth of experienced health reporters (see this post). He said yes, that because of cuts in journalism, reporters are covering multiple beats and not necessarily able to stay on the health beat over the course of their careers. He hasn’t had a chance, however, to study this in relation to the H1N1 story specifically.

You can learn lots more from Dr. Viswanath in this video of the talk.

Two links caught our attention this week that could be of interest to stations covering H1N1. While these examples are not directly related to swine flu, they may inspire you to try new approaches in your coverage.  

WNYC’s audience submitted economic indicators

The first is Crowdsourcing: A Field Guide from WNYC. Crowdsourcing entails soliciting your audience to help collect, curate, and vet information around a specific topic or issue. WNYC has been experimenting with crowdsourcing for the last few years, most notably on the Brian Lehrer Show (recently, the program asked the audience to contribute examples of the recession’s impact for their Uncommon Economic Indicators project). The guide provides case studies on how to implement crowdsourcing at your station, along with tips on where it fits in your existing editorial process and standards. There’s a useful 10 point quick-guide that rounds up the big takeaways from the field guide.

While the recent snowstorms in the Washington DC area don’t reach the crisis threshold, it’s fair to say they had a major impact on the region. The Washington Post is using the Ushahidi platform (which we mentioned in our round-up of responses to the earthquake in Haiti) to map the impact of the storm. The map provides an online tool that allows the audience to highlight locations still buried from the storm — impassable streets and sidewalks, cars buried, and power outages. But they also encourage folks to map opportunities to help in the dig out — snow blowers available or a shovel to share.

Getting to know emerging tools and techniques during more routine scenarios will allow public media outlets to respond more effectively when and if a crisis hits.

[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.

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:

[audio:http://medicaledgeradio.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/meweekend10-24-09.mp3]
["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]