Global Health Journalism

Today, the Kaiser Family Foundation released a report on global health journalism: “Taking the Temperature: The Future of Global Health Journalism.” Global health journalism has certainly not been immune to the downsizing and budget cuts being experienced in media outlets. Maternal mortality makes a couple of appearances in the report:

Before the 2010 G8 Summit in Canada, the paper’s [The Globe and Mail] correspondents in five developing countries each wrote a story from their region on maternal mortality.

And:

“It’s hard to get people to really dig down if the economy isn’t there for them to focus on the complex bigger projects that really require a lot of time and study and attention to detail,” he [Charlie Sennott, executive director and vice president, GlobalPost] said. Stories covered include river blindness, malaria and maternal mortality in India. But, Sennott said, as with other media, the most popular stories are the most sensational or those on issues with the potential to affect the reader personally. Among the most read pieces: stories on obesity in various countries. “fat in Japan: massive traffic. our series on drug resistant tB: less traffic,” he said.