Just one more post (at least from me) about last week's Global Health Council conference here in Washington. Veteran Time Magazine health reporter Christine Gorman was on a compelling lunch panel, and has handily posted her speech to her own blog, Global Health Report.

It is her opinion that NGOs and other organizations have a new responsibility to fill the gap on global health reporting left by the contraction of quality journalism. Organizations, she argued, must fulfill this responsibility by engaging in more aggressive reporting by the independent sector and the use of innovative dissemination technologies such as RSS.

I couldn't possibly improve her argument by re-stating it. So here, verbatim, is the key excerpt:

You may not have noticed but the field of journalism — at least as practiced in North America and Europe — is itself going through tremendous upheaval right now. There are lots of reasons for this but most of them trace back to the Internet and the evolving digital revolution that makes it possible to dispense with the middleman-or-middlewoman from any social, commercial or political interaction. Just look at what’s happened with real estate, automobile sales and financial services.

As for journalism, what it means is that there are fewer beat reporters, people who are given the time and resources to specialize in a particular topic. There are fewer book reviewers, fewer environment reporters, fewer film critics, fewer health reporters and certainly fewer journalists who can report exclusively on global health issues.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that you have an opportunity now, as never before, to get your story out—and I don’t mean simply by posting all your press releases on the Internet, although that’s a start. And I certainly don’t mean by e-mailing ME your press releases.

Blast e-mail is dead, killed — much like antibiotics — by indiscriminate overuse. The noise to signal ratio has gotten so high in the flood of emails that journalists receive that most of them — at least the smart ones — are ignoring blast e-mails and relegating more and more of them to their spam filters.

What's taking their place? Filtered RSS feeds, web alerts and the creative use of search engines. I don't have time to go into all the details here but suffice it to say that RSS stands for really simple syndication. It's a great way of creating a sort of web-friendly ticker tape of news, email posts or alerts that interested individuals can subscribe to, search and even filter for keywords as they drill down in the search for timely news and information. If you’re interested in getting the word out about your program, your ideas, your policy proposals and values, you need to know about RSS.

Read her full speech.

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Global Health,
Journalism,
RSS