Recruiting New Healthcare Journalism Bloggers

Anton Zuiker, the organizer of last month's North Carolina BloggerCon (Happy birthday, Anton), asked me to participate in a panel discussion about blogging at the annual conference of the Association of Health Care Journalists.

About 30 journalists came in this morning in ugly rainy weather and Anton gave them a brief spiel on history and theory of blogging. Then, within about 5 minutes, each of them started their own Blogger blog and posted the first post. They were quite engaged and asked lots of excellent questions. I hope they all get hooked and continue blogging. They are doomed now to eternity of nocturnal typing!

Carla Johnson then talked about writing her Health Beat Blog for the Spokane Spokesman-Review and Bernard Glassman gave a presentation about his up-and-coming blog of the National Cancer Institute.

I showed them what I am trying to do with Circadiana, then suggested that the best places to find bloggers who are experts in health care, medicine, nursing, or biomedical scie nce are blog carnivals, particularly Grand Rounds, but also Tangled Bank and Skept ic's Circle. Perhaps with all their newly minted blogs, we will soon see some of then sending their entries to these carnivals, and even hosting them. That would be great as these are experienced medical and healthcare journalists, so one can expec t some good blog writing from them in the near future.ˇ