US: Non-profit health news service launched

Posted by Rosemary D'Amour on November 24, 2008 at 3:27 PM

The Kaiser Family Foundation is launching a news service to provide "in-depth coverage of the policy and politics of health care" both online and through collaboration with mainstream media.

The website will be independently run, with a budget expected to reach $4 million in two years, and is a part of the "wave of online ventures that have emerged as newspapers and magazines cut jobs and newsgathering budgets," the New York Times reports.

Kaiser Health News will be based in Washington, run by former Wall Street Journal deputy bureau chief for global economics Laurie McGinley, and editor at Congressional Quarterly Peggy Girshman. They hope to recruit six full-time reporters and editors, and "to contract with numerous freelance journalists."

This start-up is one of many non-profits seeking to cover health issues, but will be the "largest and best-financed project of its kind," and hopes to begin producing original stories early in 2009.

Currently, only 1% of stories covered by news organizations deal with health policy, according to a recent study by Kaiser and the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence In Journalism.

With budgets being slashed, most news organizations will be "less capable" of producing quality coverage, Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser foundation, said.

As a philanthropic business model, the online venture's financial future is not totally secure, Altman said, although it has enough in reserve, although the news service itself will not accept ads.

Source: New York Times via Media Bistro