Kaiser Family Foundation starts health policy news service

From The New York Times Nov. 24. Although not specifically a disability-related news story, it will be interesting to see if they cover disability policy and disability topics.

Seeking to fill a niche left by the decline of the traditional news media, the Kaiser Family Foundation is starting a news service to produce in-depth coverage of the policy and politics of health care, both for an independent Web site and in collaborations with mainstream news organizations.

With a budget that is expected to reach $3 million to $4 million in two years, the
project is one of the most ambitious in a wave of nonprofit online ventures that
have emerged as newspapers and magazines cut jobs and newsgathering budgets.

Kaiser, which is based in Menlo Park, Calif., has hired two highly regarded journalists to run the Kaiser Health News, based in Washington: Laurie McGinley, formerly the deputy bureau chief for global economics at The Wall Street Journal, and Peggy Girshman, a top editor at Congressional Quarterly and previously at National Public Radio.

Ms. McGinley said she and Ms. Girshman plan to recruit a half-dozen full-time reporters and editors and to contract with numerous freelance journalists. They hope to begin producing original stories early next year.

While it will be the largest and best-financed project of its kind, the Kaiser start-up service is only one of several by foundations and entrepreneurs aimed at providing serious coverage of health issues.

The California HealthCare Foundation is sponsoring a six-month pilot project to report on health issues in the state, sometimes in partnership with newspapers. With an initial budget of $239,000, that project, the Center for California Health Care Journalism, is being overseen by Michael Parks, a journalism professor at the University of Southern California and a former editor of The Los Angeles Times.

He has already hired two people who had worked at that newspaper, which has experienced waves of job cuts in recent years. If the pilot project succeeds, the foundation will consider making it permanent with a multimillion-dollar budget, Mr. Parks said.

In Florida, a former newspaper reporter, Carol Gentry, has started a Web site called Florida Health News that collects stories from the state’s media outlets and provides original reporting. Seed money of about $185,000 came largely from seven health-related foundations, and Ms. Gentry hopes to attract advertising and donations for her struggling operation.

In Kansas, the foundation-financed Kansas Health Institute has its own news service. Elsewhere, several Web sites devoted to covering state government and policy, like MinnPost.com, pay substantive attention to health issues.

“In terms of these new journalism ventures, there’s more activity in health than in any other area, and they’re all slightly different,” said Louis Freedberg, director of the California Media Collaborative, which sponsored a conference on health journalism in Los Angeles last week. “It may be because there are so many foundations focused on health. And perhaps it reflects the fact that this is such a critically important issue.”

Though the models vary, they are united by the conviction that health policy is vastly under-covered by most news organizations at a time when polls show high levels of public concern about the cost, availability and quality of health care.

A recent study by Kaiser and the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that only 1 percent of stories covered by news organizations concern health policy. The survey sampled a swath of newspapers, cable and network television newscasts, Internet news sites and radio programs in 2007 and the first half of 2008.

“That 1 percent is a low number; that is not a media priority,” said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew journalism project. “That falls in the range of things the press feels some obligation to cover but doesn’t really spend much time on.”

Two years ago, Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser foundation, established the news service as the foundation’s highest priority for expansion.

“I just never felt there was a bigger need for great in-depth journalism on health policy and to be a counterweight to all the spin and misinformation and vested interests that dominate the health care system,” he said. “News organizations are every year becoming less capable of producing coverage of these complex issues as their budgets are being slashed.”

With assets of about $500 million and an annual budget of about $40 million, Kaiser has been a major force in health policy research, analysis and communications. Its Web site features a vast array of free reports and a daily aggregation of health policy news coverage that is viewed about 100,000 times a day, which includes 55,000 subscribers.

Whether the philanthropic model for Web-based news coverage is financially sustainable is far from settled, especially with the stock market in decline. Mr. Altman said that Kaiser’s holdings have lost about $100 million in value over the last year and that he is making significant cuts in other areas. He said that the economy
had delayed the news service but that its financing — from a reserve dedicated
to new projects — was secure.

The news service will not accept ads. But to support coverage of issues related to aging, it has accepted money from the SCAN Foundation, which is tied to a California nonprofit group that sells Medicare Advantage policies.