Clinical trial NCT00938938: Testing the Effect of Press Guides on Health Journalists
Official title: Testing the Effect of Press Guides on Health Journalists
Study type: INTERVENTIONAL
Overall status: UNKNOWN
Phase: NA
Conditions: Medical Reporting
Keywords: risk communication
medical reporting
Mass media
Lead sponsor: White River Junction Veterans Affairs Medical Center
Sponsor class: FED
Collaborators: name: National Cancer Institute (NCI)
First posted: 2009-07-14
Enrollment: 50
Sex: ALL
Minimum age (years): 18
Standard ages: ADULT
OLDER_ADULT
Accepts healthy volunteers: yes
Allocation: RANDOMIZED
Intervention model: PARALLEL

Brief summary: The purpose of this study is to test the effect of adding a "press guide" to standard materials that journalists routinely receive regarding research published in medical journals.

Detailed description: The news media has a powerful influence on public perceptions about health and health care; and much of what people -- including many physicians -- know and believe about medicine comes from the print and broadcast media. Several studies, however, have raised questions about how well the press covers medical issues, pointing out errors and omissions in coverage and misleading presentations of statistics. The goal is to help train journalists to better understand and cover medical research, and to help improve communication between journalists and medical journals.

Journalists traditionally write newspaper articles about medical research using information from press releases and the medical journal article's abstract or full text. The objective is to test whether the addition of a 'press guide' (a one-page summary of the study findings) in addition to these other materials improves comprehension of facts about the study article and the overall judgment of the newsworthiness of the study.

Eligibility criteria: Inclusion Criteria:

* All journalists attending the 2009 NIH/Dartmouth/VA Medicine in the Media Symposium will be invited to participate in the study.
* The symposium, which is held annually, is open to journalists across the country and from abroad.

Participants who are Health Journalists at the Health Journalism 2010 conference will be invited to participate in the study. This annual conference is being held in Chicago, IL at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place During April 22, 2010-April 25, 2010.

Primary outcomes:
measure: Comprehension of facts about the study article (covering study design, exposures, outcome measures, results, limitations, conflicts of interest) assessed using a brief test.
timeFrame: 0 weeks (assessed during intervention)
Secondary outcomes:
measure: Overall judgment of study newsworthiness (e.g., would you argue for/against covering story with editor, how convinced are you of study validity, what headline would you write,and usefulness of press release and (intervention group) press guide.
timeFrame: 0 weeks (assessed during intervention)
Other outcomes:
Locations:
Study officials:
affiliation: White River Junction Veterans Affairs Medical Center
name: Lisa M. Schwartz, MD, MS
role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR
References:
citation: Woloshin S, Schwartz LM, Casella SL, Kennedy AT, Larson RJ. Press releases by academic medical centers: not so academic? Ann Intern Med. 2009 May 5;150(9):613-8. doi: 10.7326/0003-4819-150-9-200905050-00007.