Transferring health care reporting skills and knowledge from the training environment to the newsroom.

摘要

The evolution of shrinking newsrooms and their budgets throughout the country and the national debate over and the public understanding of health care issues has made gauging the impact and success of training programs for established health journalists more important than ever. Despite the prominence of these training programs, relatively little research has been conducted on their ability to improve the depth and quantity of stories produced by the trainees. This paper summarized the impact of the Midwest Health Fellowship's decision to eliminate, as part of its training design, the trip to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the third year of the program (the first and second years featured a trip to the CDC). Through the lens of a knowledge-for-action theory known as Transfer, a pre- and post-training content analysis examined the Fellows' use of CDC sources in their published news stories to determine if the elimination had an impact on the transfer of information provided at the CDC to the newsroom. The analysis showed that the elimination did not have an effect on the likelihood that the third-year reporters would use the CDC as a source. The third-year reporters' pre- to post-training use of CDC sources compared to the first two years did not reflect the elimination of the CDC trip. Within the context of this study, the reporters did not exhibit the transfer of skills and knowledge from the CDC to the newsroom.