Extra, Extra: Publishing a News-Oriented Digital Forum for Public Health Professionals and Beyond

Background: Solving the nation’s health crisis is going to take more than improvements to health care. We need to identify new ways to prevent disease and health crises where they begin—in communities. 

Program background: Digital forums are an effective channel for professionals to connect and collaborate across sectors, exchange best practices and share success stories. By relating public health successes and challenges in a narrative storytelling form, a forum such as this one can spur important discussions in the field.

Evaluation Methods and Results: In spring 2011, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, with support from Home Front Communications, launched NewPublicHealth.org to create a vibrant digital destination for public health information and discussion. The Foundation’s Public Health team aimed to build a site with cross-sector appeal, and develop and distribute content using a news planning approach. The target audiences include both public health professionals and other leaders whose decisions can impact the public’s health. The site is staffed by professional communicators — including former journalists — who create multi-perspective content for a dynamic digital news cycle. NewPublicHealth.org highlights free, publicly available tools (such as Wordpress, Twitter, Facebook and Storify) and offers best practices for using these tools, based on communications principles (such as eye-catching headlines, stories that matter, content curation and redistribution opportunities). NewPublicHealth.org has accrued more than 280,000 page views from more than 125,000 unique visitors. Contributors include public health and government officials; researchers; and leaders in business, transportation, education and urban planning. 

Conclusions: This forum serves as a case study for using a digital communications channel to advance public health objectives, forge connections and spark interdisciplinary dialogue. 

Implications for research and/or practice: The lessons learned from NewPublicHealth can be applied and scaled for health communications efforts for both large and small organizations. A news forum creating a regular churn of content to curate the news of the day, provide commentary and perspectives from leaders in the field, and surface the stories of public health professionals at the community level can galvanize critical discussions in the public health field, while also advancing an organization’s communications objectives.