Tom Levenson sends us to this marvelous piece by Charles Petit:
http://ksjtracker.mit.edu/?p=9769 Knight Science Journalism Tracker: Proto, via Washington Post: The survivors – those with HIV who don’t get sick, and also editors who lose all their reporters and go to once-forbidden extremes to get copy: The Tracker has often remarked that some of the best-composed and often better-reported science pieces to be found are press releases and articles in house pubs. Which is to say, p.r. One time I posted on an issue of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute magazine simply because I was impressed by the many familiar freelance bylines writing – and writing nicely - for it. But one thing of which one could be confident with HHMI: To encounter no disclosures of error, screw-up, shaky research, or anything else casting a previously unpublicized shadow over Howard Hughes investigators.
Not that there are any I know of, of course.
But my eyes shot open after getting an email from Dan Vergano at USA Today with the terse subject line: Good Lord – You See This?, and a follow up in his message: What the hell?
He included a link to a story that ran last week in the Washington Post’s Health section. It seems on a quick read to be a competent and well-reported account by Charles Slack http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/06/AR2009070602917.html on the search for explanation to why some people are able to survive HIV infection with no illness and with no help from retroviral drugs. Under his name is the usual indicator of a freelance piece: "Special to the Washington Post." But the editor’s tagline at the end explains: “A longer version of this story ran in Proto, a quarterly biomedical magazine published by Massachusetts General Hospital.” Mass Gen comes up a lot in the story, as do a few researchers at other institutions....
[H]ealth editor Frances Stead Sellers... gets [Proto stories for] free. She told [Howard] Kurtz [ghat] early-retirement buyouts at The Post have cut the weekly section’s full-time staff from four to none. She figures the full disclosure of the story’s origin at its end is a cure for any perceived conflict. But she adds, were there a staff of reporters to do it in the office, she’d never think of running a freebie from Mass Gen....
Tracker does not know whether to spit on the Post, to cry over it, or to shake head in sympathy at this outsourcing of news to the news’s own source. There is no outright fraud on the paper’s readers, given the disclosure. But again it says right under the byline that it is Special to the Post. This special might be described as the Reader’s Digest version of a p.r. piece...
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