Hi!

At our Q2 Media Minds Roundtable event, From Newsroom to Newsletter: Why Healthcare’s Top Journalists Are Going Independent, we brought together three experienced healthcare journalists who left traditional newsrooms to build reporting platforms of their own.

Our panelists – Sharon Goldman (Ground Level AI, formerly of Fortune), Liz Kelly Nelson (Project C, formerly of Washington Post, Vox, USA Today, Gannett, and AOL), and Tara Parker-Pope (One Day Better Inc., formerly of the New York Times and the Washington Post) – gave us an up-close look at how they’re navigating the changing media ecosystem, what they’re covering on their platforms, and what biopharma communicators should understand about working with them.

Our top 10 takeaways:

1. Call them creator-journalists, and treat them accordingly. The panel landed on that term because creator names the medium and journalist names the standards; an influencer-style paid pitch would be inappropriate.

2. Expect a real point of view now. Independents can say what a finding means, like the panelist who wrote that a hormone-therapy warning was wrong and harmful, a line her old paper never would have run.

3. Assume the ethics check sits with one person. At legacy outlets, staff quietly moved conflicting ads off sensitive stories, so independents now handle that themselves by posting ethics policies and refusing money that clashes with their coverage.

4. Decide where you stand on sponsoring these creators. Paying to sponsor independent newsletters and channels is becoming a real option. Disease-awareness campaigns are one way in because they center on a condition and avoid the product-promotion conflict.

5. Do your homework on who covers your niche. No real directory exists, so subscribe and read long enough to tell serious coverage from end-times hype, and check that someone publishes consistently before you pitch.

6. Treat the person as the whole outlet. A creator-journalist may run a newsletter, freelance work, a podcast, and book projects at once. A no today often becomes a yes somewhere else. Being direct with your email outreach also is critical.

7. Give readers something they can act on. The panel treats fear-based stories as cheap, and what creator-journalists often look for in story angles is usefulness -- for example, reframing a study to show a fifteen-minute walk is plenty.

8. Watch where reader confusion is building. GLP-1s, perimenopause, and skincare all draw big responses, and one gap the panel flagged is how confused consumers feel about the health messaging coming out of the government right now.

9. Rethink how you measure these placements' value. Reach numbers undersell them, because the real advantage is a self-selected audience, which is why one panelist sees click-through rates 10 times higher than at a major national title.

10. Use your execs' podcast appetite as your opening. Senior leaders still read legacy outlets and may dismiss independent placements, though they increasingly want to appear on podcasts over a magazine cover, and that's your way in.

Mapping the changing news ecosystem

One resource that came up during the discussion was Liz Kelly Nelson’s “news ecosystem” infographic, which maps how today’s information landscape extends well beyond traditional newsrooms. It highlights some of the biggest learnings of the discussion – independent journalists, newsletters, podcasts, creators, and traditional outlets are all part of the same interconnected media ecosystem.

​Check it out here.​

Thank you again to our moderators from T2B's Media Minds Roundtable, Ellen Murphy (Syneos Health Communications) and Stephanie Stratman (Encoded Therapeutics), for leading the discussion!

T2B Pro and Student members can watch the full session replay here.

Lynnea

P.S. - Don’t miss our most recent resource from the Media Minds Roundtable: Embargoes in Biotech – Are Reporters and Communicators Working from the Same Playbook? Members can find it here.

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