Dr. George Lundberg has posted a video editorial over at Medscape last week titled, "Is There a Place for Medical Blogs in a Medical Media Company?" His answer, unfortunately, is "no," and I disagree (no surprises there!).
I have the utmost respect for Dr. Lundberg, with whom I worked pretty closely while at Medscape. As a matter of fact, I helped develop the idea and format of these video editorials while I was there. But on this topic, I think he's wrong.
After a lengthy list of interactions from the past that he feels are similar to Medical Blogs today, Dr. Lundberg finishes with the following:
But since the blogger may be the author, editor, publisher, advertiser,
critic, reviewer, and owner -- all at the same time -- and fake the
whole thing, a trustworthy medical media company may embrace unfiltered
blogging at its even greater peril.
Actually, I believe for all those reasons, it's important, compelling and maybe even vital that a leading medical media company embrace the medical blogging world. The key word in the sentence above has to be "unfiltered". Of course, any time a media company gets involved in anything, by the very nature of the terms, it's not going to be unfiltered.
But, the killer feature of the medical blog world is it's transparency. The trick for a medical media company such as WebMD (the parent company of Medscape) is to try not to be a filter, but to be the check against the "doomsday scenario" (faking it) that Dr. Lundberg describes. If WebMD and/or Medscape were to present the leading medical blogs -- unfiltered, but verified -- they would be exposing these compelling and vital writers to the much wider audience that they deserve.
Here's the task -- Bring the best medical bloggers to your unmatched audience, but don't get in the middle. Then you'll be doing a service to all parties.