Q&A with Ivan Oransky: Creating a Hub for Health Care Providers

I first met Ivan Oransky through the Association of Health Care Journalists. I believe he was taking notes on a laptop when a mutual friend introduced us. He was polite, funny and succinct. He had stuff to do, I could tell. And he wanted to get back to that laptop. At the time, he was an editor at The Scientist. Since then, he has gone on to become the Executive Editor of Reuters Health. But to many, he is even better known as the founder of and relentless poster on Embargo Watch, a widely cited blog, and the co-founder of and relentless poster on Retraction Watch, an even more widely cited blog. He still has the blogs keeping him busy, but he has taken a new day job. In July, he became the vice president and global editorial director for MedPage Today. I thought for sure I wouldn’t be able to interrupt him at his laptop again, but, in true Ivan style, he agreed to a Q&A. The first part of the post is below. The second part will run next week.

Q: Your father was a physician, and you chose that profession initially, too. Other than the specific medical lexicon you picked up during medical school, has the MD helped you in other ways? Has it opened doors for you? Or has it worked against you in some situations?

A: The MD has definitely opened certain doors. I know a lot of sources were willing to talk to me because of those two letters in my email signature file, even when I wasn’t calling from a major outlet. (Often so they could give me notebooks full of jargon, unless I steered them gently into talking to me as if I were a smart 14-year-old.) But more than a decade ago, when I first left medicine to be a full-time journalist, I know some editors assumed my training meant I’d never be able to write for a layperson audience. That’s changed a great deal as many journalism outlets have embraced the idea of reporters with specialized knowledge.

Q: You’ve been in leadership roles recently but what was the hardest grunt-level job that you ever had and what did you learn from that experience?

A: My internship year was definitely the hardest-grunt level job I ever had. I suppose I learned how to get by on very little sleep, but I also learned the value of respecting everyone on a team and giving up on the idea that I knew everything because I had a fancy degree. Nurses and pharmacists saved my hide more times than I should be willing to admit.

Q: When it was announced that you were taking over as executive editor at Reuters Health, I remember thinking that you had just landed one of the coolest jobs in journalism. What was your vision for your time at Reuters Health and how did the reality match that vision?

A: I wanted Reuters Health to be known for hard-nosed, skeptical reporting about medical studies. That meant better sourcing, tougher questions, and enterprise stories that exposed what was really going on in clinical trials. I think our regular 4- and 5-star reviews at HealthNewsReview.org, and stories that forced major players to reverse themselves suggest that we succeeded.

Q: To the average reader, the news from Reuters Health and MedPage Today all blends together in a steady stream of health updates. But the two outlets actually have different audiences. How do you see the differences?

A: Although the part of Reuters Health that’s visible to most people is layperson-focused, a wire service for doctors is a big part of the mix there. MedPage Today is aimed at health care providers, so really I’m just focusing on one of the audiences I was serving for the past four years. The questions you try to answer for doctors and nurses are different from those you think about for laypeople. It’s not “should I change my behavior?” but “what should I know about this study to talk to my patients?”

Q: What can readers and your fellow journalists expect so see from you and from MedPage Today in this new phase in your career?

A: Building on the top-notch news for which MedPage Today is known, we’re going to create a world-class conversational hub for health care providers. That means weaving the voices of more clinicians into our coverage, but it also means giving doctors, nurses, and others the opportunity to speak to one another without filters. We’ll be creating a blog network, for example. I always say that in a specialized area, your readers always know more than you do, so we want to let that expertise blossom.

Next: How does he balance all those gigs?