Health: Making a Difference in Allentown
By Pat Ford
Pew Center
They may not read every word of every story but there will be veryfew readers of The Morning Call who aren’t at least aware of”A Change of Heart,” the newspaper’s ambitious project to lower heartdisease in the Allentown, PA, area.
The Morning Call has promised stories on the topic everysingle day for three years. In addition, the paper has receivedfunding for special events, such as health fairs, to promote theproject and measure its impact.
Executive Editor Ray Holton admits it’s a challenge just to sustain the project, let alone change behavior, but he’s confident of the newspaper’s role. “The guts of good journalism is getting your community involved in improving something that can be improved,” says Holton.
The newspaper has devised a number of features that will run on thesame day every week. Each Monday, for instance, the paper runs a boxlabeled “Just for Kids” with a simple educational activity related tothe heart. Each Wednesday, the food section features a healthyrecipe, “Hearty Fare,” from a local chef. The recipe is analyzed byCedar Crest College’s Nutrition and Health Department.
Managing Editor Elaine Kramer says one of the most popular weeklyfeatures is Thursday’s “Picture of Health,” a Dewars-type profile ofa local resident with a healthy lifestyle. The staff checks infrequently with daily stories and, every couple of months, with bigSunday take-outs. To be sure there will always be material, the papersubscribes to Reuters medical wire.
“It was a lot more scary to think about maintaining this for threeyears before we got started,” says Kramer. “Now, we’re in therhythm of it. We see there’s a lot of depth. We’ll probably retiresome features and try others. We’ll need to freshen it up overtime.”
One series of stories the paper launched this fall is called “HeartMonitors.” This features a group of a dozen people who volunteered tohave their health and lifestyle analyzed for risk factors and thenspend the next year trying to reduce their risk of heart diseasethrough diet and exercise. The “monitors” are keeping a journal andreporters will keep track of their progress with periodic stories.
Health reporter Ann Wlazelek, who has become the project’s leadwriter, thinks “heart monitors” may be the most influential featurein causing people to change high-risk behavior. “If we’ve chosen agood cross-section of people,” she says, “readers will identify withone or more of them and try the same things or at least learn whatthey can do to improve their diet and exercise routine, or what worksto quit smoking.”
Charting Its Own Course
“Change of Heart” is another project to grow out of the success ofthe Baltimore Sun’s series “Reading by 9.” Sunowner,Times Mirror Co., was so impressed with the reading series, whichsought to enable all third graders to read, that it encouraged allits papers (including The Morning Call) to devise journalismprojects that would serve the community. The chain’s flagship paper,the Los Angeles Times, simply borrowed The Sun’s idea– title and all.
Holton says that wouldn’t have worked at The Morning Call.”‘Reading by 9’ was a wonderful idea, but it grew out of originalreporting that The Sun did,” says Holton. Low reading scoreswere not a major concern in the Allentown area so Morning Calleditors set out to find an issue that would have a broad impact.
Poring over a book of vital statistics, an assistant city editornoticed that not only is heart disease the leading cause of death inthe country, the rate of death due to heart disease is higher inPennsylvania than the country as a whole, with some of the highestdeath rates in The Morning Call’scirculation area.
A little bit of reporting showed that heart disease cut across allpopulations — young, old, urban, suburban, rich, poor — and thatrates could be cut with changes in lifestyle. So editors ordered up apreliminary week-long series to launch on Valentine’s Day, as a sortof test run. A special pull-out section called “Heart 101” proved sopopular that doctors and hospitals asked for reprints.
“There seemed to be a lot of material there,” says Holton. So thepaper began planning its long-term coverage, including securing$275,000 from the Dorothy Rider Pool Health Care Trust to supportevents such as health fairs held in conjunction with the series andto evaluate how successful the effort is.
Newsroom Concerns
Reporters were not as enthusiastic about the project as management,acknowledges Kramer. “People wonder, are you going to cross the lineand start catering to sponsors or manufacturing news,” says Kramer.”And they should be worried about that. I don’t have a problem withpeople having concerns about that. The problem would be if wecouldn’t pass scrutiny.”
Kramer says the paper went a long way to settling those concerns witha story in June, which looked at how local hospitals have beengetting into the lucrative heart-surgery business. The story said, inpart:
Once a specialty for hospitals deemed worthy by thestate of filling community need, heart-surgery programs inPennsylvania can now be run by any medical center with enough moneyto start one.That wasn’t the case before the state Department of Health stoppedrequiring hospitals to obtain a Certificate of Need to open newheart programs. That deregulation forced struggling communityhospitals to consider heart surgery, not because the community neededit but because the hospital needed it to survivefinancially.
“We didn’t pull our punches,” Kramer says, of the story.
Wlazelek says, initially, she was more bothered by possible banalityof the project. “When I first heard that this might be the project wepicked, I sort of rolled my eyes and thought, ‘Everybody knows that;it’s old news’,” she says.
She now says she’s gained interest as she’s done more reporting forthe project. “It’s affected me. I’m realizing some of the stories outthere — people who’ve had heart attacks at a young age and leftbehind families; people who’ve had multiple heart attacks and peoplewith family histories that put them at risk. You start to look atyour own family history and your own habits.”
Wlazelek says she thinks one remaining difficulty the staff has isthe time the project takes. To do heart stories on a regular basis,she says, “other stories have to wait. Things don’t get done. Wehaven’t added staff to do this.”
Kramer acknowledges that’s a problem but adds that concern is presentany time the paper does a project.
Measuring the Impact
The Allentown Bureau of Health is “delighted” with the project, saysdirector Barbara Spader. “Not only are they shining a light on heartdisease as a major public health problem, but they’re trying toemphasize a behavior change. That’s an incredibly important communityservice.”
Spader serves on a roundtable of local health-care professionals thatguides the project by generating ideas and reviewing the paper’swork, including checking it for technical accuracy. Spader gives thepaper high marks on all counts. But she says she has cautionedMorning Call editors that it will be hard to measure theproject’s effectiveness.
“It usually takes five to 10 years before you see the impact,” saysSpader. “I tell them they have to be patient.”
The Morning Call has devised a number of ways to determinewhether readers are actually changing their behavior in response tothe series. The paper conducted a telephone survey just before theseries started to test local knowledge of heart disease and itscontributing factors. Holton says the paper will do a follow-upsurvey in June to see if awareness has increased.
Holton says the paper also has an agreement with the Allentown BloodCenter to keep track of cholesterol levels in donated blood to see ifthey decrease as the year goes on. Also, the local Heart Associationhas agreed to survey patients who come in for blood pressure checksand other screening programs to see if they’ve been influenced by thenewspaper project.
Kramer says she’s already seen signs that the project is succeeding.”I went to my doctor and posted on the bulletin board in the waitingroom was a special section we’d produced,” says Kramer. “We know,just from casual conversation with health-care providers, this is thebest patient education they’ve ever had. In a way, that’s our job. Wedo public education all the time.”