RENDEZ-VOUS 141
Wednesday, October 30 2002
Rendez-vous with Eric Helmuth, Editorial Director of Join Together
Online
Boston University School of Public Health Boston, Massachusetts
Thank you Eric for accepting our rendez-vous. May I ask you to introduce yourself?
Eric Helmuth: It's a pleasure to talk about our work with your readers. I was originally trained in Counseling Psychology (M.A., University of Akron, 1990) and worked for several years in the field of community mental health, which led to increasing involvement with addictions issues and eventually to work in local community organizing and advocacy around these issues. That in turn brought me to my current work at Join Together.
Join Together is a national resource center based at the Boston University School of Public Health; we're funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to support community-based efforts to reduce, prevent, and treat substance abuse across the nation. We don't focus exclusively on tobacco issues -- we also address excessive alcohol, illegal drugs and gun violence -- but most of those in our audience include tobacco in the range of work they do. Many work in tobacco control full-time.
Because our approach to these issues is based on a Public Health model, we have always felt it is important to keep tobacco addiction (and the environmental conditions that contribute to it) in front of people working on substance abuse issues. Tobacco is far and away the costliest drug addiction with respect to economic, health and mortality measures. Despite that, too few drug treatment or prevention programs really address tobacco. Alcohol and illicit drugs certainly do have acute and grave impacts on individual and the public's health and safety, but we don't think tobacco control and cessation should be divorced from the work of those involved in addiction prevention, treatment or related public-policy work. On the flip side of that, we think the work of tobacco control is enhanced by knowledge of, and partnership with, broader addiction prevention and treatment efforts.
By the way, there is another significant chapter in my and Join Together's experience with tobacco control and cessation. QuitNet (www.quitnet.com), which has now spun off as a successful company providing online cessation services, began as a Join Together project, and I was involved in daily content and community management for several years. That work has had a lot to do with our commitment to continuing our tobacco news coverage.
My specific role at Join Together is to oversee content development and management for our website and e-mail news service.
Q1. Since the daily scarcnet bulletin of the Advocacy Institute stopped the tobacco control community has been waiting for a daily resume of the news. Can you explain the services JoinTogetherOnline offers, when it started and how they are produced?
Eric Helmuth: Join Together Online (JTO) is probably the original major online publisher of addiction-related information for professionals and advocates -- we started way back in 1992 on a bulletin-board style network, had a Gopher site for a while and then launched one the first major addiction-related website in 1995. We're now on the third version of the site, and our traffic keeps growing; every month about 150,000 people visit, and they view over half a million pages of information.
We publish a wide range of information useful to professionals and advocates, including legislative research and advocacy tools, resource and web links databases, an event calendar, and so on -- but we are probably best known for our news service.
Our daily news summaries cover a wide range of tobacco topics, including legislation, regulation, research, prevention, cessation, notable programs, funding issues, litigation, and so on. Every weekday we publish 3 tobacco news summaries, for a total of 15 every week.
Most people get our news in a daily (Mon-Fri) or weekly collection of news items sent out in e-mail newsletter format. People can learn more and sign up for this free service, called JTO Direct, at http://www.jointogether.org/jtodirect. You can also see the latest news on the website, at http://www.jointogether.org/sa/news. Currently we have about 17,600 JTO Direct subscribers.
Our tobacco news coverage has been going on for 10 years now, under the expert hand of Bob Curley, a professional journalist who has for most of his career covered tobacco and addictions issues for us and other organizations. Each day he searches and scans for news items, then condenses and paraphrases them to produce a summary that captures the key information and points. Our readers seem to value the summaries for saving them a lot of time in the task of staying up to speed.
Right now in JTO Direct email, the tobacco news is mixed in with alcohol and illegal-drug items, but I am happy to announce to your readers that we will soon provide an option for a free weekly e-mail containing just the 15 tobacco-news items. We're excited about expanding our audience to tobacco-control folks who don't need or want the alcohol and drugs content. Any of your readers who want to be notified when the Weekly Tobacco News edition is launched can email me at [email protected]; I will send them a note when it's ready to go.
Q2. Of course we know the crucial importance of Gene Borio's tobacco.org and Stan Shatenstein is certainly offering a very dense and thorough daily analysis via Globalink but their objective is not to restrict themselves to a strict diet of no more than 3 items. How can such a selection be achieved, how do you do yours?
Eric Helmuth: There is certainly more tobacco-control news out there than 3 daily summaries can cover, and that's why JTO will never come close to replacing the incredible in-depth services that Gene, Stan, Joe Cherner and others provide. What we try to do is capture the most representative and important stories each day. For example, on a given day there might be 3 or 4 stories on public smoking bans available on the wires; we'll pick the one that has the highest news value. However, over the course of a week we will also make sure to cover the stories in other locales if they're significant. A story that has "legs" will generate more than one day of press coverage, so I think we nab the important stuff.
Q3. 3 news items per day translate into 60 per month so it is difficult to keep in control of such a flow. Does Jointogether provides tools to search and sort the past news?
Eric Helmuth: Yes, it does add up -- there are over 8,000 tobacco news summaries in our archive!
To sort recent news, you can go to our main news summary page at http://www.jointogether.org/sa/news/summaries/ and scroll down to the bottom of the page, you can easily filter the list to display tobacco-news only for anywhere from 1 week to 3 months back. For older material, the main website search box at the upper right of every page does a very good job of indexing the news -- just search like you would at Google.
In addition, our programmers are working now on a much more powerful news search engine that will fill in the current gaps in accessing this treasure trove of a news database. By the end of the year you'll be able to do advanced searches on 10 years of tobacco summaries by date range, and much more.
Q4. While your presentation of the news is selective you also give the possibility of going further by providing on the side links to other related articles and to 4 related websites. Can you tell us about those features?
Eric Helmuth: Every news summary is assigned a series of subject codes on things like topic, geographic location, and so on. Every time a news page is called up, our system automatically searches the archive for the most closely-related stories and resources, and displays the matches on the right-sidebar. Readers can use these links to further explore an interesting topic or access useful resources.
Q5. Another service is the webplugin. Can you explain how it works? How many sites have chosen to use it?
Eric Helmuth: Web Plugins are another free service that make it easy to syndicate JTO news into another website. Because all our news story pages are generated on-the-fly with a database-driven page template system, it's easy for us to create a version of the news pages that have another website's page design (HTML) wrapped around the core content. We just provide you with a unique URL (web link) that hits our server and calls up your version of the news. Put that link on your website, and visitors who click it will get the tobacco news with your website's "look and feel." It's nice because it gives your website automatic, fresh tobacco news every weekday.
It's actually easier to see in action than to explain in words. If you go to the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids website http://www.tobaccofreekids.org and click "Tobacco News" in the left column, you'll actually be seeing content from Join Together's servers. We have about 200 websites that carry tobacco news in a Plugin, either by itself or mixed in with alcohol and drug summaries.
For more info or to request a plugin, see http://www.jointogether.org/plugins
Q6. Is there anything else you would like to add?
Eric Helmuth: Only that I appreciate the chance to tell your readers more about the services we offer, and to invite any comments or suggestions on our tobacco news coverage. Send 'em to [email protected]. We always like to hear about what our readers need most.
Thank you Eric for taking the time to be with us today.
P.S: I should have also mentioned that I appreciate ASH UK daily succinct newsletter. Let us not forget the excellent Newsletter of Murray Laugesen from New Zealand.
Comments