Sherry Jacobson, a senior writer with the Dallas Morning News; and Dr.
Karen Amstutz, an Indianapolis physician who provided the inspiration for
this book.

As always, the research found in the pages of such journals as Journalism
Quarterly, Newspaper Research Journal, and the Journal of Broadcasting
and Electronic Media is extremely helpful, as are the professional
publications of American Journalism Review, Editor & Publisher, and Co-
lumbia Journalism Review. Among the most enlightening of books studied
was Nancy Signorielli Mass Media Images and Impact on Health, Getting
the Story by Henry Schulte and Marcel Dufresne, and The Reporter's
Handbook, edited by John Ullmann and Steve Honeyman. In addition,
symposia like the Annenberg Washington Program's "Violence, Public
Health, and the Media" and the Freedom Forum's "Under the Microscope"
were extremely useful. One major conference which drew together doctors,
medical reporters, health care economists, and health marketers was "Un-
derstanding and Communicating the Health Care Story," in May 1996.
That conference provided a basis for a portion of this book and was spon-
sored by the Linder Center for Urban Journalism at the University of Mem-
phis.

The Appendix contains three important examples of in-depth health re-
porting that have been done in recent years. They cover three different
topics, all under the heading of risk communication, and show the wide
range of the issues involved. My thanks goes to the St. Paul Pioneer Press
Dispatch, the Dallas Morning News, and the New York Daily News for
allowing us to reprint portions of these important journalistic series.

Finally, I would like to thank Albert Okunade, Ph.D., a gifted health
care economist at the University of Memphis, for his contributions in writ-
ing Chapter 8 and a portion of Chapter 4 of this book; my colleagues in
the Department of Journalism at the University of Memphis, for their
friendship; and Jabie and Helen Hardin, for their generosity, which helped
make this research possible.

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