Covering Health is a blog maintained by the Association of Health Care Journalists. It is intended to help keep journalists who report on health and health care issues informed about the latest news in the field, aware of noteworthy stories and reports, and able to connect with colleagues.

AHCJ welcomes suggestions from its members. If you see a topic that you think should be mentioned on the blog, please send it to pia@healthjournalism.org.

Guest posts

Covering Health does not accept unsolicited guest posts.

Comment guidelines

To ensure that comments enhance and don’t detract from the blog, AHCJ has a formal comment policy.

We ask that your comments be relevant to the blog posting and health journalism, that they be respectful and that they be kept brief. Ideally, your comment will be under 200 well-chosen words with paragraphs as necessary; white space makes the content easier to read on a computer screen. Flaming or disrespectful posts will not be tolerated.

Remember: A comment is conversation. A comment which does not add to the conversation, runs off on an inappropriate tangent, or kills the conversation may be edited, moved or deleted.

Moderators may:

• Reject postings containing statements that appear to be defamatory or libelous in nature.
• Edit or delete comments as its administrators feel necessary. Serious edits will be notated at the end of the comment. At no time will AHCJ attempt to alter the core meaning of a comment.
• Ask the original author to rewrite or edit the message when the moderators judge it to be a personal attack or otherwise offensive.
• Reject postings not pertinent to journalism topics or covering health care (i.e. jokes, job ads, etc.)
• Reject redundant postings
• Ask the poster to re-post the message with identifying information, such as name and affiliation.

Anyone who violates the Comments Policy may be blocked from future commenting on this blog.

Links

Your comments may include links of value that are relevant to the posting. Please don’t view this as an opportunity to promote or advertise your Web site in the comments. Excessive and/or inappropriate links will be removed. Double check your links, because any link which returns an error, leads to a site under construction, or cannot be loaded by the browser will be removed.

Some tips for proper linking:

• Please use proper XHTML markup:
  <a href=”URL” title=”TITLE OF WHAT YOU’RE LINKING TO”> Anchor text that describes what you’re linking to</a>
• Please use descriptive anchor text
  • Bad: <a href=”…”>click here</a>
  • Good: <a href=”…” title=”Google Homepage”>Google’s homepage</a>
• Please keep the anchor text brief (6 words or less per link)

Identification

Please identify yourself when commenting. If we have reason to believe an identity is false we reserve the right to remove the comment.

All Rights Reserved

The blog owner, administrator, contributor, editor and/or author reserve the right to edit, delete, move, or mark as spam any and all comments. They also have the right to block access to any individual or group from commenting.

Hold Harmless

All comments within this blog are the responsibility of the commenter, not the blog owner, administrator, contributor, editor or author. By submitting a comment on our blog, you agree that the comment content is your own, and to hold AHCJ, its websites, and all subsidiaries/affiliated organizations and representatives harmless from any and all repercussions, damages or liability.

These guidelines are subject to discussion and change. If you have thoughts about how to improve them, please send a message to pia@healthjournalism.org.