bmj slides by annabel ferriman and rebecca coombes

BMJ essentialsAnnabel FerrimanNews Editor, BMJ

The BMJ news pages do not cover

Launches of new drugs and devices

Anniversaries

Awareness days, weeks, months or years

Human interest stories

Nursing or dentistry news

DoDo research the publication you are targeting

Do understand deadlinesBMJ goes to press three days before it appears

Do trust us to respect your embargoes

Do think about interesting ways of illustrating your story

Don’tAssume every press release needs a follow-up

phone call

Use incomprehensible acronyms

Ask for forward feature lists

What we want from newsStories must be of interest to doctors

We want to cover the big stories of the week

We also like exclusives

Our stories have to be balanced

We avoid promotional stories

We believe that “News is what offends somebody somewhere; all the rest is advertising”

BMJReach and impact

1,222,712 unique browsers download 5,643,102 pages from bmj.com each month (ABCe audit, October 2012).

• The BMJ’s Impact Factor is 14.093.

• International editions reach around 55,000 readers

• Every BMJ article published since the journal’s first issue in October 1840 available online

BMJIncome

Classified advertising (job ads)

• Display advertising (pharmaceutical advertising)

• Subscription revenue

• Reprints

• Sponsorship/syndication (eg EBSCO – an online journals service)

BMJWhat do we care about?

Evidence-based approach

• Medicalisation/overdiagnosis

• Risk

• Research integrity – open data campaign

• Recent journalistic investigations have explored device and drug regulation, exposed the MMR-autism link as a fraud, looked at the truth behind sports drinks