It’s September! That means it’s our blogiversary =)
This month marks the 10-year anniversary (blogiversary) of The Medical Care Blog, where we focus on the intersection of public health and medical care. To celebrate this milestone, we are dedicating this month’s podcast to a blog-focused episode featuring special guests Greg Stevens and Ben King, co-editors of this blog (and absolutely wonderful colleagues).
By way of introduction, we talk about who we are outside of the blog and give some insights into our backgrounds.
Then we dive in to talk all things blog:
- Why blog? Why this blog, specifically?
- When should someone think about blogging?
- Who are our contributors? (Cheers to our contributors, without which this blog could not exist!)
- What makes a great a blog post?
and more!
See video below, and send us your pitches! And thanks for celebrating our blogiversary with us!
Audio-only version available via Podomatic, Spotify, Apple, Amazon/Audible, and anywhere you get your podcasts!
Automated transcript below:
00:00:06:07 – 00:00:40:11
Lisa Lines
Hello and welcome to the Healthy Intersections podcast for September 2024. I’m Lisa Lines, your host and producer of this podcast. The blog and the podcast are sponsored by the American Public Health Association’s medical care section. And you can visit our blog at the Medical Care Blogger.com and see a video for this podcast. If you’re just listening to us on Spotify or wherever you get your fine podcast content, please go and see the actual post at the Medical Care blog and you’ll see the video that goes along with this.00:00:40:11 – 00:00:59:05
Lisa Lines
We’re going to be doing a little bit of show and tell today. We have a big celebration this month. This is our ten year anniversary at the Medical Care Blog, and I just have to say, I got chills just now. Just saying that. I can’t believe it’s been ten years.00:00:59:07 – 00:01:20:18
Lisa Lines
So welcome to this podcast. We’re going to be talking about the blog actually on the podcast. It’s very meta. It’s okay. I have with me here our two coeditors, Greg Stevens and Ben King. We’re going to do a round of introductions. We’re going to talk about how we got here and why we do what we do, which is blogging and in my case, also podcasting.00:01:20:20 – 00:01:31:09
Lisa Lines
So, buckle up. Ready to go. I’m going to ask my lovely colleague Ben King to start with his introduction. Go ahead Ben, take it away.00:01:31:11 – 00:01:54:19
Ben King
Thank you, first of all, for setting this up. I think this is a great idea. And I feel a little awkward going first because I’m the newcomer. The three of us. The newest to the blog. I can’t even remember. I don’t think my tenure is quite reached. One year just yet, although I guess I could start with the addition of long time blogger, but recent editor.00:01:54:21 – 00:02:32:20
Ben King
And yeah, I think this is a great idea. What an achievement. Obviously have been involved for 4 or 5 years contributing articles and just always loved doing that. But yeah, now get to here just in time to celebrate with you guys the ten year anniversary. So that’s amazing. The question was, you know, just background and introduction. So I’ll start conveniently and you know, pretend standing in front of this building behind me is the University of Houston’s Medical School, which is a new medical school in Houston, Texas, the third and the only one focused on primary care and underserved populations in our community.00:02:32:22 – 00:03:11:01
Ben King
I started here, actually. I just hit my four year anniversary, at this medical school, which is about four years old now. We just graduated our first class last summer. And so my day job essentially is, teaching what we call evidence based medicine curriculum to the medical students, mostly in their first year and also teaching an elective, we call inclusion Health Now, which is really about marginalized or vulnerable populations and getting clinical rotations into settings that students might not normally get exposed to during their, undergraduate medical education.00:03:11:03 – 00:03:31:11
Ben King
So mission I’m really proud of and really excited about and I just, love I’m going to stop myself from getting carried away and talking about it. All that I do with the medical school, it’s really been a blast. I before this was also at a startup medical school, Dell Medical School in Austin. So I’m starting, starting to create a habit out of this.00:03:31:13 – 00:04:01:21
Ben King
And yeah, it’s my research focuses primarily on that same concept of inclusion health, epidemiology of hard to study populations, primarily communities experiencing homelessness. We now are, as far as I know, one of the only academic, institutions that releases the community mortality reports for causes of death and homelessness. We do a lot of studies around, drivers of, you know, non-medical drivers of health.00:04:01:21 – 00:04:21:12
Ben King
That’s the new term, whatever we choose to call it. Right? It’s the the injustice that leads to disparate, outcomes in our system. So, yeah, been at it for a little while and, really excited to communicate some of that and help other people find their voices as an editor on this blog. How’s that?00:04:21:14 – 00:04:26:20
Lisa Lines
It’s fantastic. Greg, over to you.00:04:26:22 – 00:04:48:07
Gregory Stevens
Yeah. Hi, Lisa. Hi, Ben. And, yeah, super happy to join you guys today. Lisa, thanks for putting this together to be sort of featured on on your podcast. So I’m, I’m Greg Stevens, and, I’ve been with this blog. Gosh, probably eight years, seven and a half years, something like that. So pretty close to the beginning.00:04:48:09 – 00:05:22:23
Gregory Stevens
And, so at the time I joined, I was with USC, School of Medicine, Keck School of Medicine, and I kind of went the opposite direction. I left and went more to, public health, over at Cal State L.A. and based now, I was primarily a researcher over at USC doing a little teaching on the side, studying things like primary care and health care systems, health insurance coverage, and then as moving over to, Cal State L.A. been more focused on kind of pedagogy and, the techniques for teaching public health.00:05:22:23 – 00:05:41:24
Gregory Stevens
And that’s been a real sort of, lens shift, but one one I’ve really enjoyed. And the consistency has been is, contributing to this blog throughout that sort of ten year change. So I know we’re going to talk more about the actual kind of, blogging process and our experience come into it now. So I’ll pause right there.00:05:42:01 – 00:06:03:03
Lisa Lines
Thank you. Greg. Yeah, I think it’s really appropriate that Ben, you’re at a medical school and Greg, you’re at a school of public health. Because this blog and this podcast are at the intersection of public health and medicine, public health and health care, right. That’s where the journal is. And the editors have stated that as their kind of focus area.00:06:03:05 – 00:06:29:07
Lisa Lines
And those are our editors in chief, Catarina Kiefe and Jerome Allison was actually them who invited, just Williams and I to co-found this blog back in 2014. And so, Jess, you know, was, coeditor with us for a bunch of years, just retired from the position last year, I believe, or two years ago. I’m not sure time has lost all meaning, but,00:06:29:09 – 00:06:52:22
Lisa Lines
So Jess and I were the co editors for a long time, and we brought Greg on and then actually just retired from the position. We brought Ben on, and I have sort of stepped back some from the blogging part. Now I’m more doing the podcast, but I still will contribute a blog post here and there. And the reason why I personally came to this is because I’ve always been very interested in scientific communication.00:06:52:24 – 00:07:20:01
Lisa Lines
And, you know, I believe very strongly in the, you know, the scientific method. The last step in method is to publish your findings. These days, publishing in peer reviewed journals is sometimes very expensive, and it’s also not necessarily getting in front of policymakers as policymakers are not reading, most of the time, those journal articles. So we actually think of the blog as a way to reach a wider audience with our research.00:07:20:01 – 00:07:40:20
Lisa Lines
And that’s really where we’re focused and what the whole foundation of the blog is, is really highlighting research. And that can be research that’s published in medical care or published elsewhere or not even published yet. So we’ve done a lot of sort of here’s a preliminary analysis that we’d like to present and, and share, kind of in a preliminary way, to get the word out.00:07:40:20 – 00:08:05:24
Lisa Lines
This is sort of similar to like an abstract at a conference. So you can think of a blog as sort of somewhere between an abstract and a full paper. It’s in terms of length and detail. We also do a lot of commentaries, which I really love because, you know, in in public health, you can get, you know, there’s often a line between research and advocacy that people want to try and be on one side or the other.00:08:06:01 – 00:08:33:15
Lisa Lines
However, with all of the public health crises that we’ve been living through, particularly in the last five years, I think the public health community has more and more come to a place where we know we have to speak out. And this is our lane. You know, when we’re talking about, when we’re commenting from an evidence-based place, policies and other things that are out there.00:08:33:17 – 00:08:58:15
Lisa Lines
And this year on the blog, we’ve been focusing on climate change. So we’ve had a lot of really interesting commentaries and, pieces about climate change, especially, Greg, a recent series you just did on climate change and hope we’ll get back to that in a minute. But yeah, so, so in terms of blogging itself, guys, Greg, Ben, either of you can jump in here.00:08:58:17 – 00:09:01:09
Lisa Lines
When should a person blog?00:09:01:11 – 00:09:21:22
Gregory Stevens
I would say, when they when they want to have impact. You know, I came to blogging, after publishing numerous times and peer reviewed journals and seeing articles kind of disappear, but I felt like into the ether. Only to find out, you know, 3 or 4 years later that they’d be cited, you know, ten times.00:09:21:22 – 00:09:43:24
Gregory Stevens
15 times. And I know more people were probably reading these things, but, it starts to feel kind of like you’re not in contact in some way with the with the users of your work. It just kind of gets filed in the folios of time, unless you’re kind of a, you know, an ultra-superstar who gets spotlighted in that one particular journal.00:09:44:01 – 00:10:11:16
Gregory Stevens
But I really I came to blogging because I wanted to have a bigger impact. And so for anybody that was feeling like, and you’d like to get your voice out there a bit more, you’d like to. If you feel like you’re a fairly good communicator of, science, public health or policy or, or health care, and you want people to read your work sort of immediately and be in some way subject to immediate commentary back.00:10:11:18 – 00:10:35:24
Gregory Stevens
We get comments back every so often here on the blog that, I mean, that’s that’s a good reason to pick up blogging. I don’t think of this as any less evidence based than the peer reviewed sector. In fact, in some ways, I think, you know, we read this very closely as editors to make sure that people substantiate their claims, not just provide the citation and put together a good, good argument.00:10:36:01 – 00:10:51:07
Gregory Stevens
So I think, you know, that’s that’s a it’s a it’s a way to have impact. Well being, you know, reputable, because you have a good set of eyes. I think we’ve all got a fairly good set of eyes, that we, we put onto this. Ben, how about you?00:10:51:09 – 00:11:16:12
Ben King
I think you said that perfectly. First of all, I think the timing really is, is the second element of it. I mean, first of all, yeah, to have that idea and to want to reach an audience, it’s not going to flip through a scientific journal necessarily is a big part of it. Of course, we have the interaction with our journal Medical Care, and we highlight articles that are in that.00:11:16:12 – 00:11:40:16
Ben King
And then well, and I’ll, I’ll do some foreshadowing as well, which is we’ll talk about some examples where we’ve moved blogs in the other direction into commentary. But but for the most part, I think of it as a way to communicate an idea that doesn’t really fit in a journal as well. So, you know, we started I started with highlighting articles that were in the journal.00:11:40:16 – 00:12:01:06
Ben King
That was kind of an exercise for me to get out of some writer’s block I was having. That was why I originally started blogging, was just to get the the motion, you know, started again. And I needed to churn out some ideas. And I always, you know, you read someone else’s work and the ideas just kind of flow sometimes for me at least.00:12:01:08 – 00:12:20:14
Ben King
And that became really valuable. It got me to write about my ideas as well, in a different way. And also, you’re really locked into a specific format and what you can say and what you can, what other new or outside ideas you can loop in and have to be really heavily contextualized in scientific writing and the blog.00:12:20:14 – 00:12:47:12
Ben King
It’s really more about your perspective that you’re sharing and weaving together these ideas that may or may not fit into something you have primary or secondary data on either. So I just really enjoyed communicating certain concepts to especially public health. Emergency of Covid 19 took over. I remember it was an outlet for me to communicate some of the concerns that I had, and I turned to the blog and to you guys.00:12:47:12 – 00:13:21:07
Ben King
I remember at the time just started posting ideas. You had the schedule, you know, a little further out. And at that point we were going to a week even because other people felt, I think, the same way, the ability to communicate without needing to wait for that natural cycle that can take so long sometimes to develop evidence and instead to really focus on, you know, communicating what we knew about the public health emergency and the uncertainty, which, of course, again, you’re not usually allowed to talk about in the scientific literature.00:13:21:09 – 00:13:43:09
Ben King
So I think there’s there’s a moment when you have an idea. And if that idea isn’t necessarily something that needs to be, you know, your own line of research, the blog is a really perfect way to communicate something like that, too. And I’ve found that to be really valuable in keeping my writing chops fluid as well, because it’s such a different style of writing.00:13:43:11 – 00:14:13:11
Lisa Lines
It is really, really different. And we have a very specific blog style that we kind of enforce, partly because of my own training and kind of convictions around blog posts and how they really need to be concise, clear, guiding the reader through the argument with headings, you know, actually, you know, linking all the sources in line in the blog post, not like a journal article at all.00:14:13:11 – 00:14:36:02
Lisa Lines
And the writing style is very different for that reason. No passive voice allowed like none, you know, short sentences, short paragraphs. And that’s because our readers are generally going to be busy and sort of, you know, doing, doing their reading, sort of, you know, with all the other things that have that are in their lives going on, maybe they’re on their phone, you know, in between things.00:14:36:02 – 00:14:59:21
Lisa Lines
So you have to be really careful about, from my perspective, blog style being very direct and, you know, it’s a form of persuasive writing. I and that kind of distinguishes our blog from others. But there are other reasons why our blog is different from others. For example, we have contributors, we have hundreds of contributors who have written for us over the years.00:14:59:21 – 00:15:16:05
Lisa Lines
So it’s not just the three of us doing all the writing by any stretch. We have some top contributors who, who contribute over and over again, but, you know, they, they make up, you know, maybe a third or maybe even a quarter of the total volume. So, so let’s talk a little bit of our, about our contributors.00:15:16:05 – 00:15:19:19
Lisa Lines
Who who are they and why do they contribute to the medical care blog?00:15:19:21 – 00:15:43:17
Ben King
I’ll start because I have again the shortest tenure here. One of the things that amazed me when I came on board was just how adaptable, but also, you know, really remarkable. Our contributors come in through the front door and and how flexible and how interesting it is to work with them to get these, you know, posts up to shape.00:15:43:17 – 00:16:08:07
Ben King
I mean, it’s it’s been really I think the steepest learning curve for me has been figuring out how to work with them. But at the same time, I’m just constantly amazed by the quality of, you know, the thoughts and the, the writing that come in. There’s never been, you know, just an outright disaster with a contributor. And I think that speaks to the readership of the blog as well.00:16:08:07 – 00:16:31:13
Ben King
Right. The people read and the people who see themselves in that role of writing for us are fantastic, authors. And the style does, I think, flow somewhat naturally. It is. I think you made a great point. It’s a it’s a very specific style that we try to encompass, but it is one that is scientific and strongly sort of supported.00:16:31:15 – 00:16:57:17
Ben King
So that we don’t let you know, claim statements go unsupported and things like that. But we have a community that really understands that too. So you just say that and they go, they understand what we’re asking for. I’ve been I’ve been blown away. I mean, every single writer I’ve worked with has really risen to the challenge and has, you know, been shown some adaptability and understanding and even just learning some of the little tricks of the trade that we could talk about later if we want to.00:16:57:17 – 00:17:17:23
Ben King
But, you know, the metrics that we build in. Yeah, those, those really do help guide. And so I’ve just been amazed, it’s been so much fun to work with. I love every month that I get to do this. I try to find at least one contributor. That’s not one of my colleagues. I’m twisting their arm. But you know, somebody from, from the website who’s reached out, which has been so fun.00:17:18:02 – 00:17:18:20
Ben King
You know.00:17:18:22 – 00:17:40:08
Gregory Stevens
The two things you said stand out to me, Ben. One one is this idea that this is kind of, you know, like a team process, like this is not, you know, someone’s own personal newsletter. This is like, we’re we’re a bit of a community of writers here. And that’s, that’s nice because I think, you know, our writers are our readers and our readers become our writers.00:17:40:08 – 00:18:00:00
Gregory Stevens
And that’s like, I think, a nice kind of community that we’ve we’ve created and we send out as editors updates to our authors, you know, once every six months or so. And it’s nice the emails they get back saying, yeah, way to go. And, you know, we’re, we’re reaching more people. And and so that that’s the first thing that stood out to me.00:18:00:00 – 00:18:26:18
Gregory Stevens
The second thing that you, you said that really resonates with me too, is that, you know, it’s a real diverse cast of contributors. And one one thing in particular that I think we do differently than many places is we highlight the voices of students. We welcome student voices. You don’t have to get through some, you know, degree bar necessarily to be thoughtful and evidence based and have, good perspective.00:18:26:20 – 00:18:48:03
Gregory Stevens
So we we regularly welcome student voices and we, we, you know, we do encourage them along and we probably have to work a bit more as editors with student writers. Not always, but it’s a, you know, on the whole, we probably work a little bit more with them, but, we don’t hold them to any different standard. We hold them to a very high standard of, of evidence writing.00:18:48:05 – 00:18:54:00
Gregory Stevens
And so we welcome students as contributors as well, and they become our future readers.00:18:54:02 – 00:18:54:23
Lisa Lines
Absolutely.00:18:54:24 – 00:19:16:11
Ben King
But I just want to add that that’s a great example. I mean, two of my favorites from this past spring was after the APA annual meeting. We took the award winners from for Best Student Abstract from the section, and not everybody took us up on it, but we had a couple of the students from award winners who then went on to write a blog about the piece that they were working on.00:19:16:11 – 00:19:40:06
Ben King
Obviously, they couldn’t disclose anything they were trying to publish, down the road, but works in progress. And characterizing the issues around what they were studying, and they were some of the most fun to work with. You’re right. It was a little more work in explaining what the goal was, but, but they really jumped at the chance and and we’re so much fun to work with because I think they really enjoyed the opportunity to communicate in that different way.00:19:40:08 – 00:19:43:16
Ben King
So yeah, planting the seed early with students. Great, great.00:19:43:20 – 00:20:23:10
Lisa Lines
Yeah. Turn them into lifelong contributors. Yeah. So what goes into a good blog post? I think, you know, we have, like I said, our guidelines where we say, you know, be there, be be concise. We also have, you know, these built in filters or kind of checks, checklists, kinds of things where people can see kind of like where they might be able to shorten some sentences or, you know, remove some passive voice and we make sure that everything is tagged appropriately so people can find us on Google, you know, what Google is responsible for almost, a huge portion of our traffic.00:20:23:10 – 00:20:45:01
Lisa Lines
So, you know, to make sure that people can find us when they search on Google is important. But aside from all of that, not just, you know, sort of technical nonsense, what are the things that make a really great blog post that really grabs people? And, and makes for something that’s really memorable? I, I actually would love to share my own answer to that first.00:20:45:06 – 00:21:08:02
Lisa Lines
Yeah. So one of my all time favorite series that we’ve done, Greg, is Yours, the series that you did on climate change and Hope, and this one in particular on climate change with Bill McKibben, was so inspiring. Just, you know, really, focusing on, you know, the main points in the blog post. You’ve also got the full 45 minute conversation linked so people can listen to the whole thing.00:21:08:02 – 00:21:28:20
Lisa Lines
And Bill McKibben is, wow, such a, a light in the firmament. And he’s just an amazing person. And, and so inspiring. So and, you know, he’s been working on these issues of climate change for a very, very, very long time. And and so if he can be hopeful, I think that should give hope to most of us in as well.00:21:28:20 – 00:21:53:15
Lisa Lines
Just talking about, you know, this poet put this post, and this series and I’ll stop there. But just in terms of what makes a post from my perspective really compelling is, you know, that kind of in bright, energy that that, comes through in the post and the call to action. Always love to see blog post for the call to action at the end.00:21:53:17 – 00:22:09:19
Lisa Lines
Be less of an individual. For example, you know, actually like organize with other people. That’s, collective action. So really important stuff. I’ll stop there. Greg, tell me what makes a great blog post from your perspective? And can you share an example?00:22:09:21 – 00:22:31:24
Gregory Stevens
Yeah, yeah. I think, something well, there’s a lot of things that make a good blog post, including a good title, a willingness to be succinct. But probably for me, what I find most interesting is when people propose an idea that’s been overlooked in some way. And can I go ahead and share my example if that’s all right?00:22:32:05 – 00:23:05:03
Gregory Stevens
I like this post, by one of our physician contributors, Anthony Flegg, about the health effects of tech overload and what made this, you know, we’ve been talking about health effects of tech for a while, but what made this kind of unique was, you know, can public Health see it, raising this question of, you know, if we’re all such strong consumers of technology already, is it possible for us to kind of look outside, in an evidence based way, to see where there’s a problem?00:23:05:05 – 00:23:32:22
Gregory Stevens
And what it would also reminded me of is that, in public health, you know, where, you know, traditionally focused on things like disease transmission. And we would focus on prevention and health education, but it’s okay for public health to really chase where the data, you know, suggest there’s a problem like this, public health we’re trying to solve for, you know, what’s causing illness, what’s causing shortened life expectancy.00:23:32:24 – 00:23:54:06
Gregory Stevens
And so if there’s a problem with technology that’s that presents some type of risk. It’s fair for public health to go there and take a look at that. And so I thought this was great. It’s not a very long piece. You know, it didn’t necessarily touch on something brand new, but it just put it in a new light and reminded us that, you know, public health, we can take steps into this area and do some work here.00:23:54:08 – 00:23:57:03
Lisa Lines
Great example, Greg. Then how about you? What do you think?00:23:57:04 – 00:24:18:13
Ben King
First of all, was a big fan of both of those posts, and I guess I follow the blog even when I’m not editing actively because both of those ring a, ring a bell as soon as you brought them up. Well, I mean, the Bill McKibben interview was just this summer, and what a what a fantastic example of what we set out to do with our year of theme.00:24:18:15 – 00:24:37:23
Ben King
I don’t want to say it’s the pinnacle because we’re not done yet, but that was a really great article that I ended up sending to some ecology friends as well. So I just want to echo that, one that Lisa shared in reflecting on what I thought was an interesting function of the blog. I wanted to highlight an article that was a little different for me.00:24:37:23 – 00:25:05:13
Ben King
It was the first time that I had edited a piece which made it onto our fresh voices, collection. Which is the collection of, you know, first hand commentary or perspective that authors can chime in and write. I want to highlight this piece from, Rachel Patterson in May of this last year, in part because the story, the narrative that she has to tell is just so striking.00:25:05:15 – 00:25:38:23
Ben King
And the relevance to the intersection of public health and medical care, I think is really hyper clear. But it’s not commentary from an objective position. This is somebody who was going through IVF treatment, when the Supreme Court in their state, ruled that treatment to be against their constitution and threw out, lots and lots of patients who were actively in care providers, had to close up shop and stop offering this kind of service.00:25:39:00 – 00:25:59:10
Ben King
So she wrote in the blog about that experience. Really highlighted by the fact, by the way, you know, a lot of our authors, are contributors. They will they will develop, or they will bring in a photo or something. You know, it’s usually a stock image from online, or we help them find something and match it to the story title.00:25:59:12 – 00:26:18:23
Ben King
This was a picture that she had already, as part of, her experience in getting through and successfully completing IVF in a way that, you know, was a hundred times harder than it needed to be. We’ll just put it that and I’ll I’ll leave that as a cliffhanger. For those of you that want to come and find this post.00:26:19:02 – 00:26:46:11
Ben King
Just a phenomenal story and such a pleasure to work with this contributor in developing it. It’s not from a place of negativity, but it is from a place of helping people to understand what happens when, you know, policy changes affect medical care so rapidly as this did. Just a phenomenal example. And as I as I alluded to earlier, this is an example that’s really contrary to the method.00:26:46:11 – 00:27:14:04
Ben King
We usually the approach we usually take, which is, you know, the articles in the journal tend to get highlighted by contributor. And if you’re thinking about contributing, go to the journal and look at what they’re publishing, because there’s always really interesting studies and it may pique your curiosity. Or you may have a thought, a comment about how, that either affects the work in the field that you’re in or you have, you know, thoughts that you want to help contextualize that study.00:27:14:04 – 00:27:35:05
Ben King
That’s the perfect way to get started, in my opinion. But in this case, we actually reached out to this contributor. Lisa, I think you connected them with the editors. And then they went on to publish a commentary in the journal itself, to reach a different kind of audience, because I think we do have different audiences in many ways.00:27:35:07 – 00:28:07:00
Ben King
So they got another chance to tell that story in a in a different forum once again, and really seemed to value that which, which meant a lot that we were able to help sort of be a stair step in, in communicating that, perspective as well. So I’ll add again that, those kinds of posts are available on the Fresh Voices page, right at the top of the blog, if you go, along the top bar that’s available and under collections, and we have several of those, but, right now that’s one of my favorites.00:28:07:02 – 00:28:33:11
Lisa Lines
Thank you so much, Ben. That’s great. Yeah. And I agree that a really good, easy entry way into blogging is to blog about an article that’s been published in medical care, and that does two things. One, it actually makes the article free for some period of time after it’s featured on the blog. So if you’re an author of an article in medical care, a great way to get more eyes on your research.00:28:33:13 – 00:28:53:24
Lisa Lines
But even if you just are sort of affiliated with that, you know, that line of work or do some work in an adjacent area, you can start with highlighting, you know, piece in medical care and then add in something about your own work. So there’s lots of different ways to kind of get into the blogging world. And we have a whole contributor guide that we’ve, worked out.00:28:53:24 – 00:29:12:05
Lisa Lines
There’s Greg has a walkthrough of the software that we use a video on that. How to actually use the software. So, we tried to make it really easy for new contributors to get involved. And, and I just want to say, you know, we got here with ten years of over, you know, I think 300 contributors. Is that right, Greg?00:29:12:05 – 00:29:39:19
Lisa Lines
I think you counted them up at one point, and we can’t do another year or even another five years or ten more years without more contributors because, you know, we don’t we don’t actually make these posts ourselves. We actually depend on you all the audience, and the readers of the blog. And, so if you are listening to this and you’ve thought about, oh, I may have something I want to write about, don’t hesitate.00:29:39:20 – 00:30:08:06
Lisa Lines
Just make it your goal. Make it your goal by the end of the year. To submit an idea, pitch to us. We are just so interested in your perspectives and your contributions from, every stage of, you know, career development, every stage of education, every kind of work that you might be doing. We’re interested, and our audience is probably interested, too, if it falls into that nice little intersection there between public health and medical care.00:30:08:10 – 00:30:36:13
Lisa Lines
So I guess that’s my pitch to ask folks to go ahead and, you know, submit to us. We we really depend on our contributors. We wouldn’t be able to do this without you. And so we hope to see lots of pitches coming in for the fall. And, we look forward to that. Greg, any final thoughts or, last comments you’d like to make about the blog blogging in general or anything at all or.00:30:36:15 – 00:31:01:09
Gregory Stevens
Yeah, I mean, very briefly, you know, it’s like you said that we, you know, we welcome voices here, new voices, returning voices. And, you know, the process of blogging is I think it’s an enjoyable one. You know, there’s some work involved in doing this and for the first time, contributors and can feel like a little bit of, an extra bit of work as you got to learn about our blog style.00:31:01:11 – 00:31:15:16
Gregory Stevens
But we work with it. You know, Ben’s a pretty nice guy. Lisa, you’re a pretty nice woman. Fairly nice myself. We’re, we’re going to we’re going to work with you. And, I hope you submit something and publish something really good.00:31:15:18 – 00:31:17:20
Lisa Lines
Ben. Anything else to add?00:31:17:22 – 00:31:45:12
Ben King
Oh, I think just, just as Greg said, the, the bar is not as high as it might look. We all have a lot that we’re trying to write that we’re trying to produce. And, you know, my encouragement is really just that this is not the same kind of writing. And so it will feel different, and it helps to think of it as an outlet for the kinds of communication that maybe you’re not able to do.00:31:45:14 – 00:32:14:10
Ben King
This is, you know, this is not protocol writing for those that are stuck in whatever, you know, space or if you’re if you’ve written a couple grants and you just can’t lift your pen again, then you know, this is the perfect opportunity to get some thoughts out there in a really easy to communicate way. There’s rules to follow, but at the same time, we’re just so interested in what your communication should be so we can really, you know, work with you and, and hopefully it is enjoyable.00:32:14:10 – 00:32:17:17
Ben King
Just as Greg said, I think that was perfect.00:32:17:19 – 00:32:40:02
Lisa Lines
Definitely. Yeah. So congratulations for ten years. Here’s ten more. And thank you so much Greg and Ben for being on the podcast today. It was very meta. It was very cool. It was very fun. I really enjoy always talking with you guys. It’s just, one of the highlights of my of my work. And I really appreciate everything that you both do and audience.00:32:40:02 – 00:32:47:24
Lisa Lines
Thanks for listening, watching, reading. And, don’t forget to subscribe. Thank you so much. See you next time.
Lisa M. Lines