Is Life Sciences Media Helping Or Hurting The Industry?
By Ed Miseta, Chief Editor, Clinical Leader
If you’re like me, keeping up with news in the life sciences industry is an integral part of your day. I am especially interested in news relating to the pharma companies and their partners, and every day I get emails updating me on the latest news pertaining to drug discovery. But lately I have noticed a disturbing trend in many of those emails. It seems some media outlets are doing their best to promote all the bad news they can find. As a result, I am beginning to wonder why they seem to be lining up against the industry they are intended to cover.
At Life Science Connect, our goal is to bring together pharma companies with potential outsourcing partners. We support the overriding goal of the industry to get lifesaving drugs to market faster. If we can help bring companies together to facilitate that process, we will have helped the drug developers, the CMOs and CROs, and most importantly, the patients.
How do we do that? We focus on the best practices, industry challenges, trends, and innovation in the outsourcing industry. We provide ample opinion, fair analysis, and actionable information. By doing so, we believe we provide true value to our readers (pharma professionals) and help them make better decisions. This does not make the industry coverage by other news outlets better or worse than ours, just different.
Bad News Is Popular News
Having said that, I have to confess I am often tempted to focus on topics that are a bit more controversial. The National Enquirer sells a lot of magazines every week focusing on the sensational and the scandalous. Anyone who has ever picked up an issue will know it reports on everything that is bad or seedy in Hollywood, which is what a lot of people seem to enjoy reading. If a famous actor donates $50,000 to a charity, it’s not news. If that same person gets drunk and slaps a photographer, it’s a front-page story.
Although reporting on production problems, recalls, warning letters, and plant closures would guarantee a lot of clicks and downloads for our publication and websites, it does not support our mission of bringing together companies. This often causes us to pause during editorial meetings and ask ourselves whether various stories will serve to help our readers, or will simply drive those looking for negative news to the website. Additionally, when several other news sites are already reporting the story, is there really any value to be had from regurgitating the facts one additional time?
If reporting on these topics does nothing to advance the industry, then why do it? There is certainly value to some in the pharma industry to learning about negative industry outcomes. If GM issues a safety recall on a million automobiles, buyers will want and need to know that information. Some sources undoubtedly report on scandalous stories to get more clicks, and there are writers who may feel obligated to report on certain stories simply to not appear to be out of the loop. Whatever the reason, this strategy may not always be to their benefit in the long run.
Last year, I had the opportunity to visit a large pharma company at their corporate headquarters. Some local media were also on hand, as well as a couple of national news services. What I didn’t see were any other life science media outlets. At one point while on a break, I asked one of their marketing managers why I didn’t see a certain pharma media outlet in attendance. “We really don’t care too much for them,” was the response. “I feel we have a lot of good news to report, but they only seem to want to focus on the bad.”
Earlier this year, I also had the opportunity to visit a service provider for the ground breaking and grand opening of a center that would have numerous positive partnering opportunities for the drug discovery industry. I was struck by the number of significant life science media outlets that failed to make the journey. What I considered to be great news for the industry, others did not seem to deem very newsworthy at all.
We can all criticize a company for having a Phase 3 failure, but is that really helping the industry? Very few drugs actually make it to market, meaning every pharma company will have many failures. But I don’t believe that is something we need to highlight. It seems to me that when we stop having failures, we have probably stopped trying. The more failures pharma has, the more effort they are putting into finding a cure for patients in need.
Let’s Work Together To Change The Image
I recently wrote an article on the bad reputation of the pharma industry. It discussed how an industry whose primary focus is on saving lives and improving the quality of life for people around the world could be viewed in a negative light by the media and public as a whole. The public only knows what it hears from the media, and I suppose the media angle is understandable, based again on the principle that bad news sells.
This situation reminds me of the local paper in my town. If health inspectors review a local restaurant, the paper will report the establishment received 13 violations. That restaurant may later replace all of its outdated equipment, retrain staff, and update its procedures. Unfortunately, that information will not be reported in the paper, leaving customers with only the memory of the 13 violations.
Reporting on negative inspections at pharma sites may not necessarily be a bad thing to pharma readers, so long as it is balanced with positive outcomes. If a company receives a 483 or Warning Letter that is worthy of reporting, then when the company undergoes an intensive review and improvement process to bring the facility up to specifications, that should be at least equally newsworthy. Perhaps, like my local paper, too many resources in our industry are focusing on the negative outcomes and not adequately following up with the positive.
Going forward, I certainly hope to see this situation change. There are many positive efforts going on in the industry, and it should not be difficult to find sufficient angles on which to focus. By working to promote the positives and fairly report negatives when warranted, we can all help change the reputation of the industry and facilitate the drug discovery process. There will still be national media outlets to report on the negatives, but let’s not exacerbate the situation by jumping on the bad news bandwagon.