Behavioral Journalism: Beyond the Marketing Model for Health Communication

As knowledge of the relationships between health and behavior has expanded, practitioners of public health and preventive medicine have become increasingly concerned with the promotion of behavior change in individuals and in whole populations. ] This has led to many new efforts to use mass communication media as agents of health promotion, for example, through public service advertising campaigns to change consumer behavior and publicity stunts intended to sway opinions about products or policies. I will briefly criticize the typical orientation of this work and present an alternative paradigm that I believe to be more sensitive to audiences’ real needs and more effective in reaching public health goals. Illustrations will be drawn from prevention studies concerned with cardiovascular disease, cancer, HIV infection, child abuse, and nuclear warfare. Public health communication activity has been dominated by the concept of social marketing, ’’2,3 that is, the idea that public health agencies can healthier lifestyles by adopting the orientation and adapting the methods of commercial advertising and public relations agents who help sell products or politicians. Typical techniques include various types of advertisements and attempts to shape news coverage or to embed messages in entertainment formats such as soap operas or television situation comedies. The marketing approach has