Readers of the Radio Times can visit locations used in the filming of Sir David Attenborough’s Africa on a tailor made tour offered by the 90 year old UK listings magazine. The Africa trip is one of dozens of destinations listed on RT Travel page and the latest example of how publishers are increasingly thinking like […]
Category: David Payne
Readers’ editor: Crazy eggs and the BMJ in a mobile world
Each year the BMJ runs an online reader survey. The survey is mainly multiple choice but there is also a free text question where we ask readers: “What single improvement to bmj.com would make the most difference to you?” Every year the most popular response is “Make it free.” There are other recurring responses to […]
Readers’ editor: Video abstracts
Cuba’s population witnessed huge economic change after losing the former Soviet Union as a trading partner in 1989. Food shortages caused by the downturn led to obesity rates falling from 12% to 7% in six years, an average weight loss of between 4-5kg across the whole population. The country also introduced new green policies, including […]
Readers’ editor: What is a “BMJ man (or woman)?”
In the early 1990s I spent the weekend at the home of a friend’s parents, both of them GPs. I’d recently started work as a political news reporter on the GP magazine Pulse. “Never read it,” said my friend’s dad. “I’m a BMJ man through and though.” He’s now retired, but whenever I visit a […]
Readers’ editor: Pharma advertising in the BMJ
In 2011 research physician Tristan Barber responded to an editor’s choice on conflicts of interest, saying: “Reading the current BMJ and noting several letters regarding conflicts of interest, it was particularly distracting to have the front cover being a fold-out advertisement for a pharmaceutical product. “As a consequence I was very aware of all of […]
Readers’ editor blog: Our Indian readers, and why there’s more of them
At the beginning of 2013 bmj.com’s most accessed article in India typically received between 100 and 200 views. In three months the figure has more than doubled. In the first full week of January there were 9,784 visits to bmj.com from India. The figure has been rising since. Last week there were 12,121. In November 2012 […]
Readers’ editor blog: Patient consent
Last year a colleague phoned a patient named in a BMJ practice article. The patient had consented to her story being published (it was about to go live), but had wrongly thought her account was destined for publication in an obscure medical journal that would gather dust on library shelves. My colleague was concerned that […]
Readers’ editor blog: Comments, comments everywhere
Yesterday morning the BMJ’s press officer needed to locate a rapid response about Tamiflu from Peter Doshi, a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Doshi’s response accuses the drug’s manufacturer Roche of “all talk and no action” following its promise to share full clinical study reports (CSRs) for 10 treatment trials. Our Tamiflu open […]
David Payne: Horsemeat and the Food Standards Agency
The horsemeat scandal has triggered calls for the UK’s food safety watchdog to have stronger regulatory powers. The Food Standards Agency was stripped of its nutrition and labelling roles in a cull of quangoes shortly after the coalition government entered office in 2010. Isn’t it time they were returned, to restore public confidence in the […]
Readers’ editor: What do US physicians think of the BMJ?
This blog is the first in a series about you, our readers. Fiona Godlee, the BMJ’s editor in chief, suggested I write a regular blog explaining some of our policies and procedures. Many of them have been in place for decades, but our readership of practising physicians and academic researchers may not be aware of […]