And don’t attach artificial importance to what actually appears in the article compared with what appears in what you call the sidebar. I broke that info out into a box specifically to make it more eye-catching. If you just make it part of the article text, it blends into the background and often (usually?) doesn’t get read.

I noticed that the article on the site has had a title change, from “Patients seek health info on Web, but it isn’t always fresh” to the shorter and much more sensible “Patients seek health info on Web.”

Perhaps it would have been a better article if all the stuff with Dr. Terrell had been excised. Start with the first three existing paragraphs that introduce the Pew study and define the problem, then fill out the rest of the article with the tips from Julie Myrick, medical librarian at Moses Cone Health System. Ms. Myrick’s advice directly address the concerns of the Pew study.

The Pew study, after all, is about healthcare consumers and the ways that they seek information online. Dr. Terrell’s commentary was at best only tangentially related to the real story.

The real story is about the critical need for healthcare information literacy, not about whether a doctor approves of his/her patients independently researching their own health concerns.

So perhaps the article didn’t “miss the major points” as much as it de-emphasized them by making them a sidebar. The article made the real story a sidebar, and made what should have been a sidebar the story.

And this may not have been done by you, but by your copy editor. Either way, I stand by my opinion that it is a poor article.

Best,

-David

First, reporters don’t write the headlines. Copy editors do. Second, if you read the entire article and accompanying text boxes, etc., you’ll see that there are a number of suggestions for ascertaining the most reliable online sources of medical information.