Michael McCarthy's Stealthy Health Guide

"The local angle really does get people's interest," said Michael McCarthy, editor, publisher and et al of the Seattle Local Health Guide. He's a slender, bearded man with a warm manner and it's not all that surprising to learn he's an M.D. himself, trained in internal medicine by Virginia Mason.

His online health guide currently devotes a section to H1N1 flu developments, another to health advice and tips, another to healthcare industry news. It's attracting about 25,000 readers per month--all the flu news has pushed numbers up ever since May, and once people find the site, they come back. The initial site was born in 2007, and reborn a year ago in its Wordpress incarnation.

It may be time, McCarthy admitted a little ruefully, to work harder on the site's revenue stream. Like many people who have founded a news site, he's driven primarily by the sense that it's a public necessity.

Michael McCarthy

McCarthy writes stories himself, and aggregates health industry and policy news from sources like Kaiser Health News and ProPublica. "There are more than enough stories out there," he emphasized. He likes to follow a story's real-time transmission, from a World Health Organization H1N1 conference, to the CDC presser hours later, to a public announcement the next day by Madrona's public schools about their flu policy.

"Part of what's valuable is just finding what's good that's available," he added. Health care news that hasn't caught mainstream interest is out there, but it's chasing too few reporting resources.

His imaginary "reader" is a mom staying educated on health care, but in practice, the site casts a much wider net. McCarthy points out that King County total employment in the health care sector rivals Boeing's. Recently he's begun working with the Seattle Times, which has, thanks to a grant from American University's J-Lab (via the Knight Foundation), started exploring content collaboration with local bloggers.

McCarthy, on other hand, brings journalism chops of his own to the table. Previously he was a "laptop bureau" for the British medical journal The Lancet, becoming their North American editor. He's also been a stringer for Reuter's. It shows in his coverage--he's been asked to inject more of his personality into the site. It's something he's hesitant to do. He'd prefer that readers find what they need without his editorializing. There is enough of that around health care policy.