Communicating Risks & Benefits from the FDA

The Risk Communication Advisory Committee to the Food and Drug Administration has just released Communicating Risks and Benefits: An Evidence-Based User's Guide (edited by Baruch Fischhoff, Noel T. Brewer and Julie S. Downs) in an effort to provide more scientific foundations for effective risk communication. The book is freely available online in pdf format.

Committee chair Baruch Fischhoff, described the book's goals as "to make communication science accessible. Another was to facilitate evidence-based approaches.Each chapter is 3,000 words, each addressing these points: What does the science say?
What does the science mean?...How can you tell how well you've done?...We wanted to make people feel guilty if they didn't do any evaluation."

Themed Journal Issue on Crisis Communication

Media International Australia (No. 137, November 2010) is titled The Victorian Bushfires and Other Extreme Weather Events: Case Studies in Crisis, Culture and Communications. Edited by Louise North and Jason Bainbridge, its focus is on media coverage of the 2009 Australian bushfires (Black Saturday) that killed 173 people and displace some 7,500 others. In addition to articles on the bushfires the issue includes a content analysis of local news representations of women in Hurricane Katrina and a piece on the role of social media and public information management during the 2009 tsunami threat to New Zealand. The issue takes on a rather prescient tinge in light of the recent Biblical-proportion-flooding in Queensland. Hopefully the scholarship in this area, as the editors hope, has some influence on practice though it's hard to imagine on the local front with Mother Nature delivering her latest blow just a month after the issue's publication.

Media International Australia is available in the ASC Library.

William Evans Bibliographies

For leads on current health communication research, check out the current issue of Health Communication which alwaays features a substantial bibliography of new research articles compiled by William Evans (Institute for Communication and Information Research, University of Alabama). Since the journal is bimonthly you can count on six such bibliographies a year organized around health campaigns and promotion, health communication theory and research, health information and informatics, health risk communication, mediated health communication, patient-physician/interpersonal health communication and communication in medical contexts. Bibliographies usually list from 75 to 100 items. Dr. Evans welcomes suggestions regarding his compilations, especially difficult-to-find/fugitive publications. The journal is available online from the main library webpage. To make checking this a habit you might want to add Health Communication to your Pennalerts account to be receive a table of contents email alert with each issue.