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Mediating media coverage

Every week we issue a press release. We select a few of the articles to be published the following week and summarize them in a way that we hope will pique a journalist's interest. And while we (and our authors) love press coverage, we try make the release appetizing without being irresponsible. A catchy title is allowed, hyping up the conclusions or leaving out some key caveats isn't. And we always encourage journalists to link to the actual paper so that anyone interested can check the source.

The embargoed release goes to a select group of international science and medical journalists and is also posted on a couple of news sites. (If you are a journalist and want to receive our releases, send an e-mail to press@plos.org).

On November 21st, the lead item of our press release called "Causes of global death and disease in the next 25 years" summarized a paper by Colin Mathers and Dejan Locar on "Projections of global mortality and burden of disease from 2002 to 2030". To our delight, the story was picked up by many journalists, including some at Reuters, AP, and other news agencies. After the embargo lifted on November 27, it found its way onto the CNN ticker tape, into over 200 newspapers we know of, the pages of Nature and New Scientist, onto Monsters and Critics, and even DogFlu.ca.

It's great to see how many humans and dogs care about those projections — we all need to work together to make sure that limited resources to relieve global mortality and disease burden are spent the right way.

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