Medicine, without it we would die. It is considered to be a necessity in the world today, and it is constantly evolving. With all of the change and innovation in today’s times there are few ways in which we as people can keep up. One of the most invaluable sources of information are blogs. In the recent years they have been gaining a lot of traction with the new generation, generally they contain short posts on the constantly changing environment cutting through the nonsense and getting straight to the point. A blog that I will be talking about in particularly is http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/. This is by far one of the best blogs I have ever read when in terms of health and wellness. It provides an overall coverage of the topic ranging from family issues to the body and its ever changing landscape.
The various bloggers cover a multitude of issues in clear and concise formats that are appealing to the eye and draw the readers in. The authors themselves are all well-rounded in many different areas of wellness. For example, one author named Nicholas Bakalar has composed pieces in areas such as the mind, parenting, the body, and food. I have read articles from each of these different sections and he presents his facts in a way that does not mislead. He only states as much as he knows and makes it known that any conclusions that he draws are based upon current research or the few studies that he, himself has looked at. By doing this he creates credibility for himself because it allows the reader to trust that they are getting the most accurate information for the time in which they are being presented, obviously things can change as time progresses and new discoveries occur but the point of a blog, or at least this one that is, is to get the most up to date stories and news to the public.
With a topic like health and wellness the blog’s audience is a wide range of individuals. It is for people are just generally health conscious to those who are medicine junkies. By this I mean they are always up to date with the constantly changing environment and latest medical breakthroughs/setbacks, not that they are addicts to any medicines. There are articles that range from how exercise affects your brain to doctors contemplating if they hastened a patient’s death. This makes generalizing an audience difficult, however if I had to I would say that the audience is in the age range of mid 20’s to early 40’s. They are mix of both genders and races, who lie somewhere within the middle class due to the fact that this is the New York Times and as a whole that is who I feel they are targeting.
The aspects of the text that help to gain such an audience and generate return customers are a combination of the layout, reader interactivity, and consistent up to date news on anything and everything that relates to the various subcategories of health and wellness. The layout of the page is very simple yet efficient. It is a basic, white layout that uses aspects of color to draw the reader’s eye to the articles themselves. Also every article has an associated picture to go along with it, when looking at some of them you want to read the article just to find out why that picture was used. For example, one article is entitled Antibiotic Use Tied to Diabetes Risk and the associated picture is a die. In terms of reader interactivity, in the “Doctors” section they have a post called Think Like a Doctor. In these posts they describe a case and leave it to the readers to determine what is wrong with the person or what caused a certain situation to arise. Then on the following day they post the answer with a fully explained diagnosis of what the person has or what happened to them and all about that disease or condition. Personally I plan on returning monthly to solve the mystery (or at least try to that is). The variety of subcategories is also a huge part of the text. With most medical blogs you will find they are highly specialized which in some cases can scare readers off because if they are not experts in everything related to surgery for example, then they will be completely lost. Here the readers receive general knowledge on just about everything and anything they would want to know. They have sections in the body, the mind, food, fitness, love, family, doctors, voices, and even pets. It covers topics in relation to current events and how that can affect individuals both physically and mentally. One article speaks on gay parents and the worries they may have with their kids going back to school in terms of something dubbed by the author as “microaggressions”. Another thing this site does very well is that they always tie the articles back to people and explain how it affects the public rather than just stating some random facts leaving readers to think why this information is being presented to them.
When it comes to intellectual standards of critical and creative thinking set forth by some institutions there are two done very well by this site. It follows both relevance and depth. This site is able to stay consistent with its theme and always ties all of the different blog posts back to the topic of health and wellness. The articles are all of a similar style and it helps to keep a consistent tone throughout and make all of the articles have a similar feel. All of these different things help this site retain its relevance. When it comes to depth, as I have previously said this site has a lot of different topics however I feel that no matter how short the posts are, the bloggers almost always go into the topic they are covering and try to get to the heart of the matter explaining why what they are writing about matters and the aspects that go into it.
Keeping all of this in mind though, this site is not without flaw. While it is nice to see authors cover a wide variety of topics, I wish there were more authors solely focused on one category. This would add a nice variation to the blog with some of the articles containing more specialized information and perhaps tying multiple articles together. This would also help for the blog to reach a wider audience, giving the people who already have a vast knowledge on topics such as the ones covered something else to learn rather than just general facts of what’s changing in the world.
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