As a growing number of city governments declare racism a public health issue, BMSG is partnering with the Praxis Project to evaluate such declarations by assessing how they were received by local stakeholders, how they were covered by the media, and whether they resulted in government action to dismantle inequities.
In this project for Futures Without Violence, Berkeley Media Studies Group evaluates how domestic violence and the child welfare system appear and intersect in the news, explores the implications of that framing, and offers recommendations for journalists to improve reporting on child welfare and domestic violence issues.
Food and beverage industry marketers are increasingly using online data to target their products with chilling precision to specific demographics, in specific locations, and at specific times. BMSG worked with the Center for Digital Democracy to assess how food and beverage marketers are deploying their digital tactics in retail environments.
BMSG worked with the California Department of Public Health to review and refine its messages supporting Health in All Policies, an approach that considers how all of our public policymaking decisions impact health. BMSG has written a chapter on talking about Health in All Policies for a toolkit the department developed to help advocates make the case for why Health in All Policies helps protect physical and fiscal health, advance community engagement, and build relationships across government sectors.
BMSG worked with The California Endowment’s HEAC Initiative to provide media advocacy training and strategic consultation as they pursued policy change in six sectors: schools, after-school, neighborhoods, health care settings, and marketing and advertising.
BMSG worked with the Sierra Health Foundation to maximize attention for the Healthy Youth, Healthy Region report that the Foundation commissioned from UC Davis’ Center for Regional Change. The report focused on rectifying health inequities among young people in nine counties. BMSG advised the Foundation on the dissemination and media strategy for the report release and preparing Foundation spokespeople, including youth, to talk with reporters, policy makers and other civic leaders.
With colleagues from the UC Berkeley School of Public Health and UCSF’s School of Medicine, we conducted a news analysis, comparing how supporters and opponents framed their messages in four successful California-based SSB tax campaigns.
The way researchers and reporters talk about health directly influences how policymakers think about it and, more importantly, what they do to promote health. BMSG collaborated with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) to create two customized strategic communications trainings, which we delivered to public health researchers and science reporters attending the June 2013 Canadian Science Writers’ Association Meeting in Montreal.
BMSG served on the technical assistance team of the Communities Creating Healthy Environments to see that all of its partners were aware of the latest food industry marketing practices and equipped to challenge those practices if they saw them interfering with establishing healthy environments for children and adolescents.
New technologies are fundamentally altering the marketing landscape. With our partners at the Center for Digital Democracy, we conducted a descriptive study to identify and analyze the emerging tobacco and alcohol digital marketing practices.
