Strengthening the public health debate on handguns, crime and safety
Our objective with this project was to bring accuracy to the current debate about guns and increase the visibility of public health perspectives on handgun violence.
Studying food and marketing industry research behind digital media marketing to children and adolescents
This study improved the accessibility and visibility of an important body of research that is playing a critical role in shaping contemporary food and beverage marketing to children and youth. With help from our partner Jeff Chester at the Center for Digital Democracy, BMSG collected, catalogued, analyzed and made available industry research reports on the effects of the techniques and approaches used in contemporary food marketing to children and youth.
Supporting advocacy for policy change through enhanced understanding of news coverage of the social determinants of health
In counties throughout California, community leaders are advocating for structural and policy changes to advance racial and health equity. To strengthen their ability to do so, BMSG helped build their awareness of how news coverage advances or hinders efforts to improve the social and environmental conditions that influence health.
Talking about child care
For this project, BMSG provided media advocacy training for select grantees of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and developed tools for advocates working in California and elsewhere in the nation. Ultimately this training was intended to help improve the quality of child care, its financing and accessibility.
Talking about prevention in Minnesota
To help the Minnesota Statewide Health Improvement Program (SHIP) grantees and Community Health Boards (CHBs) understand how their most important issues — nutrition, physical activity and tobacco — are currently framed in the media, BMSG analyzed news coverage on these issues in distinct regions of the state. Based on the news content analyses and a skill and message assessment, BMSG provided recommendations to the Minnesota Department of Health about how it and its grantees can best frame prevention in the given news context. BMSG also delivered a series of regional trainings to SHIP grantees to help them learn more effective ways of talking about prevention. Following the trainings, BMSG reexamined news to assess whether SHIP and CHBs key messages about prevention were included in news coverage.
Talking about teen dating violence: Bringing prevention into the conversation
BMSG worked with the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence to better understand how teen dating violence is portrayed in the news and what the implications are for prevention policy.
Talking about trauma
This project, funded by The California Endowment, equipped the field with the language and skills needed to more effectively communicate about childhood trauma; trained a new breed of online journalists to tell stories using that language; and gave advocates the tools to transform systems that may compound, rather than mitigate, the traumas children experience.
The advertising story
The Advertising Story set out to find out how the Ad Council’s obesity prevention messages compared with other messages from food and beverage companies and what context those messages would appear in.
The soda tax debate in Telluride, Colorado: How was it framed?
BMSG conducted a study to help Healthy Eating Research (HER), a program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, understand how news coverage portrayed a 2013 proposal to tax soda in Telluride, Colorado, so that future ballot initiatives might better anticipate what to expect when SSB taxes are presented to local voters.
Uncovering the roots of health inequity: Lessons for health departments
BMSG worked with the National Association of County and City Health Officials on its project with the CDC’s Center for Injury Prevention and Control titled the Roots of Health Inequity: Synthesizing a Knowledge Base for Practice. BMSG synthesized the literature and developed a series of reports to explain health inequity and its root causes.