On Monday (June 13), Katherine Hobson's post "What Daughters of Women with Breast Cancer Should Know" to the Wall Street Journal Health Blog was brought to my attention via a Wall Street Journal tweet.
Hobson opens with a reference to another one of the newspaper's blogs, Speakeasy, which two days earlier published an essay by Jennette McCurdy, teen star on Nickelodeon’s “iCarly.” In it, McCurdy talks about growing up as her mother battled stage IV breast cancer.
There are a couple of observations here. First, the connection to McCurdy's celebrity status. Hobson does her readers a service by relating the teen star's story with factual information about the familial risks of breast cancer. Communicating McCurdy's story provides readers with a relevant way that women – moms, grandmothers, aunts, etc. – can approach a conversation about breast cancer with the young girls in their lives, a subject that even McCurdy says can be touchy. “… Sometimes, parents can have a difficult time judging just how much information you may or may not want to know.” Plus, including the teen star's story increases the blog’s search engine optimization. Adding McCurdy’s name to a Google search with terms "breast cancer" and "daughters," moves Hobson’s blog to the top of the search results.
Second, Hobson chooses to deliver additional, in-depth information on the risks of breast cancer via the social media tool called Scirbd. The pop-up feature allows the reader to go deeper into the subject matter and provides the convenience of printing or saving the information right from the screen.
Hobson could have easily used a simple link to the expertise offered by Dr. Marisa Weiss, as she did with several other resources; However, the Scirbd tool was a good way to bring added value to her blog and accomplish the medium’s mission of bringing news to people how and where they want it.
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