Thinking about digital media + sexual health communication Part One
A few years ago I published a couple of articles on ‘digital sexual health’, suggesting that sexual health communication professionals might productively draw on insights from the fields of media studies and digital journalism studies.
(Note: these are paywalled, but I’m happy to share a pdf).
It was the hey-day of ‘digital first’ social news platforms like Buzzfeed and Vice News - and many legacy platforms were investing in digital experiments.
At the time I was teaching in a journalism program and working (in an advisory capacity) with local organisations who were designing new ‘youth’ sexual and reproductive health platforms.
As a non-journalist interested in the ways we learn about and express sexuality and gender in digital cultures - and the social and political forces that impact our learning and expression - I was intrigued by the growth of social news platforms.
As the 2014 New York Times’ leaked ‘innovation report’ revealed, even exceptionally well funded legacy news organisations struggled to reshape their offerings as they moved away from producing static newspaper formats.
In order to be effective in dynamic digital ecosystems, they had to rework their editorial systems, business models, professional identities, team structures and the nature of story-telling itself.
Journalism was a profession (and industry) built on effective communication, and it was being radically reshaped by the growth of social platforms, newsfeeds, and algorithm-driven content-sharing practices.
But I had the sense that a lot of health communication work I was seeing was more aligned with marketing theory and practice than journalism - and as a consequence there was a lot of emphasis on factors like ‘measuring engagement’ and less emphasis on how to reshape health outreach content for a digital-first environment.
For example, there was also a lot of desire to build apps in the twenty-teens - but not much curiousity about how target audiences (or priority populations) were already engaging with sexual and reproductive health content in digital spaces.
Re-reading my own publications almost a decade later (in the age of the broligarchy), the research that informed the articles holds up well, but the recommendations are pretty outdated.
The boom in digital news and magazine has busted - in part due to the content monetisation and moderation changes on Meta and X (formerly Twitter) that have all but sucked the joy out of the social web (but that’s another post).
I don’t teach journalism anymore, but I’ve recently been exploring new sources of (lateral) insights into digital media content production - mostly via newsletter content and conference panels.
I say lateral because I’m currently picking over content from a range of disciplines and industries (from digital marketing, to digital journalism, to digital visual and performing arts) like an academic bin chicken.
This approach is sparking some reflections on what works well in digital sexual & reproductive health communication now, and how it could productively evolve in the future.
Obviously, this is all work-in-progress. In Part Two, I’ll share some sources… and some of my preliminary thoughts.