Dear Diabetes UK
I was diagnosed with type 1 about twelve years ago. Almost immediately I became a life member of what was then the BDA (was it?). Over the years I've seen a few redesigns of Balance and noticed quite a few changes. Visually they have mostly been an improvement, or at least have kept the journal looking modern. But at the same time it's become editorially more chatty, more jaunty even with less emphasise on hard facts and fewer long articles of any depth. Of course I understand the reason for that and the need to appeal to younger readers, but for me that's been a bit of a shame. I find there's not so much for me to read, and most often it now gets skimmed and dumped.
The website too, certainly on the home page, is full of eye catching banners and adds all competing for attention. It is starting to look very commercially brash and not always easy to look at.
All that's a bit of a shame, but isn't really anything to worry about as such.
But then I got the latest newsletter. With the headline '1 in 5 have Diabetes' and '20% with Diabetes' in the subject line of the email. Very eye-catching.
The repetition of the statistic is interesting as it means it is clearly deliberate. But it is false. Not to put too fine a point on it, it's a lie. Read on in the newsletter and you quickly see that the numbers refer to 'hospital patients' only.
Obviously the headlines are meant to grab our attention and get us to read further, as it did with me. But playing about with the truth like this is a dangerous route. Some will only have read the headline after all, and will have gone away with the wrong information. And do this kind of thing too often and we will no longer be able to trust Diabetes UK to be the one place we can turn to for the unvarnished truth and the facts about our condition.
It's difficult not to feel that since I received my first issue of Balance it's been a continuous process of popularisation that has now changed your editorial policy to the point where strict adherence to facts can be 'flexible'.
I'm not against popularisation, even when I don't like it personally, but I worry that if this process continues with examples like the one above, it will eventually undermine all the core values that brought Diabetes Uk into being in the first place.
With concern
JohnG
I was diagnosed with type 1 about twelve years ago. Almost immediately I became a life member of what was then the BDA (was it?). Over the years I've seen a few redesigns of Balance and noticed quite a few changes. Visually they have mostly been an improvement, or at least have kept the journal looking modern. But at the same time it's become editorially more chatty, more jaunty even with less emphasise on hard facts and fewer long articles of any depth. Of course I understand the reason for that and the need to appeal to younger readers, but for me that's been a bit of a shame. I find there's not so much for me to read, and most often it now gets skimmed and dumped.
The website too, certainly on the home page, is full of eye catching banners and adds all competing for attention. It is starting to look very commercially brash and not always easy to look at.
All that's a bit of a shame, but isn't really anything to worry about as such.
But then I got the latest newsletter. With the headline '1 in 5 have Diabetes' and '20% with Diabetes' in the subject line of the email. Very eye-catching.
The repetition of the statistic is interesting as it means it is clearly deliberate. But it is false. Not to put too fine a point on it, it's a lie. Read on in the newsletter and you quickly see that the numbers refer to 'hospital patients' only.
Obviously the headlines are meant to grab our attention and get us to read further, as it did with me. But playing about with the truth like this is a dangerous route. Some will only have read the headline after all, and will have gone away with the wrong information. And do this kind of thing too often and we will no longer be able to trust Diabetes UK to be the one place we can turn to for the unvarnished truth and the facts about our condition.
It's difficult not to feel that since I received my first issue of Balance it's been a continuous process of popularisation that has now changed your editorial policy to the point where strict adherence to facts can be 'flexible'.
I'm not against popularisation, even when I don't like it personally, but I worry that if this process continues with examples like the one above, it will eventually undermine all the core values that brought Diabetes Uk into being in the first place.
With concern
JohnG
