School’s magazine, blog earn national honors

The medical school’s Office of Communications & Public Affairs recently earned national honors for the magazine it produces and for its blog.

The spring 2013 issue of Stanford Medicine magazine, which featured a package of stories about blood, received a gold award in the special-issue category from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, known as CASE.

The judges for the category noted that “we expected publications to present a single topic from multiple perspectives, which Stanford Medicine accomplished in style. There was great variety and depth of content around the central subject matter, coupled with leads that pulled the reader right into each story, and sustained his or her interest with superior writing and creative angles for each story.”

The judges went on to say that two themes dominated the story package: “excellent writing and vivid imagery; the combination was dynamic.”

Gold award for staff writing

Additionally, the magazine received its third consecutive CASE gold award in the periodical staff writing category. The collection of five stories in the entry included: “Blood, sweat and fears,” a first-person account of dealing with blood phobia, by John Sanford; “Blood quest,” which describes Stanford’s historic role in protecting blood recipients from HIV, by Ruthann Richter; “Too deeply attached,” a feature on a potentially life-threatening condition known as placenta accreta that affects pregnant women, by Erin Digitale; “Almost without hope,” a look at the heartbreakingly scarce medical resources on an Indian reservation in South Dakota, by Tracie White; and “Microbe computers,” which describes the quest by a Stanford bioengineer to use living cells as computers, by Andrew Myers.

The magazine is edited by Rosanne Spector.

CASE is a professional organization for those in the fields of communications, alumni relations and development at educational institutions. It includes more than 3,600 colleges and universities, as well as independent elementary and secondary schools in 82 countries. To recognize the best work in these fields, CASE sponsors its annual Circle of Excellence Awards.

Bronze for blog

Additionally, the Health Information Resource Center (a clearinghouse for professionals in the consumer-health field) gave a bronze award to Scope, the blog produced by the Office of Communication & Public Affairs. The center’s Web Health Awards were created to “recognize high-quality electronic health information.”

Scope attracts more than 70,000 readers each month, and is overseen by Michelle Brandt.