‘The quest for pageviews has not been kind to specialists’

After more than 16 years as a journalist, eight as a dedicated health correspondent, Helen McArdle has hung up her dictaphone at The Herald in Scotland.

She is off to a new post as communications and media manager for the Edinburgh-based Eljamel Inquiry which is investigating Tayside neurosurgeon Sam Eljamel and claims of poor care to his patients.

MJA Chair, Shaun Lintern, asked Helen for some reflections on her career and the challenges health journalists face.

How hard was it leaving journalism?

It was not an easy decision. Yes, the hours are long, the pressure of the newsroom is fierce, and the workload seems impossible at times, but any journalist will tell you that there is nothing like the buzz of a great scoop or the excitement that comes from a tantalising tip off.

Working as a reporter for the Glasgow-based Herald – the newspaper I had grown up reading – was an absolute privilege. I was blessed with the best colleagues in the business; people who never took themselves, nor the tumults of our rapidly changing industry, too seriously.

What was so great about health as a patch?

Working as a health correspondent, perhaps more so than many areas of journalism (I previously covered transport for the Herald), really does expose you to the best and the worst of humanity. I was always amazed by the number of people willing to share intensely personal details of medical negligence or terminal disease diagnoses that might have been avoided, all because they hoped that by doing so they might stop the same thing happening to someone else.

In my experience, by the time people are coming to journalists – especially health journalists – they are at their wit’s end. These might be patients who have come to harm or exasperated NHS staff whose attempts at whistleblowing have been shut Down.

What was hard about the job?

The worst feeling as a journalist is when you feel sure that someone is telling you the truth, but you know your chances of turning it into a report you can actually publish are slim to none. The reasons can be multiple: you cannot persuade other sources to corroborate the claims, on or off-record; the legal risks are high; or you simply do not have the time it would take to investigate properly (a problem that is particularly acute in local and regional press, where newsroom resources have been shredded over the past 15 years).

I finished up at the Herald with several stories hanging in the air, unfinished. In one, a consultant had come to me complaining that a culture of bullying and cronyism in his department had led to several senior medics being signed off sick with stress, leading to a dependence on locum cover. By the time I found anyone else willing to speak to me, I was days away from finishing up.

Meanwhile, attempts to stand up the claims about locum spending through freedom of information requests had been foiled by what looked to me like highly selective responses by the health board concerned. Could I have stood that one up, if I had more time? I’ll never know.

What has changed since you started?

My 16 years working as a journalist coincided with a transformation of the media landscape. When I joined the Sunday Herald in 2008 (moving to its daily stablemate, the Herald the following year) neither newspaper had a website and none of the reporters were on Twitter. The shift in focus from print editions to a “digital-first” agenda where journalists are writing primarily for the website is understandable when a majority of readers access the news via the internet.

On the downside, the quest for pageviews has not been kind to specialist journalists whose work inevitably attracts fewer eyeballs than celebrity gossip, politics, or culture war flashpoints.

My own online traffic peaked during 2020 and 2021 when demand for Covid news was at its height. While London-based nationals like the Times and Telegraph continue to have
dedicated health editors and correspondents, this is fast disappearing in Scotland.

The Scotsman made its health correspondent redundant in 2023, and the health correspondent at the Scotland edition of the Times now has to split her time covering health, education, and general news. It remains to be seen whether the Herald will recruit a replacement for my role, but chatter in the industry is gloomy. One senior executive told me it is “hard to make the business case” for a dedicated health reporter while news organisations chase the pageviews that bring in the advertisers.

Arguably, the case is stronger when it comes to subscriptions: people paying to access news sites are more likely to be attracted by expert writers and specialists covering the topics they are interested in. Perhaps a shift towards paywalls will revitalise demand for specialist journalism, including health. In an era of mis- and disinformation, it feels more vital than ever.

What are the consequences of these changes?

In Scotland, the lack of specialist correspondents also leaves a vacuum into which issues like the Scottish Government’s failure to reboot elective activity in the NHS at anything like the pace of England’s risks going unscrutinised, and the reasons behind it misunderstood. General and political reporters cannot be expected to have the knowledge or contacts base to make sense of what is really going on and why, and that leaves the public badly under served. For now, however, that is someone else’s problem.

What next for you?
At the end of January I took up a new post as communications and media manager for the Edinburgh-based Eljamel Inquiry which will investigate how and why Tayside neurosurgeon Sam Eljamel was able to continue practising in the NHS for years despite numerous alarm bells warning that patients were coming to harm.

Hearings should begin later this year. Like most health journalists, the case seems depressingly familiar. How often do we hear from NHS staff and patients that something is going wrong, but nothing is being done to fix it? I hope the inquiry will give patients the answers they deserve.

If you’re interested in contacting the inquiry or want to be added to its mailing list you can email Helen at