Interview: Conan Kisor, American Medical Association
Conan is the editor of a number of print and electronic publications for the American Medical Association (AMA), the largest organization for physicians in the United States.
I am 35, and the son of a newspaper editor and book critic for the Chicago Sun-Times. My mother was a children’s book critic, so there were lots of opinions at home! I did a four-year BA in English at Kenyon College in Ohio, and my first job was working for a public relations firm. I called them 50 times and they eventually let me become an intern with them. In my last year at college I started writing spots for the college newspaper, even though my mother made me promise never to work in the newspaper business – the competitiveness, long hours, and hard living takes its toll.
I stayed in PR for a year and then I got a job as a news reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago, a wire service that covered crime, government, and courts. I learnt the who, what, where, how, and why of journalism and developed my interviewing skills – it’s very difficult to try to get the person on the other end of the phone to say something quotable.
My “client” isn’t really a client, it’s the entire American Medical Association, my employer, and I focus on what we put in the magazine to convince the readership to keep their membership in the AMA, come to our meetings, and collaborate with us.
My publications are intended to demonstrate the many ways the AMA is working on behalf of doctors. The goal is retaining and growing our membership of 250,000 physicians and students, which is a broad audience. Our readers include everyone from 23-year-old students to 65-year-old physicians.
The doctors in our audience could be working in accident and emergency in a hospital or be in private practice in an office on their own, each having very different experiences within the medical profession. We focus on the broad, national issues that affect every member of the profession. Our tone of voice aims to be one that doctors trust. We try to include subject matter for everyone, but recognize that not every article will appeal to every reader.
We produce a number of publications. AMA Voice is a bimonthly newsletter mailed to every member. It has eight pages and plenty of photographs. I am the editor and I have two writers on my staff; together we produce a handful of publications. The writers draft the content. I write one or two articles and edit the rest and I also write some of the issue-based advertising. We’re part of a large, integrated in-house marketing agency of about 20 people – we handled over 13,000 creative projects last year from advertising and posters to magazines and newsletters.
We work with a design manager and five designers, and we share the process of working out the initial layouts. We follow a loose template and use consistent graphic elements in the publications, and we all use a booklet of house fonts and colors.
We plan the editorial and approve the content, which gives us a great deal of freedom. We highlight frontline medical doctors and students in a real-world approach – it’s not “top-down” and we include lots of profiles of our members. The issues don’t change much year to year, but the solutions and tactics we use do change. We are always asking ourselves “How can we demonstrate concisely that AMA is doing something to make the problem better?”
The big features, usually covering two pages, are planned a couple of months in advance. We are given the design input at the front end, and then plan a photographic style to suit the article’s content and angle. For example, the government’s payments to doctors under Medicare (for the over-65s) is a big problem. The government plans cuts in the payments to doctors by 10 percent each year, which makes it hard for older patients to find a doctor who can afford to take care of them. We will find those whose practices have to limit the number of Medicare patients they can accept, and report on how the AMA is working with lawmakers to help them. We use graphic headlines and imagery. For example, we’ll feature an ophthalmologist standing in front of an eye chart supported by a headline that uses “focus” as its theme.
“The issues don’t change much year to year, but the solutions and tactics we use do change.”
We have a staff photographer who travels around for us, and we hire local photographers too. We art direct them remotely by giving them a creative brief and the article to read, so that they can bring the story to life. Sometimes we fly a designer out to art direct the shoot in person too. The doctors are usually helpful, finding 15 minutes in their diary for us. We do a lot of phone interviews with doctors, but lots of the material hits the cutting room floor because we can’t publish it or don’t have room for it – 800 words is our maximum for an article.
Our staff writers are highly informed. Two have been with us for three and four years, and we have a new writer on the team too. We have to be conversant in the subject matter and also in the correct tone of voice – getting the tone right is 80 percent of the battle. I aim to complete an interview in about 15 minutes, prepare a short article, and make sure that the headlines say a lot. We know our audience is intelligent but very busy, so the editorial has to be “idiot-proof” so that our readers will “get it” in a couple of seconds as they flick through the pages. We sacrifice cleverness for simplicity. We’re translating for a general audience, so it can be strange to interview doctors who are leading experts in their field and then simplify their words.
After I hang up the phone I have to type up the interview straight away, as I can lose the essence of it, even with the stacks of notes I take. I bang it out as quickly as possible in order to keep it as fresh as possible. We use focus groups to learn the reactions to our work, and I am always astonished by the take some people have on it. For example, if the words “choice” or “life” appear in a headline, they tend to conjure up images of the debate on abortion in the US.
My advice to other writers is to try to imagine that you’re the audience – think about how much time you have to read these sort of articles, and what you will think about each article under these circumstances.