Media training exercise for future public health physicians and journalists: Community Medicine Residency Program at University of Toronto and Journalism Program at Ryerson University

The media training exercise is a collaboration between the Community Medicine Residency Program at the University Toronto (U of T) and the School of Journalism at Ryerson University (Ryerson). The objective is to enhance the media interview skills of future public health physicians, and raise public health knowledge for the journalism students. The media training session has been conducted annually since 2002, with eight radio interviews and three TV exercises. Each media training session includes three steps: planning, exercise and review. PLANNING: one month before the exercise, the coordinator at U of T collected the resident physicians' areas of interest. The professor at Ryerson let the journalism student choose the resident they would like to interview according to the residents' expertise. The matched resident and journalism student list was e-mailed to both groups. One week before the exercise, the residents and journalist students conducted a telephone pre-interview. EXERCISE: on the day of the exercise, residents and journalism students conducted the interview in the professional studio at Ryerson, and then the journalism students edited the clips on site. It usually took one hour to complete 10 interviews. REVIEW: the group review session was conducted immediately after the exercise, with residents, journalism students, the journalism professor and residency program director. The clips were played and evaluated, in a discussion led by the faculty members. The evaluation of the training sessions was very useful for both groups. The media training session will be continued as a regular curriculum feature of the two universities.