Digital Intelligence in PME, February 2012

I’m a bit late with this post as February’s PME (Pharmaceutical Market Europe) has been out for a while now. Once again the magazine features the latest print outing for my Digital Intelligence blog.

It asks, after the MHRA approves its first app, whether pharma mobile apps are medical devices. There’s also room for a look at the FDA’s ‘social media’ guidance on off-label information requests, a real-world evidence collaboration between AstraZeneca and IMS Health and much more.

• Read February’s PME in full online

Breaking news reports and social media guidelines

Last year the BBC issued social media guidelines whose stand out message seemed to be “don’t do anything stupid”.

But the Corporation’s not unreasonable suggestion to news staff who use the likes of Twitter may have been only partially heard, and today the BBC published some “refreshed breaking news guidance”.

These singled out the microblogging network to emphasise that it should be the priority of correspondents, reporters and producers to send information first to their BBC colleagues.

Europeans and newspaper websites

I thought the internet was supposed to kill the newspaper, but the public’s desire for a newspaper service – albeit a digital one – is still going strong, judging by statistics that caught my eye recently.

That’s not, of course, the same as saying things are easy for individual newspapers – if that were the case there would be no need for Newspaper Death Watch – and even some supposedly progressive online-only models are faltering.

Nonetheless, it’s striking that nearly half of Europe’s 380 million internet users visited a newspaper website in November 2011, according to online analysts ComScore.