News bureaus around the country tap into radiology's hot spots

In an era when a reporter can fire off an e-mail to Australia or Germany at the end of the day and have a reply waiting first thing the next morning, the concept of news bureaus may seem a bit antiquated. Outside of city council meetings and fires or earthquakes, a lot of reporting can be done by telephone, particularly in medical publications that draw on research from around the world.

Sometimes there is just no substitute for face-to-face interaction with a news source, however. Our main office in San Francisco places us close to several major research centers and a steady stream of specialty society meetings.

News editor C.P. Kaiser works from Philadelphia and takes advantage of his proximity to nearby universities, as well as New York, Washington, DC, and the American College of Radiology. Assistant editor Merlina Trevino works at our Waltham, MA, office and attends many of the meetings that spring from that concentration of academic medical centers in the Boston metropolitan region, particularly those in her specialty area of PACS and informatics.

This geographic diversity allows us to attend meetings we might otherwise miss and to develop closer relationships with sources we can visit in person. It also enables us to take better advantage of our various time zones, a fact not lost on the San Francisco editors who are relieved to have slightly fewer 5 a.m. calls to make to Europe.

Ms. Lowers is special projects editor for Diagnostic Imaging