Time for a Reset
The Munro Report is changing - what and why?
If you’ve been a subscriber for a while, you’ll have noticed that for a long time the newsletter was quieter than it should have been. The truth is that clinical and academic work absorbed the time I used to spend writing, and the gaps got longer until momentum was lost. I have missed it!
I would like to avoid that happening again, so here’s what I’m changing.
What this newsletter is for
For anyone who’s joined recently, or who’s forgotten why they signed up: The Munro Report exists to write clearly about paediatric infectious diseases, child health, and the quality of evidence behind both. The audience has always been mixed; parents who want to understand what’s actually happening when their child is unwell, clinicians who want a careful read of new data, academics who want commentary that takes methodology seriously, and journalists or policy people who want to know what the evidence actually shows.
I try to do one thing reliably: explain what we know, what we don’t, and how confident we should be about the difference. That hasn’t changed. What’s changed is how seriously I’m going to treat the work of doing it.
What’s changing
Three things.
Posting will be more regular: My aim is to publish every few weeks, with a working mix of evidence-quality commentary, outbreak news, and parent-facing pieces on the everyday child health questions that come up again and again.
The visual identity is being refreshed: Header images, the publication mark, and the overall look are being brought into a coherent theme that matches what the writing aspires to; a serious editorial publication. You may have noticed some of this already, and it will continue rolling out over the coming weeks.
A paid tier is opening: Almost everything on The Munro Report will remain free, as it always has been. Outbreak commentary, evidence reviews, and parent-facing pieces will all remain free, on publication, to anyone who subscribes. I will offer some additional material for those who offer support through a paid subscription by way of thankyou, but the substantive work stays open to everyone.
The reason for opening paid at all is editorial independence. A newsletter funded by readers doesn’t need sponsors, advertisements, or institutional patronage that comes with strings attached. And it lets the writing be sustained at a level the spare-time-around-clinical-work model has otherwise struggled to manage.
If the newsletter has been useful to you and you can spare it, a paid subscription is how you make more of it possible. If you can’t, or you’d rather not, that’s entirely fine. You remain a welcome reader, and the work you came for stays free.
That’s the reset. The next post will be along shortly.
Thank you for joining me.