Introduction to the Show

Carolyn: Welcome to Circulation on the Run. You're weekly podcast summary and backstage pass to the journal. I'm Dr. Carolyn Lam from the National Heart Center in Duke National University of Singapore. I am thrilled to be your host every week. Joining me today to introduce our podcast are two very very special guests. Dr. Joseph Hill from UT Southwestern is editor and chief of Circulation. Hi Joe.

Joe: Pleasure to be here, Carolyn. Carolyn: Thanks, and your second guest, Dr Amit Kara is also from UT Southwestern and the associate editor for digital strategies of Circulation. Hi Amit.

Amit: Hi, Carolyn. Happy to be here. Carolyn: No Joe and Amit, if you don't mind I'm going to start the ball rolling by sharing my little story of how these podcasts came to be. Now do you guys remember when we first talked about this? All right well I do. Joe: Absolutely. Carolyn: Ha ha because frankly, and I don't know if you know this Joe, it wasn't a very good day for me. I had just landed very early in the morning from a long trip and I was battling jet lag while trying to get a million things done such as unpack, clear my mail, get ready for work. You know, the usual. Of course the thing I needed most was to learn that I also needed to do weekly podcasts for Circulation right. So after our chat I did I suppose what a lot of us do when things seem a little bit overwhelming. I dropped everything and I headed for a run in the gym. But in the gym as always I was trying to multitask as well, so I brought my mobile device for my jog so that I could read my mail at the same time, you know. I can already see the smiles of everyone listening because I know you've done this before. Anyone who's done it will know what a pain it is trying to read while you're bouncing up and down on the treadmill. It was just at this point when I was about to go cross-eyed that the radio in the gym started to play the morning news and the news headlines. I remember thinking to myself, oh wow, how I wish I could have someone read my mail or at least the headlines of the mail to me so that I could get the gist of everything even while I was literally on the run. That's how the Circulation podcast idea came to me and hence it's name, Circulation on the Run. To me it's an audio summary of the headlines of the journal so that you the listener can in 15 minutes get caught up literally on the run or drive or whatever it is you're doing when you'd rather listen than read. Just so you know you haven't missed the big things. But in addition to getting an overview of the issues contents every week, you get main take home messages as a clinician. Because it will be dull to talk to myself every week I will be inviting an author, an editor, of a featured article of particular clinical significance so that we can give you a behind the scenes look of the paper. That is the idea of the Circulation podcast. Joe, how does this fit with your vision of the journal? Joe: Carolyn, I love your story behind the scenes on how this all got started and I really, truly appreciate your energy and leadership here. This is such an important endeavor for where we want to take the journal. In fact, your leadership here illustrates one of the major initiatives that we have started and that is a global footprint of editorial oversight for Circulation. We are afforded an extraordinary privilege here to see the best science as it emerges from all around the world and we want to do everything we can to make sure that the journal meets the needs of the clinicians, the practitioners, and the investigators everywhere in the world. Here you are leading this important initiative from your home base in Singapore. That's exactly what we're looking to foster and develop going forward. Carolyn: Oh Joe thanks so much for that. I really so appreciate this privilege of doing this and it's true that I'm a living example of the journal going global so to speak. I also really like the way you say that with this overwhelming knowledge that we're facing, we do need help to synthesize and synergize that information. Especially in the clinically oriented way. I think you made that very clear to us in your leadership of our editorial board. Thanks for that. Maybe speaking of trying to reach the world, social media and digital strategies play a big roll. Amit maybe you could tell us a little bit more about how the podcasts fit in your larger scheme for the journal. Amit: Absolutely and I just want to echo Joe's comments and thank you, Carolyn, for taking the lead of this important endeavor. We couldn't think of a better person to do so. When we look digital strategies we have to remember that the journal is producing so much valuable content. The authors are working very hard and creating such an immense amount of new knowledge. We have to appreciate that people consume knowledge in different ways. In the current era there's so many different ways to do that. One hand we still have the traditional print journal which is incredibly valuable and important. Has depth of information that certainly many and most people would want to investigate. But the other end of the spectrum we have our bite sized information which is Twitter and Facebook and so forth which certainly helps people sort of prioritize or are able to glean what's exciting that week and then they can go back and do a deeper dive. The podcast fits somewhere in between. I love what you said, Circulation on the Run, you're example was a great one for people who are wanting to consume this information but perhaps in a different way. The audio component and also a time component where they have 10 to 15 minutes to take in this information. Your vision for this is a great one. We'll have a brief component where you will review the weekly articles and people can then learn what's in the journal and what's the most important findings and content that week. Similarly they have the opportunity to really get to know an author and get to know some editors and to really get behind the scenes. This backstage pass if you will. We finally have to remember that we're appealing to a broad audience. People of different ages and around the world. People like to consume information in different ways. We really like to have this as an important part of our offering towards helping people consume this information. Carolyn: Oh Amit. I couldn't have said it better. Thank you so much. Just to be true to ethos. Let me remind everyone that it's going to be a 15 minute podcast and we're going to do our very best to compress all that you need to know into those 15 minutes. I just want to echo what you said that this is only part of the broader strategy and it doesn't mean that the print journal is dead in any way. In fact I am so excited to see the new journal. I don't know about you. It's got a whole new look. It is really really quite good looking, if I might say so. Everyone out there, you're going to expect this new journal on June 29th, 2016. Look out for it. Trust me. You won't be disappointed because there's also a very special little part of the cover that I'd like to discuss before we sign off. That is the doodle. Joe could you tell us a little bit more about the doodle? Joe: As you say the journal look I think is fantastic. It has a clean and modern look to it. The judicious use of color to highlight the different types of content, which as before spans a spectrum of basic science, the definition going forward is vertebrate models, pre clinical models, and disease oriented questions. Starting there, traversing through clinical science, population sciences, health services research, the entire spectrum. Again we are afforded an extraordinary privilege here to help frankly shape the future of cardiovascular medicine. We take that responsibility very seriously. That's why we've recruited an extraordinary team of editors from literally around the world. At the same time, we want to have a little fun. We want to make it fun and engaging as well as very very serious. As part of that, we've launched something that we're calling the Circulation Doodle. That is an idea that leverages the google.com website where I think everyone is familiar with. They, based on an event that occurred that day or week or month, they play around with the visual depiction of the word Google. We're going to do the same thing with Circulation. Every month we will reach out and solicit doodles from artists all around the world. Everyone who's listening to this podcast, I encourage you to think about this. Every month there will be a doodle theme. The first one for July will be Texas. Commemorating the fact that the journal headquarters is moving back to Texas after having been in Boston for 12 years. Previous to that it was under the leadership of Jim Willerson. It's coming back to Texas and the first Circulation doodle depicts a Texas theme. In fact, if you're interested you can find this in the April 25th issue of the journal where in the third of four notes from the incoming editor in that third one on April 25th, we show the first doodle. We're asking people to submit doodles according to monthly themes. The month of August will be vacation. I can tell you start thinking about ways in which you might incorporate a vacation theme in the depiction of the world Circulation for August and the one that comes in that's the best, that the editors like the most, it will be placed on the cover of the print journal and on the website for a full month. We've also conceived themes for the rest of the year all the way through to June of 2017, and in the first issue that comes out from our team, we will list those themes and you'll have plenty of time to start thinking about what you would like to submit. Then in subsequent years, those monthly themes will also evolve. We'd like to get people's ideas about issues that come up related to holidays or national heritage months. Things that we might not know about from our base in the US. We want to do that around the world. It's an opportunity to be creative at the level of themes, and again artistic depiction of the word circulation. Carolyn: I love that. Thank you so much Joe and that just exemplifies that we are all about science and all about having fun at the same time. That was a brilliant introduction to what our podcasts are going to be like as well. Thank you so much Joe and Amit for joining me today. Again, everyone, this was Circulation on the Run. Don't forget, first issue coming out 29th June, 2016.