Bringing #JPM18 to the People

If you were still on an eggnog high, you may have missed it, but last week, the health journalism community had a justified meltdown over a new policy that would have barred them from entering "breakouts" at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare conference, which kicks off in a week in San Francisco.

The breakout sessions are 30-minutes, anything-goes Q-and-A events held in cramped rooms following the heavily scripted corporate presentations. To the extent to which anything novel gets said, it gets said in the breakouts, which was why the press was beside themselves.

The good news is that J.P. Morgan relented, so the press corps can jam into those sessions and listen for news amidst the pablum. The bad news is that the rest of us, especially those not in San Francisco with a conference badge, have a much, much harder time listening directly.

The corporate presentations are generally webcast, making it a useful way to catch up with new companies or companies in the midst of reinvention. But whether to webcast the breakout sessions is largely up to the companies themselves. (Two years ago, investor Brad Loncar listed the companies who did -- and did not -- choose to broadcast the breakout sessions.)

The other problem is that it's difficult to find all of the webcast links, short of going through website by website, scanning the IR sections. There should probably be a better way. And my colleagues at W2O Group and I are trying to work through that better way.

We've put up a Google Sheet -- you can access it here -- that seeks to re-create the #JPM18 schedule, with links to presentations and breakout sessions. We've done the first morning of the conference already, but we'll welcome any help you'd like to give: the document is fully editable.

Many companies have yet to announce their webcasting plans, so we'll be updating as we see additions made, as well as filling out the rest of the grid. The hope is that for those not at the conference, there can be a one-stop shop to provide links to whatever session might be of most interest at a given time without sending everyone on a wild goose chase.

It's a small nod to transparency, which is -- we hope -- the most 2018 thing we can do.