Here's how much money doctors actually make - it’s a catchy headline, but it summarizes a single article and then passes it off as research...

I don’t mean to pick on Business Insider in particular, but this is a great example of the kind of journalism that I’ve found frustrating. BI has an annual article that pretends to analyze doctor salaries - 2016, 2017. In 2017, it’s just pulling two charts from a single Medscape article and then describing them... there’s a lot of interesting content discoverable with a google search or even a look at the Medscape references. The articles miss a ton of nuance, e.g., controlling for specialty, seniority, hours worked, and some other factors black male physicians earn 35% less than their white male counterparts, a significantly larger gap than the 13% the BI article indicates - but women don’t have a disparity in pay between black and white doctors (more here).

Racism, compensation and costs in healthcare, and their intersections are a hugely deep research-hole you could fall into and a short, well-researched summary of the current state medical compensation by race and specialty would be an incredibly interesting article. However, by regurgitating articles online, we’re creating more content in the sense of “bytes of data on the web” but not actually creating more content in the sense of “new informed opinions or ideas.” BI could very well have created a one- or two-line summary and linked to the Medscape article or even just re-directed a BI-hosted link to the article’s URL; instead they’ve created a false “second-source” online that could dilute the power of the original article (by sucking traffic or potentially reducing the SEO strength of Medscape). Also, by spreading the readership of what’s essentially one article across multiple periodicals, journalists may be reducing their own ability to survive based on advertising or subscriptions.