Malachi Sheahan III, MD, has been at the helm of Vascular Specialist for more than seven years. In that time, it is fair to say the newspaper—the official voice of the Society for Vascular Surgery (SVS)—has evolved. About a year and a half after he took over at the helm in the summer of 2018, the title changed publishers. With the swap in publishing partner came a new tone and editorial strategy.
Now, another new era beckons for Vascular Specialist, which mails out monthly to each of the Society’s members. From Jan. 1, the SVS will publish the title in-house after six years of a publishing partnership with London, England-based medical media and event company BIBA Medical, owners of the globally renowned Charing Cross (CX) International Symposium founded by the late vascular surgery luminary Roger Greenhalgh, MD.
And Sheahan, Vascular Specialist’s medical editor with overall editorial oversight for the paper, sees opportunity for further evolution in the title’s voice. Six years ago, when he last confronted an unknown Vascular Specialist future, he wasn’t quite sure what to expect. But, says the chair of vascular surgery at Louisiana State University (LSU) in New Orleans, the partnership with BIBA Medical breathed new life into the paper.
“For the first time, we really started producing our own content rather than commenting on news we got from the wires, so to speak—that really limited the scope of what we could cover,” Sheahan recalls. “A majority was cardiology-related, medical-related. Of course, that is interesting—but we could never really cover content on-site at the vascular surgery regional meetings like we do now, or at VESS [the Vascular and Endovascular Surgery Society], or at SCVS [the Society for Clinical Vascular Surgery]. All of that came on with BIBA.”
Over the last six years, Sheahan says, Vascular Specialist was able to build its own brand. With the title now moving in-house to the SVS, with the Society now acting as both owner and publisher, the chief editor hopes to be able to further flesh out that brand. “Now we cover breaking science in the vascular surgery world directly, and we bring a different flair, much more of a voice,” he reflects. “What are we? We are not a journal, not strictly a newspaper, and not quite a magazine. I would say we are much more ‘of the specialty,’ a must-read for folks who want to stay up to date with what is happening with the vascular specialty: the science, the regionals, the politics of it, anything controversial, government relations, really new content. In the longer term, we plan to do more mapped-out content, with more lead time, and more special issues.”
To that end, Vascular Specialist will move from a 12-issue publishing schedule to a nine-times-per-year title that places a laser focus on specific areas of vascular surgery, such as peripheral arterial disease (PAD) and venous disease. The paper has a new managing editor, Killian Meara, who will assist the medical editor in setting the editorial agenda. Sheahan also wants to broaden the range of voices that appear as guest editorialists, columnists and commentators.
“The paper now is how I have envisioned us one day to be: to be the newspaper for vascular surgery and for the specialty, and for anyone who is interested in it,” he says. “We have been able to increase our medical student readership, our trainee readership—creating content for them. We want to cover the specialty completely. I want to have more associate editors and more voices involved, so that it is not just me and my voice.
“We want to have more recurring writers, more vascular surgeons who will give the newspaper a different flavor and a different perspective than I can—a different sensibility and opinion, hopefully, from the way I think, so that we can be more well-rounded, I would say, and especially in the editorial process.”
And Sheahan, who now also serves as SVS secretary and is chair of the Vascular Surgery Board (VSB) of the American Board of Surgery (ABS), won’t be heading anywhere any time soon. He will remain as medical editor and as a popular and regular author of the page 2 editorial, a coveted spot which is the preserve of the paper’s chief editor to either write or commission. As for any perceived conflicts assigned to him? They remain just that: perception over reality, he says.
“I don’t see any of my other roles, for instance, necessarily as conflicts because they all serve the specialty, and everything I have written has been written in deference to the specialty—what would be best for vascular surgeons and their patients—and I don’t think there are true conflicts there,” he says. “But it is definitely time to bring more voices in. Everyone is going to write from the perspective of the specialty, of course; we may disagree, but that is the goal. Just having other views, different views, from different societies, will always be helpful to counteract any perceived conflicts of interest I might have.”
No greater testament to that is in evidence, perhaps, than editorials Sheahan has written in recent years taking a look at areas such as trauma surgery and cardiology where they intersect with vascular. To counter his own voice, he invited a trauma surgeon counterpart to write a rebuttal. It went over so well that he found himself accosted once again, more than three years later, at the recent American College of Surgeons annual meeting, by a trauma surgeon keen to remark on the two articles.
