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NYT Now, which launched last year, is an app that provides a selection of New York Times stories, plus aggregated content. The NYT Now team is staffed with a combination of internal and external hires, with editors and developers working closely together.
That just leaves one thing on the personnel side: who to lead this “ragtag band of people,” as Latour put it. He thinks the best results come from a person who knows how the organization works, and at the same time who can envision success and move it into reality, “who delivers something fresh.” That’s an unusual combination.
As for the where: The Minneapolis Star Tribune moved to new offices this year. Editors for both print and digital sit together at a “hub” in the center of the newsroom. The Journal has a similar setup in New York; other newsrooms are starting to provide space for engineers and product designers on the floor as well.
Don’t put your newsroom startup in a corner or in the basement, Latour implored. The Journal has two digital teams working in the middle of the newsroom on a mobile initiative and the new WSJ.com. Developers and digital designers moved into the newsroom in May, and the digital designers now also report to it. Mobile and web developers in the newsroom will work side by side with journalists on products and new features.
It’s the execution that counts.
If building a startup within a legacy news medium is one way to spur innovation and the transformation to digital, changing your day-to-day operations is another track. It alters your workflow, papers that have made the change tell me, and it alters the newsroom’s way of thinking.
Meetings do matter. Sometimes it’s on a small scale. At The Boston Globe, the managing editor for digital has a Monday morning meeting with the head of products, the head of editorial, and a representative from the sales department.
The Sports section announces a chat about hockey and both pre-game and post-game blogs. The Features Section will be blogging about fish sandwiches. The business desk will run the crop forecast outlook for corn.
A day later, at the The New York Times: Different venue, same idea. The most important meeting of the day, the 10 am news meeting, was officially retired this spring. Up until then, it was called the Page One Meeting and editors pitched their stories accordingly: The emphasis was on the print paper, and on page A1.
Now the meeting has a new name — the News Meeting — and a new feel. A social media editor starts by putting up the website and the mobile app on a big screen, and walking the group through what happened the previous day.
There are close to twenty editors sitting at the oval-shaped table and another ten sitting on the second row. The Paris and London Bureaus are on speakerphone and Clifford Levy, who led the team that developed NYT Now, is looking at his Chartbeat dashboard on a laptop.
All the pitches are focused on digital. The editor for National has a story on the prosecution of Senator Bob Menendez for that evening, but he’s asked “why wouldn’t we put it up right now.” The Business desk offers a story on the New York Auto Show to go online and the Culture Desk has a review of the new Whitney Museum to be published at 1 p.m. A profile of “Orphan Black” actress Tatiana Maslani is already going up today — it’s a Wednesday — even though it won’t appear in print until it runs in the New York Times magazine on Sunday.
No one mentions sections, page numbers, or even the front page. A smaller group will decide on that later today — it’s not relevant for this (most important daily) meeting.
The meeting ends with the photo editor presenting a compilation of pictures to possibly be published online: A Cold War bunker in Norway, Secretary of State John Kerry during the Iran nuclear talks in Switzerland, and a “cuddly and fluffy angora show bunny“. The image is still on the screen when the room empties.
Be sensitive to office politics; implement a no-jerk-policy. People naturally fear change, so explain (and explain and explain) and assist in building a new skill-set for colleagues outside of the startup. At the same time, educate your new hires about the history and the shared values of the organization. Have brown bag lunches to bridge possible hostilities. Understand why both sides need time and help. Give people chances to talk, bond, and laugh.
The masthead stays on message. The newsroom leadership should back the startup and not get flustered when mistakes happen — because they will, and they should. This public display of high-level support is crucial and thus criticism is dealt with informally and privately. The rest of the newsroom should not be made aware every time a small change is discussed. Maintain a no-jerk-policy in both the startup and the rest of the newsroom. Complaining and obstructive behavior are counterproductive to the future of the entire company.
It’s sometimes difficult to get an organization’s leadership to recognize the fact that the company needs to transform digitally. The problem is structural, according to Harvard Business School professor Kotter: The organization is set up to publish a new paper every day. it’s not set up to figure out how to make that paper obsolete.
Even if a newsroom’s leadership realizes the need to innovate digitally, there are still hundreds of journalists to take into account, and not everybody is there yet.
David Skok is managing editor for digital at The Boston Globe, which has recently launched two news startups — Crux, “covering all things Catholic,” and Beta Boston, covering tech news in the region.
Skok believes in Clay Christensen’s RPP theory: It’s about resources (people, budgets), processes (workflow, digital-first), and priorities (editorial and managerial). When all of these are in place, the company can more easily adapt to change.
Sree regularly gives talks to newsrooms and reminds them of the U.S. railroad companies that didn’t realize how serious it was that their business model was under pressure from airlines. They assumed they were in the railroad business, when in fact they were in the transportation business — and see where they are now.
Similarly, Sree said, journalists aren’t in the print paper business anymore. They’re in the news, information and data business.
The Huffington Post’s Koda Wang, who oversees the company’s global expansion, urges newspapers to stop thinking of themselves as newspapers: “The idea of a fixed print format is long obsolete.” And so the thinking in the newsroom has to change accordingly.
— Visibility and repetition help. Ishmael recommends “always over-communicating.” Tailor different messages for different groups: vendors, journalists, the board of directors that needs to sign off on an investment.
— Don’t get frustrated. As Kotter said, “You’ll never win everyone over.” You don’t have to get the entire newsroom behind this industry-changing model. Your goal is 50 per cent plus one.
That brings up a question I’ve encountered in many newsrooms: Doesn’t all this innovation hurt our core business?
Niche verticals at legacy papers can create a “safe space,” in the words of the Times’ Blake Wilson, to experiment without alienating readers and without foregoing the institutional culture.
One of the classic traps of innovation is the expectation that every startup has to succeed. But not every idea has to be a blockbuster. Small successes can also lead to new revenue streams (and a larger scaled transformation in the newsroom).
Jim Moroney, publisher and CEO of The Dallas Morning News, bases his transformational strategy on two assumptions. The first is that print advertising revenues will continue to decline. The second is that, for a local newspaper like the Morning News (with a 250,000 Sunday circulation and 8 million unique website visitors per month), geography prevents digital advertising revenue from scaling enough to offset print ad declines.
Moroney doesn’t want to downsize the newsroom more than it’s already been downsized. It was 600 reporters strong in 2001; today, it’s half that size.
The Dallas Morning News has experimented with different solutions. It put up a complete paywall — with no meter — in February 2011. That didn’t work, so Moroney took the paywall down.
Now the Morning News is trying a range of other ideas. It offers events like “One-Day University,” where professors give classes to readers. It started a content-marketing agency. And it now owns the craft beer and indie music festival Untapped and the food and wine festival Savor.
The paper also found room to innovate in arts and culture. This year it launched GuideLive, a mobile-friendly site with an infinite scroll of things to see and do in the area.
This, Moroney says, is all about sustaining innovation. His strategy is not to disrupt his own company, but to try and find enough sources of revenue to sustain it.
Here’s my interview with Dillon, lightly condensed and edited.
Freek Staps: Don’t people want a calm working environment above all?
Karen Dillon: What gets people out of bed in the morning is their intrinsic motivation in work: Am I respected by my colleagues? Am I growing and given the opportunities to grow? Can I believe in the mission of the company? All of these can be unclear in times of change.
There are very few people who can deal with all that change in the newsroom without having some kind of natural, personal reaction. You can expect to see different kinds of behavior from your colleagues, and also from yourself. They might be checking out personally; they might be so angry that they’re not capable of joining,; they might subtly put down the ones who are innovating. This all makes sense: they’re good at what they do and they’re not so sure if there’s something they can do after this.
Staps: If you are an employee who does this, how can it hurt you?
Dillon: What’s especially hurtful is that you might apply a lot of your energy to eying others. You’re telling yourself other people get better assignments, there’s this woman who can come in at 10 am every morning, and why is he in that meeting while I’m not? Let me tell you: if you use any of your energy to compare yourself to others, you’re already lost.
So stop that. There are very few people who naturally think: How can I join this transformation, be a part of this? But do try to actively engage, ask questions that are not hostile to understand better what’s happening. Make sure you’re eager to learn, as opposed to only bringing skeptical questions. You want to be a part of this. I’m not saying give a standing ovation every time the boss speaks or nod your head in agreement all the time, but realize this: people want to work with people who bring energy.
Staps: What if the newsroom’s strategy isn’t clear?
Dillon: The strategy might still be forming, and that’s okay. Actually, the majority of companies that succeed in the long run have changed their strategy along the way. They had a strategy before, let’s call that the deliberate strategy. But along the way a better strategy become clear, the emerging one, and that one will be the way to go and achieve success.
Staps: What if a reporter decides not to join the new way forward and stick to print?
Dillon: You mean to just stay here and fade out? That’s a pretty limiting strategy. If you want to wait until your retirement, [that might work] if it’s just one year or two years out. If you have a decade to go, that’s just plain stupid because you’ll lose control of your own choices. Say you like to write longer articles. If you say no to everything now, and the company later decides to reprioritize long-form journalism — then no one is going to give you a chance later on because you showed all that hostility to change in the beginning.
There’s a more basic question: Don’t you want to be happy? If you act difficult and obstinate, chances are you won’t keep the respect of your colleagues. You’ll be considered a jerk and pretty soon you’ll be miserable. You can’t guarantee that you’ll continue to have a happy and successful career if you aren’t at least open-minded to the new possibilities in front of you and join the battle now.
Short-term mutinies actually can work, but in the long run you’re still losing because change is inevitable — in any company, and especially in quality journalism right now. So it’s better to root for success, to figure out how to do great work, and start to shine yourself.
Staps: How does the leadership keep office politics in check during all these changes?
Dillon: Make clear what your overriding values and goals are, both by voicing them and through everyday choices. Don’t say, ‘This experiment is the future of this newsroom,’ but then go and do five things in a week that give print the upper hand. With that, you’ll undermine yourself.
The editor-in-chief has to be willing to disrupt himself. If he thinks [this startup] is the future, he should allocate the resources to it. Don’t call it ‘the experiment’ and then look for every opportunity to limit the resources and investment you’re willing to make in ‘the future.’ Don’t pay those reporters less than everybody else. Don’t call it a lifeboat and then limit the number of lifejackets. Otherwise, you’ll never get reluctant journalists to jump aboard.
Staps: When do you start to worry about office behavior?
Dillon: When you notice groups excluding others — for instance, not being invited for lunch. Or when people are ‘forgotten’ to be invited to events. Even more visible is how many people you actually see, working. Does the office empty out early? Are people doing minimal work? Are people laughing enough?
Staps: What are the signs that a transformation to digital is succeeding?
Dillon: As soon as you see cross-boundary friendships forming, that’s good because it usually results in cross-pollination of ideas. Also, look out for surprising colleagues who offer to write a story for the new publication. It means that the old boundaries are not that strong anymore. By then, you’re getting somewhere.
Think of the reader’s needs. What job do you need to do to best serve the reader? Your app, website and social media content should be seamless.
Reporters need to be knowledgeable about the financials of the company and the industry as a whole. Use readership data (engagement time, pages per session, number of visitors or subscribers) to promote change and to help solve conflicts. Editorial choices are not made solely on the basis of what readers want. The newsroom, however, is ultimately at the service of the reader’s desire for quality news and information.
The Times struggled with that in the creation of the NYT Now app. All of the new content sometimes felt like homework to new readers who didn’t have a history with the brand, said Blake Wilson.
NYT Now saw some successes and some failures. One of its goals was to find a significant new audience. That worked; there are no signs that the app cannibalized the Times’ paid audience, Wilson said. The second goal was to monetize the app by charging $8 per month. That didn’t work so well: The New York Times announced this spring that it would make the app free.
NYT Now uses bullet points and a conversational tone to sum up stories. Those bullet points were a matter of debate in the newsroom. But Wilson said that many mobile readers on news apps simply scroll down to get a glimpse of the headlines, reach the bottom, and scroll back up without ever clicking on a headline. By adding bullet points under headlines, NYT Now provides more information on the display layer.
“The audience has given us permission to take what we’re doing further,” Wilson said.
Meanwhile, the Globe kept the audience in mind when it had to reframe the way it thought about delivering a story.
In the old days, the Globe’s goal was to deliver the best print story. All the other media — Facebook posts, Twitter, video, even the Boston.com and BostonGlobe.com websites — were supposed to promote the paper. Print was everything.
The challenge now, Skok said, is just to create a story, in any shape or form, and help it reach its intended audience. Twitter helps publicize that story. So do Facebook, Snapchat, “and, by the way, print as well.” The Globe is not a platform-specific publication anymore — it’s a story-telling machine. In this model, stories can both appear in print and online, and it doesn’t matter which comes first.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune’s website attracts seven million unique visitors per month and is the second most profitable part of the company, after the Sunday paper.
On the day I visited the Star Tribune, Arizona senator Harry Reid announced he wasn’t going to seek re-election. Terry Sauer’s team gave the Harry Reid story the second-best position on the website, right below a story about a fire in the suburbs that caused a death. When he checked Chartbeat, he was surprised to see that the Reid story got more readers than the fire. Contrary to his earlier plans, he kept the story up there.
“Cats and lists have actually always been a part of newspaper history,” Sree agreed. “Papers have tried for centuries to lure people in.” And throughout that time, there have been many other changes that were criticized at first, too: Color, new sections, different story formats like interviews.
All of these decisions should be informed by data.
Sree proposes that, every day, a journalist should send the entire newsroom an email about the daily numbers and what they actually mean. Which stories performed best, and why? What can we learn from the use of certain kinds of headlines? Did the amount of time spent by readers on a specific story reveal a curiosity gap between the headline and the content actually delivered?
All of this is, in Skok’s words, the “unsexy” work of making your newsroom a more product-centric and user-centric organization. It may not immediately reward you with a Pulitzer prize, but it might help get your organization better aligned with a more digital time.
Freek Staps helped found NRC Q and is the co-managing editor for online at NRC Media in The Netherlands. He completed this work as a 2015 Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow.
Photo by Daria used under a Creative Commons license.
POSTED Aug. 25, 2015, 1:28 p.m.
Staps, Freek. "Want to create a more digital newsroom? Find your inner startup." Nieman Journalism Lab. Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, 25 Aug. 2015. Web. 25 Apr. 2019.
Staps, Freek. "Want to create a more digital newsroom? Find your inner startup." Nieman Journalism Lab. Last modified August 25, 2015. Accessed April 25, 2019. https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/08/want-to-create-a-more-digital-newsroom-find-your-inner-startup/.
4health pet food uses premium natural ingredients to curate the best formulas for your pet. Always the #1 ingredient, real meat is complemented by whole vegetables so you can be sure your pet is receiving the nutrients they need. You will never find corn, soy or wheat in 4health foods, but you will find omega fatty acids for healthy skin and coat as well as antioxidants to promote overall good health in your animals. Found exclusively at Tractor Supply Co., 4health is committed to providing optimal nutrition for optimal health.
Gets a rating of 4 out of 5 on dog food advisor. Quality ingredients, no junk fillers, fair price, not too expensive and my dogs love it. It’s also available in grain free. Only sold at tractor supply, that is the only con.
First I want to say ever since I switched my GS to 4health dry dog food he's been doing great. He's even out on weight after having issues with skin itching and ear infections and weight loss. He's three but after trying everything under the sun not sure what to do for my poor buddy we heard about 4health and it's been great. However... I thought I would try the 4Health canned dog food. After maybe an hour of feeding it to him and just a little bit mixing it in with his dry he had never had such explosive bowel movements and the three years that I've got him he was lethargic. Just in such bad pain.
So needless to say we just decided maybe it was the canned food and we weren't doing it anymore. Sure enough we stopped it. He was fine... But then I saw the 4Health hip and joint chewy bites I thought all this should be great. After giving him one now he seemed to get a little bit of diarrhea. This is months later by the way since the can food and wasn't as active but I thought nothing of it. Then I gave him another one the next day and went out for some errands. When I came home there was a yellow diarrhea everywhere. Vomit everywhere. Foamy vomit. He was in my house. When we leave the house he stays in the secure area. All through the night he was vomiting foamy vomit. I wasn't sure but I thought maybe it was the bite so I would help them.
I gave it to him one more time a couple weeks after to see. Sure enough the next day. I mean is it this product? The dry dog food seems fine but the chewy bites I would never thought something like that would cause such bad issues for him. I mean he was near death. By the way I'm blind as a bat and using my talk-to-text to try to write this message review. His stool by the way was also like a yellow sponge. I don't know. Never had these kind of issues. Won't bees in the bites anymore. I think I'm going to stay with the dry dog food because that seems to be doing great for him. But never ever use that canned dog food and absolutely do not buy those bites.
Updated on 02/02/2019: I am disgusted with DIAMOND 4HEALTH dog food and the way corporate did absolutely NOTHING to aid, check in, or even pretend like they care. My 4 year old boxer nearly died, from their dog food mistake and Diamond Pet Foods straight up ghosted me for the last 23 days. I was sent one email that was a copy and paste email from a Diamond "veterinarian". I sent in proof of purchase along with clean images of the production stamp, and they said and did NOTHING. I have spent thousands with them, and in return they try to kill my family boxer. Do not support Diamond or 4health. Look at the real reviews - there are about 6 on here with folks that had the exact same issues with their dog's health after feeding them this food. Diamond knows about this and they continue to make dogs very ill and even kill them because they cannot monitor their food production.
Original Review: I have fed our 4 year old Boxer 4 Health large breed adult. Made by Diamond, for the last 3 years. It started as a great alternative to higher priced grain free foods. The most recent bag, purchased from TSC as that's where diamond sells under the label 4 health, makes my boxer vomit after each meal. She is mostly food motivated. It's not like her to have a food standoff for 5 days and refuse to eat. Within 1 hour of eating, each time without fail, she vomits, followed by dry heaves. I need to know what's going on with my boxer, in regards to what happened with this batch of food as it needs to be recalled and removed from the shelves before someone's pet gets very ill or worse. I will make a video as well if I don't hear back today, just to show everyone the signs, so they know.
So I had no idea that this was here but I want to share my story. Was urged to switch to 4health by a vet in Franklin TN. Our English bulldog had some skin issues and he thought it help. About 4 months in she started the same issues. Hair loss and itching. We take her to a different vet who does some checking and finds she has some allergies and prescribes some meds. Just when we think we are on the road to good health she stops eating, is rapidly losing weight and throwing up phlegm and panting constantly. Oh and the cow patties she is leaving behind are awful. So back at the vet again and we learn she has some problems with her blood and we pay 500.00 at that visit. 2 days later another round at vet and 450 more. The third visit she is a bit better probably because of steroids but we also started feeding her boiled chicken breasts and rice.
The vet then tells us they think she has cancer so we take to a specialist and they want to test her at 2000.00 and say they wouldn’t be able to cure if it is cancer. They could only treat it. So we take home our 6 year old dog scared to death she could die at any time. But we were in for a miracle. She starts eating more of the chicken and rice we made and her weight picks up and her healthy happy self is back. But not so fast. When we had to go out of town we bought some more 4health salmon and potato dog food thinking it would be easier for the kids to feed while we were away. Now she is back in the same boat. She is throwing up foam and pooping throughout the night. Has no energy and looks awful.
After reading some other reviews on here one thing I find crazy is that most of the bad reviews are coming from TN. So why don’t they notice this and do a little research and find out what is going on. I would like to know. Hell if it were human food it would have been recalled already. I am going to take these reviews to my vet and just ask because I could be wrong but I doubt it and at least they can keep an eye out for it in the future. If anyone else would like to talk about this with me email me **. Thanks for reading.
My dog has been eating 4health for a few years. A year or so ago he experienced explosive bowel movements after eating the grain free beef stew - the clerk at Tractor Supply was unaware of any issues. A few months ago I bought 2 bags of the hip/joint bones (he had eaten them before and no problem). After eating a few out of the first new bag, he became lethargic and vomited the foamy phlegm that I saw someone else on here had described. I threw away the bag. After a month I decided to open the new bag and try one, thinking he may have just not felt well before, AND seeing no recalls. He ate one and within the hour looked like someone who was drunk. He fell over and couldn't get up, was also vomiting the phlegm.
My son helped me get him into the car and to the vet. By the time we got there (by now a couple of hours since eating the bone), he was acting alert. The past few weeks he has refused to eat any of the 4heath dog food with the exception of a couple of the cans. He began acting lethargic, drinking a lot of water and losing weight. Our vet has just put him on meds for a kidney infection as his white count is up and BUN level is off. After seeing these other comments I have no doubt something is wrong with this food and treats. But what to feed him? Guess I will be making my own since I don't know that there is any brand to trust anymore.
How do I know I can trust these reviews about 4health Dog Food?
My daughter has had her pup for 4 years. She is a AKC Basset Hound and on last Sunday she left us all heartbroken. After purchasing a big bag of 4health whitefish and potatoes dog food my daughter and Bailey returned home from college. After opening the bag and feeding Bailey a bowl we left for a few hours and upon returning my wife and daughter's walked into a house of horror and it was only the beginning of this nightmare. BAILEY had vomited and had bloody diarrhea all over the house. She was completely lethargic by Sunday afternoon and died Sunday night. She did not eat anything other than this dog food. Please don't put your beloved pets life at risk. DO NOT BUY THIS DOG FOOD.
We have 2 Labrador pups that started out on different brand (very healthy, energetic puppies) - we switched to 4Health on recommendation of TFS employee last month as a less expensive option. Most recent purchase of food (2nd bag of 4Health) has resulted in lethargic pups with diarrhea, and now they have no appetite. When I bought this last bag, I had to get a smaller size because the large 30-lb bags were sold out (for 2 weeks). I have not seen a recall, and employee at store was unaware of one. Strange to see empty shelf for a popular product, which makes me think there is an unannounced problem with production or quality.
We'll be returning product to local store for refund, and putting pups back on either Wellness or Nutro brand. NOTE: I have 2 older dogs that have not had the puppy food, and are okay. All dogs play together, so I am convinced the dog food is the problem after reading other reviews. A number of years ago, the two older dogs got sick after eating Purina brand - they quit eating altogether until I got a different product for them. They bounced back, but I remember there was a massive recall because the food was tainted with melamine (from rice production, I think).
We have two Havanese littermate pups. They are 6 years old and have eaten 4Health Dog food for four years. Last week, we replenished our supply of can food which we mix with 4Health dry food. Our female pup had a seizure the next day (Thursday) after eating from the new supply. We took her to the vet for blood work to find she had liver issues. At first we thought it was potentially a congenital shunt (potentially still a contributing factor). The vet put her on KD prescription food at that time. We did not notice another seizure until Saturday afternoon and then two additional seizures on Sunday. Our male dog continued to eat the 4Health food as normal until he had a seizure on Monday and we knew it was an environmental issue. We took him to the vet to find his bloodwork showed liver issues as well.
My wife researched to find the reviews on this page which solidified our belief that it is a food issue. Both dogs have been feed the KD prescription food this week and seem to be back to their normal selves. I pulled the cans from the recycling bin when food was believed to be the issue. The two cans were: grain free beef and chicken (lot#1102503) and lamb and rice (lot#1159242). We contacted Tractor Supply to register a complaint with this information. They are going back to Diamond to determine next actions. We want others to know what we have gone through and to encourage others to speak up if they have experienced the same issues we have experienced. Other dogs should not go through what ours have gone through.
My six dogs were switched from Iams MiniChunks to 4health in the summer of 2015 amidst some bad reviews for Iams and some people's dogs becoming really sick. I have had no complaints until the most recent bag I purchased about a week and a half ago, which has made three of my six dogs very sick, with one barely hanging on at the moment. 4health and Diamond Naturals, I have read, are pretty much the same dog foods with the same ingredients and made in the same plant. I thought I should write this after reading of the dogs who have just died recently from eating Diamond dog foods. I have pulled the food from my dogs and are feeding them boiled chicken and rice. However, two of them are still too sick to eat anything. I hope this message goes a long way towards saving some dogs' lives.
I have been feeding my 4-year-old golden retriever and pug 4health foods since they were puppies. I had been happy with the food until this year. This last batch I bought in October, first the Salmon and potato, halfway through the bag the dogs began to refuse eating, then they had diarrhea. I then try and switch to the lamb and rice, and for a day or so it seemed better. But now the retriever is back to diarrhea and the pug refusing to eat. There is definitely something going wrong with their food.
I'm just curious if anyone else has had problems with this food. I feed the dry and canned food. I have 3 big dogs and 4 cats on 4Health. I’ve been ruling out everything that could be causing GI upsets in both my dogs and cats. Night after night - I get woken up by one, two, or all 3 of them with diarrhea. Cats also have recently started having diarrhea and vomiting. I can’t think of anything it could be besides the food. I don’t want to give 4Health a bad reputation if it’s not the food. But they are not subject to anything else that would be causing this. Not to mention, it’s with all my pets. So, putting feelers out there to see if there may be an issue with this food. Thank you.
I have 2 labs, one 22 mo. The other 8 mo. Both were raised on 4Health Puppy formula and all was good. I continue to give the 8 mo lab the puppy formula and she is fine. I think it is good dog food and am satisfied. The problem has been with the 4Health Grain Free Turkey/Potato Adult Formula made by Diamond. I bought 2 30lb bags in Feb2015. She consumed the first bag without any major problems. I did start to notice that her stomach frequently gurgled loudly about 2 weeks ago.
We had just started on the 2nd bag and about 10 days later the problems started. Heavy vomiting (may have been blood in some of the specimens), couldn't keep anything down at all including water, then massive, nasty diarrhea. It took us about 3 days to isolate the cause to possibly being the dog food. So we stopped her from eating any of the Turkey/Potato and gave her a little of the puppy formula. She did better, but still vomited (not as bad). Then I put her on switch (pumpkin) and a different adult dog food. Within a day she was almost like her old self. It has now been 2 days and she is fine. The batch number was DL1 1405. Our dog is fine now and we are just out a bag of dog food. But I will not purchase anymore adult formula dog food made by Diamond.
My dog became sick after I transitioned him over to the new 4Health Diamond kibble. Began vomiting, then stopped eating. Vet treated him for mycoplasma. Prior to this I had only seen this dog vomit once in 7 years. After several weeks of multiple vet visits, huge vet bills, and round the clock care he became so debilitated that he had to be put down. The dog was perfectly healthy prior to the switch and put up a valiant fight for his life. Tractor Supply told me, at first, that Diamond had just changed the packaging, not the formula, so it took me a week or so to make the connection. In my heart I know it was the food.
We bought the lamb & rice in a very large size. Shortly after starting the food they started having diarrhea, then it got much worse. Bloody diarrhea and vomiting from all 3 dogs! My English bulldog is the sickest. She eats the most, so, that makes sense. My 3 lb. Snorkie didn't like it and ate the least of it. She still has bloody loose BM's & vomits. The vomit is foul & viscous and resembles the poop. I got a free sample of another high quality dog food at the pet store and was out of town with my Snorkie 4 days. She started feeling better & I didn't see blood, in her firmer BM's.
When we got home my other 2 dogs were worse with fever, chills, vomiting & bloody BM's, that they couldn't even hold to go outside! I fed my little dog more of the Diamond food, not realizing this is why they were sick. I decided it had to be the dog food when my little dog was sick again, after eating the dog food. I pulled all that food, contacted my veterinarian and the store we bought the food from. The store exchanged it for the 4Health dog food we normally buy.