Insights

<p>In June 2002, Dr. David F. Archer had a paper published under his name that reassured women everywhere that they could take antibiotics and birth control pills at the same time and not worry about pregnancy. The article was music to the ears of executives at Wyeth, the drug company giant.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.reportingonhealth.org/users/craigrosa"><br />Craig Rosa</a> is relatively new to the news arena. Before becoming the senior interactive producer for KQED in San Franciscion, he was creating innovative educational programs at The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose. He has put that educational know-how to work for QUEST, KQED's multimedia series about Bay Area science and environmental news.<br />

<p>Robert Davis, Ph.D., M.P.H. is on a mission: Reporters need to put on their skeptics' hats when they report on the latest and greatest in medical research.</p>

<p>It sometimes seems like it takes a high-profile case like <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/03/31/schiavo/index.html">Terri Schiavo</a> to get people to think about end-of-life issues – or editors to agree to stories on the topic.</p>

<p>Have you ever wanted to pick the brain of an investigative reporter? The California Endowment Health Journalism Fellows (Twitter hashtag #cahealthfellows) got the chance with former Los Angeles Times investigative reporter Bill Heisel, who also writes the thrice-weekly <a href="http://www.reportingonhealth.org/blogs/130">Antidote blog</a> for Center for Health Journalism Digital.&nbsp;</p>

<p><em>“I’m really ashamed I let myself get caught up in dishonest and deceitful campaigns really just so a few corporations and their Wall Street masters could become richer than they already are. So now, in a certain way, I’m trying to make amends.”</em></p>

<p>On Sunday, a four-part series a year in the making runs in the Bay Area News Group. As the science reporter for the chain, I teamed with health reporter Sandy Kleffman to report and write this series.</p>

<p>Bay Area News Group will begin a four part series on health inequities Sunday that will feature ZIP code maps revealing wide disparities in life expectancy, asthma hospitalizations, heart diease and cancer rates.</p><p>The project, by reporters Sandy Kleffman and Suzanne Bohan, found striking health differences among ZIP codes just a few miles apart.</p><p>Even middle-class neighborhoods are affected, the analysis reveals. Middle-class areas have longer life expectancies than the poorest neighborhoods, but fall years short of life expectancies in the wealthiest areas.</p>

<p>It’s not as seductive as a candlelit bedroom.</p> <p>But a dinner with medical colleagues after a board meeting can exert a powerful a pull on talented scientists flirting with the drug industry. Rarely one-on-ones, these dinners are usually threesomes:</p><p>1. The seducer: a representative for a medical communications company that has been hired by a drug company to help market a particular product or disease in need of new cures being cooked up by the company.</p><p>2. The object of seduction: a researcher with known expertise in the company’s target area.</p>

<p>In 2008, Henry Schuster was "the new guy" at <em>60 Minutes</em>. Everyone else at the show had already taken the big interviews, the politicians and bigwigs who would be at the center of many reports. So Schuster took a different approach: "I would rather set the table for our viewers by addressing the issue, not the candidates," Schuster told the 2009 <a href="http://www.reportingonhealth.org/fellowships/seminars/california-health… Health Journalism Fellows</a> at this evening's keynote address. "We wanted to do a health care story."<br />