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Field Notes

Learn more from award-winning journalists and health experts here. Topics in Health essays offer overviews of key issues, while Craft essays present “how-to” tips from the Center for Health Journalism Digital.

Topics in Health

Photo by John Moore/Getty Images
Finding people to actually talk about their experiences is tough. For many people, eviction is...
Deborah Bell-Holt and her granddaughter stand near an oil drilling site by her South Los Angeles home. A growing body of science
Health experts point to the crippling influence of institutionalized racism as a looming roadblock...
Photo by Rick Gershon/Getty Images
Even worse, the investigation revealed children had been tasked with cleaning up the toxic mess at...
Dust from sand dunes, often kicked up by off-road vehicles, at Oceano Dunes in Central California contributes to poor air qualit
A reporter learns the importance of telling stories for communities rather than about them.
Photo by Sergey Zolkin via Unsplash
A reporter reflects on lessons from reporting on Cambodian refugees in California still grappling...
(Photo by Oscar del Pozo/AFP via Getty Images)
Many Pacific Islander communities suffer from high rates of diabetes and kidney disease. Less well-...
(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Reporting on long COVID while seeing its effects firsthand allowed me to better understand what my...
(Image: Three Sisters by Tanya Momi)
As women and mothers, we couldn’t understand how life could target vulnerable women like Leena so...
(Photo: Agustin Paullier/AFP via Getty Images)
Street vendors have faced a long history of persecution in LA and elsewhere. Consider these...
Fresno County STD investigator Hou Vang speaks with a patient to inform them of their diagnosis in July 2022.
Even when people were willing to talk about the issue generally, they weren’t willing to put a face...
A line of more than 30 cars await a food distribution event to begin at Copper Mountain College in Joshua Tree on Aug. 2, 2022.
The long line of cars waiting for food on that sizzling Saturday morning in Bloomington, California...
(Photo by Bre Pettis via Flickr/Creative Commons)
How are we supposed to cover the community as a whole when we can’t communicate with a large...
Brian, a Palo Alto teen who has struggled to find adequate mental health treatment. I found him and his mom after posting in a l
It's easy to feel trapped by the feeling that you need to see a story through simply because you’ve...
Photo credit: (Illustration by No Limit Creatives via inewsource)
“It’s not the type of health crisis that you’re going to have neighbors come over and bring a...
(Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)
How misadventures and the laughs than ensued helped one journalist build rapport and deepen his...
(Photo via Jenna Kunze)
Government agencies do a poor job of gathering Native-specific data. A reporter finds that a turn...
(Photo: Shae Hammond/Bay Area News Group)
A reporter spent a lot of time standing outside tiny home communities, trying to catch people...
Guillermo Hernandez, a renter in Fresno, was told by his doctor that he needs to stay out of the heat because of the medication
A series of the health impacts of extreme heat puts the experiences of Fresno residents front and...
Starms Discovery Learning Center is an elementary and middle school located in the 53205 ZIP code, a neighborhood where children
Uncontrolled asthma is rampant in central Milwaukee, to devastating effect.
Farmworkers labor in a strawberry field amid near Ventura, California.
A member of the Mixteco migrant community reflects on the devastating impact of COVID-19 on the...
Le'Andrea Anderson Tolbert in Selma, Alabama.
Easy to say, harder to practice: Showing up in person opens up pieces of reporting that bring...
Photo credit: (Photo by Ricardo Arduengo/AFP via Getty Images)
Puerto Ricans aren't eligible for all the benefits other U.S. citizens are. Two reporters are...
Gene Ampon, 75, at the Seattle home he shared with his life partner, Roger Anderson.
To tell the story, we needed to track down a man who was committed to a state hospital over a half-...
(Photo by Alicia Devine, USA TODAY Network/Tallahassee Democrat)
Many families in rural America struggle to access obstetric care, and mothers of color, already...
(Image by Smoobs via Flickr/Creative Commons)
Black women have higher hysterectomy rates than white patients, especially in the South. I wanted...
(Photo by Adria Malcolm/New Mexico In Depth)
"As an Anglo reporter little versed in this science and history, I had a lot of catching up to do."
(Photo by Jeremy Bishop via Unsplash)
A new law meant to curb domestic abuse runs up against judges who know little about it.
(Photo by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds via AFP/Getty Images)
“As people start to age they feel invisible, discarded, even,” said Priscilla Essert, during our...
(Photo by Michael Brown via Flickr/Creative Commons)
A reporting duo shares nine pieces of advice to keep in mind when covering childhood mental health.
(Photo by Durant Weston via Flickr/Creative Commons)
"I was used to seeing homeless men and women leaving the shelter. This was different. Why so many...
Hygiene stations and toilets in LA’s Little Tokyo neighborhood.
A freelancer's neighborhood walks give rise to a story on LA's failure to maintain hygiene stations.
A teacher leads students through an activity at Freedom Elementary School in Buckeye, Arizona in 2021.
"I was so fixated on finding a Latino student it hadn’t dawned on me that there might be another...
Kevin White points to his mother in a family portrait. Her Medicaid expenses led to a $128,000 lien on his family home, which he
Loopholes allow wealthier families and attorneys to avoid estate recovery, and in some counties the...
Luz Vazquez Hernandez, 18, pulls out the shirt she wore for roofing last summer.
Nonprofits were less helpful than expected, but Florida school districts helped a journalist find...
(Photo by Fred Dufour/AFP via Getty Images)
A reporter pivots between experts and data to try to understand why still so little is known about...
The Cherokee County Department of Social Services in Murphy, North Carolina.
An investigative series on the state's child welfare system was powered by "a fairly simple data...
A student adjusts her facemask at St. Joseph Catholic School in La Puente, California in November 2020
Patience, persistence and relationships all prove key in reporting the story.
(Photo by Marco Di Lauro/Getty Images)
Journalist and long COVID support group founder Fiona Lowenstein shares timely advice for reporters...
(Reveal/The Center for Investigative Reporting and Molly Mendoza)
Reporting on sexual harassment and assault allegations at a Bay-area high school tested a reporter'...
Attendees at an online panel discussion on Asian American gender-based violence in May.
A reporter finds people are hungry for spaces to talk about the mental health challenges...
(Photo by Andreas Gebert/Getty Images)
A state health department issues an unusually restrictive response to a reporter's public records...
A young girl places pinwheels in the ground with a detective at the Bentonville Police Station at a rally to raise awareness of
When reporting on trauma and death, strategies for coping become essential.
(Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
A reporter explains how she found women willing to speak out about substandard maternity care in...
(Photo by Nenad Stojkovic via Flickr/Creative Commons)
By last fall, the pandemic's brutal toll on youth mental health had become clear.
Romeo, 8, and his sister Victoria, 3, play in their mobile home. The family was among those profiled in the reporter’s series on
Don't give up. Follow these tips to overcome data deserts in your reporting.
Olga Contreras teaches students remotely from her classroom at Saucedo Scholastic Academy in Chicago in September.
A reporter finds the limits of reporting from the living room and sets out for a Chicago classroom...
Tim O’Shei interviews the owner of Mogadishu Food, a Buffalo, New York restaurant that is operated by refugees from Somalia.
A reporter relfects on lessons learned while covering the mental health challenges confronting...
Francisca Porchas, the founder of the Latinx Therapist Action Network
"The stress of my own personal experiences led me to dig deeper into how immigrant women were...
 (Photo by justin lincoln via Flickr/Creative Commons)
"For years, I avoided stories I deemed too personal. Until the day I couldn’t."
Tanya Gan Lim teaches a “newcomer class” in Maryland’s Prince George’s County school district.
How are school systems coping with large influxes of immigrant children? A reporter reflects on...
Two women embracing
A reporter shares what she learned about taking care of yourself while reporting on grief-filled...
Jessica Miller
Are you staring down a daunting list of public records requests? Here are a few tips that can help.
(Image by Annelise Farquar)
Emerging research on toxic stress sheds light on entrenched disparities and points to new...
(Image by Alex Zuniga)
Consolidation is changing heatlh care — and how much it costs — in almost every corner of the...
(Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
Hard-won lessons from an investigation into ICE's failure to provide adequate medical care to...
Sexual assault survivor Dominique Green joined a “cohort” of survivors who helped inform and shape CapRadio’s reporting on the i
Why the traditional journalistic process does not always work well for those repeatedly betrayed by...
A volunteer serves food during a community meal event for the one-year anniversary of the November 2018 Camp Fire.
For the survivors of the deadliest blaze in California history, the pandemic was a disaster upon a...
Burning building
A bill that would increase workplace protections for domestic workers is now before California's...
(Photo by William Murphy via Flickr/Creative Commons)
Through my reporting and listening to young sexually active LGBTQ people, I learned there would...
Telling the real story of homelessness — and busting the biggest myth
"The experience of working with our subjects for more than a year changed my own ideas about...
(Photo: San Luis Opisbo Tribune)
Step one: listen to community questions before asking your own.
Chris Stewart, right, checks the blood sugar levels of his daughter, McKenzie Stewart, 6, center, after her jazz dance class
A reporter learns to diversify her tactics to find more diverse families for a series on the rise...
Marc
Carl and Malette Young struggled for more than a decade to find help for their adopted son, Marc,...
One of the residents of Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, who was interviewed for the story.
Finding a fixer to connect with reluctant sources was the first step.
The Navajo Reservation near Many Farms, Arizona.
The Navajo Nation's high rates of asthma and other respiratory illnesses have taken on a new...
Jimmy McCullough, principal of Horry County Education Center, talks to students leaving the alternative school.
"My grief and frustration over JJ’s fate were compounded by all I learned about the effects of...
Dustin Wallis, a nonsmoker who has stage 4 lung cancer, plays with his children in Cottonwood Heights, Utah.
Utah has the lowest smoking rate in the nation, yet the biggest source of cancer deaths in the...
Mother and child
North Carolina has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the nation. As is the case in the...
How I uncovered decades of abuse at a “model” reform school — and spurred sweeping state policy change
How a reporter used data and documents to show how the state of Pennsylvania failed in its duty to...
Different stories, common plight: Reporting on California’s remaining uninsured
While many uninsured individuals are low-income residents, upper-middle-income Californians also...
Univision reporter Jose Gonzalez speaks to an undocumented Fresno woman
Many immigrants see America as a paradise full of opportunities, but find another reality: a series...
Shasta County jail.
Reporting on county jails and jail deaths? Use these tips from Matt Brannon of the Redding Record...
Luther and Shirley Sterrett care for their son Josh who has Duchenne muscular dystrophy. While the family is supposed to get 92
The crisis is expected to dramatically worsen as the nationwide demand for in-home nursing...
Leticia, an undocumented 53-year-old mother of three, spent months on the waitlist for a knee surgery. The untreated injury not
In quick-hit coverage of health policy, it’s easy to skip the tough task of tracking down real...
Wikimedia Commons
Two brothers-in-law who live next door to one another in rural Northern California have chronic...
Kate Green is a 30-year-old who’d rather roll the dice without insurance than face steep out-of-pocket costs. (Photo by Autumn P
How two reporters used data to explore how California's ambitious health care initiatives could...
Leslie Mullowney, who was contacted after responding to our call-out. Here she feeds the chickens at the Napa home she and her f
"I ultimately found a handful of good sources who were willing to share their personal housing...
Berenice Palmer’s experience in a long-term nursing home bed was actually quite positive, but perhaps not what listeners should
Reporting this story really opened my eyes to how important it is to collectively think about how...
Levi Lundy reflects beside recovered molten metal from his father's truck, which melted in the Camp Fire in Paradise, Calif.
In the fires that devastated Paradise and Santa Rosa, kids were often the most vulnerable.
A wildfire destroyed hundreds of homes in Redding, California, in 2018.
"Here I was, a stranger dropping into people’s lives, asking that they tell me their deeply...
Elder abuse is on the rise, but persuading seniors to share their stories is a challenge
"People talk to me about all sorts of health issues, even addiction and sexual assault. Elder abuse...
A nurse checks on inmates as they receive dialysis treatment at West Valley Detention Center in San Bernardino County. (Photo by
A reporter shares five key sources to help others exploring health care problems in California...
(Photo by Don J. Usner/Searchlight New Mexico)
Roads are a key to everything, a reporter quickly finds out while traveling through the Navajo...
What I learned reporting on an opioid crisis in a community that didn’t perceive it as a crisis
A reporter shares a handful of investigative reporting techniques that proved essential in...
Ashley Peterson’s story was told through a five-part series published in April in The Indianapolis Star.
How do you know when someone is ready to be interviewed about a trauma she has endured? And what do...
Karoline Vázquez Díaz got emotional as she described the pain she endured when she got sick with leptospirosis as she sat next t
A journalist shares key lessons from reporting on the Puerto Rican government's failed responses to...
(Photo by Andrew Kuhn/Merced Sun-Star)
A story of why it pays to keep analyzing the data, even if it isn’t cooperative at first.
Adianet Galván died after botched cosmetic surgery in Florida.
"As fellow news junkies, we talked about the increasing number of cases we reported on a daily...
Evelyn West, great grandmother of Kee'Mayah West, 2nd grader, of North Braddock, Pa., dresses children at Great Start Day Care i
Some life journeys start at a good day care center and end at the heights of academia. Some...
Dr. Tolbert Small helped spread awareness and treatment of sickle cell. (Photo by Drew Costley)
There was a lot going on in my head when I started reporting — was I the right person to write the...
As a journalist, I was out of my depth and definitely out of my comfort zone. But after weeks of...
Photo by Briana Sanchez/Argus Leader Media
Over the last decade, Congress has repeatedly flagged the abominable conditions in the South Dakota...
(Photo: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)
Finding people who are willing to talk about their STDs publicly can be a tall order for...
One-month-old baby Alexander rests in his mother’s arms during a group therapy session for women and mothers dealing with substa
What happens to the growing number of drug-exposed babies? Answers "proved maddeningly difficult to...
Latrelle Huff with her ex-boyfriend and their twins at the babies’ baptism in 2014. (Photo: Family photo via USA TODAY)
How a reporting team overcame countless hurdles to tell a new story of how children are affected by...
Cristine Pagan helps her son Dean with reading homework at a local library. When Dean started first grade at Comly Elementary la
A dynamic team blended traditional street reporting with innovative scientific testing for a hard-...
What I learned reporting on housing and economic inequality after Hurricane Harvey
In the months after Hurricane Harvey slammed the Texas Gulf Coast, residents of small towns and...
MJS photo
James Causey returned to his old neighborhood in Milwaukee to take a sustained look at how young...
Richmond residents helped design and build the amenities at Elm Playlot, and created the programming for kids and adults. (Photo
Who could possibly have any sort of objection to renovating a park? Those pushed out of their...
How a story about childhood trauma in Paradise became one of community trauma
A reporter set out to discover why trauma rates were so high in the community of Paradise, Calif....
(Photo: Fiona Goodall/Getty Images)
For 20 years, First 5 has used the tobacco tax revenue to finance health, education and other...
Mo Chao Yang sits in her garden in North Sacramento, remembering the ways she survived the secret war in Laos. (Photo by Scott T
There is no way for an outsider to just parachute into a different culture and start writing about...
In Fiddletown, California, many older residents live alone and struggle to access social activities and mental health resources.
CapRadio’s health reporter Sammy Caiola spent six months exploring the reasons behind the high...
Dr. Brian Wansink, left, visits elementary students in Ithaca, New York. Revelations about Wansink’s research methods led to his
BuzzFeed reporter Stephanie Lee explains how she went about obtaining crucial emails between...
Photo by Damon Dahlen/Huffpost
Finding the right people for your story is one of reporting's eternal challenges. One reporter...
Julie Swann-Paez, a survivor of the San Bernardino shooting, works with a Pilates instructor to strengthen muscles during her re
Among the key takeaways: "Establish your credibility early and often with all of your potential...
Getty images
An investigation into a Sacramento gun range ultimately spurred new legislation to better protect...
Adela Carranco, left, with her mother Olga Maldonado. Adela’s story of unmet mental health needs helped put a human face on the
One consistent memory I have from reporting on California’s mental health system for low-income...
Photo by Randall Benton/Sacramento Bee
California has problems serving young children with disabilities. Reporter Jocelyn Wiener explains...
[Photos by Arizona Daily Star]
Since the Great Recession, Arizona has cut programs that help poor families and spent more money on...
Image credit: Alex Zuniga/New Times
In California’s county jails, a reporter finds far more obstacles to getting data on health care...
(Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
In California, Medicaid coverage among undocumented immigrants dropped, even as the broader...
(Photo: Mindy Schauer/Orange County Register)
A reporter discusses the difficult decisions that have to be made between telling deeply personal...
(Photo-Antonia Gonzales)
Two reporters share their tips and insights from reporting on health issues in Indian Country.
The Affirmation Wall in the fourth-grade classroom of teacher Cindy Herrera. Students can write positive notes to each other. (P
A reporter recounts his journey to find the stories that shed light on how Trump’s rhetoric and...
Photo
A FiveThirtyEight reporter on how she tackled an ambitious series on a huge, overlooked health...
[Photo by Bradley Gordon via Flickr.]
“Have a plan, but expect to ditch it,” a news mentor drilled into my head 25 years ago. “If you’re...
Photo

A mysterious cluster of rare, fatal birth defects has devastated families in three rural...

Photo by Kerry Klein
"By the time I was finished, my reporting had covered not only the Valley’s marketing problem, but...
Photo credit: Openhouse
In an era when good data about the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community remains elusive...
Reyna Maldonado, 24, was born in the Mexican state of Guerrero and crossed the border with an uncle when she was six years old.
Even when persistence and dedication enable a reporter to find undocumented communities willing to...
[Photo by Marie. L. via Flickr.]
"The magic is in how we listen and how we ask," writes reporter Gisela Telis. "When reporting on...
Photo credit: Jesse Pratt Lopez
In Georgia, thousands of students are taken out of their schools and sent to centers where they are...
Photo: Clarence Williams/WWNO
Many New Orleans children come from tough backgrounds and have been thrust into a new school system...
Mackenzie Piascik, then 2, was flown to a hospital after she accidentally shot herself. (Tampa Bay Times file photo 2010)
Data allowed reporter Kathleen McGrory to show gun accidents involving children were a growing...
A view of the Petersburg power plant located just miles from Washington, Indiana, which is located in the Indiana county.
For reporter Giles Bruce, it wasn't until he jettisoned all his preconceived notions about what was...
Photo
For an ambitious project on lead in Chicago, City Bureau started with the question: "How do we as...
Photo
The story of heroin in New Mexico's Rio Arriba County had been told too many times by the national...
Photo by Maria Grazia Montagnari via Flickr.
Experts believe one reason the word gap is so prevalent is because it starts so early in life. But...
Photo by Richard Bammer
Reporter Richard Bammer set out to explore how overlooked migrant education centers are addressing...
[Photo by Dan Tuffs/KPCC]
It can be hard to find new, compelling ways of telling stories about well-known health issues. But...
Photo: Ana Venegas/The Orange County Register
In many Asian communities, mental illness remains mired in stigma. A reporter in Orange County,...
Photo: Marilyn Chung/The Desert Sun
For some Californians living near the border, Mexico offers the promise of reliable health care at...
[Image courtesy Leo Castaneda/inewsource]
A data-driven look at opioid addiction in San Diego found that old assumptions about addiction...
Photo
In California’s Central Valley and rural north, more than a dozen hospitals have closed since the...
Photo
After living there for over a decade, I know San Francisco is uniquely situated when it comes to...
Guadalupe Vargas with her daughter Jaylani, 1, outside their mold covered bedroom window at the Walnut Creek Apartments.
Bad housing has emerged as a key issue in California's Sonoma County races for elected office since...
Rochelle Nishimoto recounts the death of her son Jason with her other son Adrian.
Two reporters set out to answer a question: Was the horrific death of a mentally ill inmate in a...
Children play in water infested with blue-green algae at Silverwood Lake in San Bernardino County.
"I had fair warning that gathering data on blue-green algae toxins in California was going to be an...

"Finding families touched by the death of a child was hard," writes Sammy Caiola of the...

A year after Michael Brown was killed by police in Ferguson, a reporter returned to the...

High drug prices are an issue in Medi-Cal coverage

The secretive world of pharmaceutical pricing is mired in opacity. To investigate how pricey...

A look at what happens to children who've lost parents to death, mental illness, addiction and...

For a reporting project on food insecurity in Native American communities, finding the data was...

In the southern U.S., tropical diseases such as Chagas disease, toxocariasis, leishmaniasis can...

"Finding women who would be candid about their stories of abuse was incredibly difficult,"...

Journalist Lottie Joiner recently set out to explore what happens to young African American men...

The health disparities between Johnson and Wyandotte counties in Kansas are real. Reporter Alex...

In Asian American families, where the subject of sex is particularly taboo and parents may lack...

On Tuesday, National Fellow Michael LaForgia and two colleagues received the 2016 Pulitzer Prize...

"There were a few times when I felt I had reached a dead end," writes Patricia Wight. "I worried...

Most families didn't want to talk to SinoVision reporter Melody Cao about autism in their...

"It’s around 10 p.m. when I call a crisis worker for victims of domestic violence in remote...

The percentage of babies born to women who didn't receive prenatal care had increased...

Hawaiian parents were describing a foster care system that was biased against Hawaiians, yet...

As journalist Ada Calhoun "started casting around for potential good news in the child welfare...

A view from the inside of a youth lockup facility.

How one reporter overcame closed courts and bad data to get the scoop on Arkansas' juvenile...

It started as a series of reports on the dangers Latino children face when they're not placed in...

KCRW reporter Avishay Artsy set out to report on ethnic disparities in cancer outcomes. After...

For her three-part series on the health effects of rising violent crime in Merced County,...

The infections that patients pick up inside hospitals can be debilitating and even deadly. Yet...

If you're pitching a story that’s going to take you off deck for dailies, it helps to have two...

A year after Thomas Eric Duncan died from Ebola after seeking care at a Texas hospital, what’s...

In the fields of Calif.'s Ventura County, some workers only speak Mixteco. The cultural and...

As a journalist, both homelessness and mental illness are uniquely challenging topics to report...

Nearly 60 hospitals have closed in the U.S. since 2010. In reporting on how hospital closures...

"As a journalist and as a person, there’s something therapeutic about being entrusted with...

Despite the numbers of Floridians stranded in a health policy no man’s land – earning too much...

Advocates for a bill to provide health care to undocumented immigrants rally in at the Capitol in Sacramento. (Photo by LA Times/Hector Amezcua)

When LA Times reporter Soumya Karlamangla started looking into health care policies affecting...

For three months this year, I spent time with some of the sickest, most expensive patients in...

Raymond McElfers has his throat examined by his doctor. (Photo by Emily Maxwell | WCPO)

Reporter Lisa Bernard-Kuhn tackled an ambitious project looking at how doctor offices and...

The strategy of using cell phones and texts to nudge people toward healthier decisions makes a...

(Photo by Heidi de Marco/Kaiser Health News)

There's little data available on in-home caregiving, which makes reporting on the issue...

Two Herald reporters are being honored with the Selden Ring Award this week for their "Innocents...

Stuart Hodes with his wife Helen, who has Alzheimer's. (Photo credit: Amanda Inscore/The News-Press)

Reporter Frank Gluck recently spent five months reporting on how Alzheimer’s disease has...

In Baltimore, violence has marred countless lives. But Baltimore Sun reporter Andrea McDaniels...

Last year marked a turning point for people living with chronic hep C and public radio reporter...

We've all heard the stories of hospital closures, but what about when hospital beds go unfilled...

The challenges are different in many rural areas, such as Eastern Montana.

When I started reporting on Montana's "aging tsunami," I wanted to know what solutions held the...

Dennis Kreisher, an Allentown 'super-utilizer' of the health care system. (Tim Darragh/The Morning Call)

A strongly reported series examining a new program targeting 'super-utilizers' in Pennsylvania...

Despite Wendy Davis' filibuster, Texas lawmakers passed strict new abortion regulations in 2013...

The Michael Brown case has come to symbolize popular disillusionment with finding justice, but...

Orange County isn't the first place you'd expect to find child malnutrition.

Southern California's Orange County has a reputation as an affluent playground, making the...

Approaching Fallon, Nevada

A reporting trip that set out to investigate the causes behind a mysterious childhood cancer...

Photo by Jeffrey D. Allred

When I tackled the topic of loneliness as a 2013 National Health Journalism Fellowship project,...

By 2012, when I started my fellowship project, several journalists -- in Philadelphia and...

The U.S. locks up more individuals per capita than any other country in the world. We have 2.2...

We already knew about air pollution's link to asthma, heart disease, lung cancer, and shorter...

PHOTO CREDIT: Tara Lohan

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking -- using water, sand and chemicals at high-pressure to crack...

Federal health reform will leave out California's two million undocumented immigrants, a dilemma for multi-status families like Norma Navarro's. Her 7-year-old son Angel is a citizen, but her 10-year-old daughter Aneth is not, meaning they'll have significantly different health care experiences. Photo by Brian Myers, Media Arts Center San Diego

I had a sense that care for the undocumented took place in the shadows of the U.S. health system...

Four 2013 Pulitzer Prize finalists give an inside look at "Prognosis: Profits," a series about...

One of the public health trends these days appears to be a focus on the built environment. Here'...

Photographer and multimedia journalist Alison Yin, a 2012 National Health Journalism Fellow,...

MENTAL HEALTH

Why does mental health seem to get hit so much harder by cuts than other arenas? What do these...

Asthma is the most common cause of hospital stays for children. It can strike anyone, but has...

The Affordable Care Act establishes national standards for health insurance benefits. Should...

With all the media coverage of health reform, there has been surprisingly little reporting about...

Volunteers and residents in the East End take a fitness walk

Recent developments in Richmond, Va., made a story looking at how where you live affects your...

Indian country is a very different world from the one most of us mainstream reporters inhabit....

The tobacco industry may not have the commercial presence in the U.S. it once did, but cigarette...

Minimally-regulated residential care for the elderly is a fast growing, less expensive...

Help wanted. Pay not so great. Excellent chance of injury. You’ll never see an ad like this in...

It’s not easy for journalists to undertake testing on humans, nor should it be. But there are...

Journalist Paul Kleyman, who has covered aging issues for more than 20 years, offers tips for...

Get tips for covering the brave new world of personal genomics from a genetic scientist and...

Angelo Solis, a homeless alcoholic, racked up nearly $1 million in medical charges over three...

Rusting oil drums

Environmental health reporting sheds light on some of the most important decisions a person can...

Veteran food policy journalist Christopher Cook offers context on "food deserts" and how to...

Like writing about abortion or animal rights, writing about vaccines inevitably raises the ire of...

Two journalists offer tips for your reporting from their award-winning series on the striking...

Health information technology is a complex and...

Health Reform Lesson Photo 2.jpg

Here's a recap of the latest developments on the health reform front, along with some helpful...

Media coverage of health care quality often hinges on a doctor's personality, rather than...

How do you tell the stories of children or teenagers who have stigmatizing health problems...

Follow the money. That simple phrase – though never uttered...

My odyssey into the world of tuberculosis began with a simple remark by a well-connected friend...

When it comes to climate change, the most important impacts of the emissions...

A "show-me-the-evidence" health journalist offers tips on covering alternative medicine without...

Probably every health reporter in the country has been asked at one time or another to write a...

Eleven million Americans have eating disorders. Here are tips on covering this complex disease...

The national story of poor dental health and its implications — former U.S. Surgeon General...

Swine Flu Resources Photo 3.JPG

Although scientists and public health officials have long worried that an avian flu virus would...

Imagine if your doctor asked your 12-year-old son to explain to you that you had just been...

With the rise in MRSA  and other antibiotic-resistant infections, the few that prove dangerous...

Where Health and Economic Issues Collide

Not many reporters want to write about homeless people – and not many editors want to read about...

Journalists have to ask hard questions about where sources get their money – and about the...

Journalist Emily Schmidt had a rare opportunity to humanize the often-hidden story of domestic...

doc giving care

Native Americans experience higher disease rates than other Americans for problems ranging from...

Girion.Rescission.Content.Picture.jpg

It started on March 20, 2006, with what I thought was a one-shot story about the health care...

Obesity is visible — walk down the street and you bump into it. Diabetes, on the other hand, is...

The best HIV/AIDS coverage goes beyond the latest statistics of how many people are infected or the...

Craft

High school student shown.
Publishing shorter pieces on a regular basis helped keep sustained attention on the issue.
(Photo by Ken Chuang via Pixabay)
An experienced journalist reflects on the learning curve that came with tackling an in-depth series.
(Photo by Shawn Dowd/Rochester Democrat and Chronicle)
It started with a deceptively simple question: Why are there more trees in some parts of town than...
After the Assault
Until I started interviewing survivors of sexual assault, I never thought of a source as someone I...
Jen Christensen
Data pointed me in the right direction. But getting out in the community revealed the struggles...
 (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
What do you do for stories that have no available dataset — what if no one has asked people about...
Why it’s so essential to find real people for your health policy stories
News stories about health care policy are often way too dry and boring. The missing ingredient?...
(Photo by Igor Spasic via Flickr)
When it came to finding truly surprising patterns or stories within the Alabama data, I hit wall...
Nataly Mendoza, a student at Sequoia High School in Redwood City, conducts an interview in Spanish with a man.
By partnering with teens, a reporter seeking a deeper understanding of health in local communities...
Photo via Giles Bruce
The initial statistics shocked me. It turns out, I hadn’t seen anything yet.
How data powered every step of the reporting on chronic absenteeism in California schools
We were about 30 seconds into our first look at the California Department of Education’s chronic...
(Photo: Vickie Connor/Desert Sun)
Ultimately, I had no data for my data project. So, under the advice of data guru Paul Overberg of...
(Photo: Kevin German/Luceo for USN&WR)
With deadlines looming, I was able to publish a feature-length story just a week after receiving...
Photo by Salgu Wissmath
If you were to seek opioid addiction treatment for yourself or a loved one, what are the chances...
(Photo by Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images)
When I set out to explore disparities in sexually transmitted diseases, I noticed few outlets...
Alicia Kachmar takes a puff from her cigarette outside of Coal Miners Bar & Grill. (Photo: Rick Kintze/The Morning Call)
When is OK to offer a desperate source a ride, or a bottle of Tylenol? Knowing when to intervene is...
Michele Dutcher takes a bus to and from the Valumarket in Louisville for groceries. (Photo Credit: Matt Stone/Courier Journal)
A questionnaire helped a reporter find more than a dozen Louisville residents of different...
Carl Hull, a 10th grader at Dymally High School, follows a route which he sometimes changes up to get to school.
A Los Angeles Times reporter spent a year reporting on the high schools in LA County surrounded by...
Latrelle Huff prepares dinner for her children. (Photo: Stephen B. Morton/USA TODAY)
"One of the first lessons we learned was the need for patience with survivors. We were often asking...
Painting by a survivor on display in STAR Court, Los Angeles County's specialized juvenile court for commercially sexually explo
Journalists seeking to include the voices of survivors in their stories should start with the most...
An assignment chart in the ER at County USC, one of the busiest emergency departments in the state. (Photo by David Crane, Los A
The tide of ER visits rose in Southern California after Obamacare became law, growing about 27...
Demonstrators at a Sacramento rally last year in support of a bill to create a single-payer system in California.
The Sacramento Bee’s Angela Hart shares how she got a handle on a huge story: the potential move to...
Photo by April Xu
Undocumented immigrants’ health issues are almost always ignored by the mainstream media. One...
Photo
In reporting on epidemic levels of back pain among immigrant laborers, a Telemundo correspondent...
Photo: Beth Nakamu/The Oregonian
"If newsrooms want coverage to be diverse, newsrooms must back up that aim with an investment of...
Tracie Potts interviews potential sources for a broadcast series on health reform.
"Data is the backbone of good reporting, but people make the audience care," writes broadcast...
Photo
Several months into their investigation, two reporters realized they lacked one key element: "The...
Francisca said that she and her husband were “like animals, hiding from the heat.”
Climate change is making the problem of urban heat a growing health risk. But reporting on the...
Tom Fox/Dallas Morning News
As women go to jail at staggering rates, Dallas Morning News reporter Cary Aspinwall tapped into...
Sharon Cantillon/The Buffalo News
Buffalo News reporter Tiffany Lankes shows how data can create a story framework that comes alive...
[Photo: John Moore/Getty Images]
Data journalist Leonardo Castaneda offers reporters a detailed tutorial on how to analyze — and...
John Moore/Getty Images
AP journalist Meghan Hoyer provides an updated dataset and guide to help reporters better...
[Photo by Mike Tigas via Flickr.]
"As a data journalist, let me state my bias: I do not like scorecards," writes veteran data...
Photo: Eva Hambach/Getty Images
California's psychiatric hospitals can be highly dangerous places, both for patients and staff....
Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images
One reporter's intrepid data quest has given reporters nationwide a new look at how their local...
Dr. Samantha Smith checks on 58-year-old patient Paul Shelton. He has severe liver scarring as a result of hepatitis C, but his
How one reporter "fell down a data rabbit hole" while investigating how many Medicaid patients were...
Photo: John Moore/Getty Images
What to do when you can't find the right research for your story? A Florida newspaper pursued a...
[Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images]
Are California hospitals doing a better job of preventing serious mistakes in the wake of a state...
While nearly half of Florida's kids rely on Medicaid, the program has battled persistent problems...
Before Jackie Valley tackled her series on the unmet mental health needs of Nevada's children, “...
In reporting her series on mental illness in Shasta County, Alayna Shulman didn't find the data she...
A deep dive into the data on federal pay-for-performance programs for hospitals turned up a few key...
 The Rev. Thomas Walker sings during a service at Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church in Rocky Mount. He was diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer at age 47 and has become a prostate cancer activist. [Photo credit: Ethan Hyman/NewsObserver.com]
African American men in North Carolina suffer from some of the world’s highest rates of prostate...
Reporter Liza Gross was seeking a fresh way to convey the risky environmental conditions facing...
"What came back was hundreds of pages of heavily redacted records with no names attached," Corwin writes.
Reporter Tom Corwin of The Augusta Chronicle was shocked to learn of 82 unexpected deaths in 2013...
Photojournalist David Gross hatched a plan to crowdfund a project in which he'd photograph and...
A big national health report or new story breaks, and you'd like to cover the news with a local or...
JON LOWENSTEIN/NOOR
To really engage audiences and maximize the impact of a big reporting project, it's vital to plan...
(Photo by AP via Politico)
Last fall, we had no idea how the Obamacare rollout was going to go. So Politico's Jennifer...
Rick Rayburn encourages his wife Marianne to help him make soup for supper. Capital Public Radio | Andrew Nixon
Reporters covering stories of people in stressful situations can find themselves struggling with "...
Andrew Nixon | Capital Public Radio
When reporters strive to foster community engagement, it not only stands to make for better...
Creating custom hormone therapy is big business for compounding pharmacies. Regulated by state...
Reflections on Reporting About Pesticides and Neuroscience
It is difficult not to view poverty-stricken farmworkers as victims and pesticide manufacturers (...
For the Dennis Hunt grant, Burt Hubbard and I-News produced a package of stories including video,...
Bill Greene/Globe Staff
Shortly after two teens were shot in 2011 by another boy who mistakenly thought they were part of a...
Some years ago, I began hearing from my sources that I should investigate the generic drug industry...
Maria Guzman has faced an emotional journey due to violence in El Salvador. Her son disappeared two years ago.
When I think about lessons learned in the past six months, two phrases come to mind: time...
To document Rubbertown, Ky., residents’ claims of unusually high rates of disease, I needed hard...
In 1973, nearly every Michigan resident was exposed to a toxic chemical. As I brought this story...
At first, investigating what kind of discipline the Wisconsin Medical Examining Board was meting...
How could legislation designed to protect people from suspected cancer-causing compounds in...
When it comes to health issues, the southeastern corner of Virginia usually is pretty average. That...
Timothy Brown, formerly known as "The Berlin Patient" (Eva Kolenko)
Former Bloomberg reporter Rob Waters describes his two-year-long quest to interview the “Berlin...
Karen Weintraub, a former editor at The Boston Globe, offers tips for editing health and science...
Pairing English-language and ethnic media to report stories can be rewarding and result in great...
There’s hardly a health story out there that cannot benefit from some good data – from estimates of...
Pulling off a narrative story in the medical world requires a different kind of story thinking and...
Get tips on covering medical research stories from veteran AP reporter Lauran Neergaard. 
The first step in asking a stranger to open up to you is to follow the golden rule: Treat others...
Rural adults are older, sicker, less educated, less well paid and less likely to have health...

Announcements

The Center for Health Journalism’s two-day symposium on domestic violence will provide reporters with a roadmap for covering this public health epidemic with nuance and sensitivity. The first day will take place on the USC campus on Friday, March 17. The Center has a limited number of $300 travel stipends for California journalists coming from outside Southern California and a limited number of $500 travel stipends for those coming from out of state. Journalists attending the symposium will be eligible to apply for a reporting grant of $2,000 to $10,000 from our Domestic Violence Impact Reporting Fund. Find more info here!

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