By Cathy Jedruczek
From the Spring 2007 issue of HealthBeat
Tuan Nguyen finished talking to his source, hung up the phone and smiled in triumph.
"I was interviewing somebody and I was able to ask all the right questions and understand all the different medical studies," said Nguyen, a student at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. Nguyen had been working on an in-depth consumer story about interventions for Alzheimer's disease.
Nguyen is one of seven students in the school's inaugural class of 50 who chose health and medicine reporting as an area of concentration. He and his classmates are learning how to detect spin, bias and conflicts of interest in health information; read and interpret scientific studies and translate data into understandable stories for the public.
The CUNY School of Journalism, which opened last fall, also offers concentrations in urban affairs, business/ economics and arts/culture. All students are trained to work in a converged newsroom, but in the second semester they pick a media format that interests them: print, broadcast or interactive media.
Stephen B. Shepard, former editor of BusinessWeek, is the school's dean. He started his career as a science writer, so he thought the school should have science reporting track. But then he changed his mind.
"I think there is a better market for journalists writing about health than science," Shepard says. "It also enables us to do service journalism and tell people how to be health conscious."
The health and medical reporting track at CUNY has a sequence of three courses with an urban focus. Trudy Lieberman, one of the nation's first consumer reporters and president of the AHCJ board of directors, designed the courses and is heading the program. Ivan Oransky, deputy editor at The Scientist and also a member of AHCJ's board of directors, is an adjunct professor.
"The idea is that when students finish these three courses they'll be prepared to cover everything from "study says" stories to the complexities of hospital and drug company finance and marketing," Lieberman says.
In the first course, students have four major assignments: a news story based on a study reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association or the New England Journal of Medicine, an in-depth consumer piece on topics such as the wisdom of bariatric surgery or intervention for heart disease, a profile of a medical resident from Mount Sinai Hospital, and an investigative story about the institutional review boards at New York hospitals.
"The assignments are designed to really stress hands-on reporting," Lieberman says. "I wanted to bring students out to the community, to follow a resident, so they could understand medical education and what life is like in the hospital."
Nguyen particularly liked the idea of interacting with New York's diverse communities.
"You get out and start asking about things you are interested about," Nguyen says. He attended UCLA and worked in documentary filmmaking before going to journalism school.
The best of students' work is published on the school's Web-based wire service and is available to news organizations.
Students get a chance to hear from professionals in the medical community. Early in the semester they met with Harriet Rabb, general counsel at Rockefeller University, who lectured on clinical trials. Lieberman brought in Dr. Diana K. Berger, who is the medical director for the Diabetes Prevention and Control Program at New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and Henry Finder, the editorial director of The New Yorker to talk about narrative medical writing.
Students also have to write a consumer advice story by coming up with rules for understanding drug advertising on TV and drug company Web sites.
"I watch a lot of TV sports and see a lot of advertising and I'm always tearing the pharmaceuticals apart anyway," Andrew Greiner says. He chose the health and medicine concentration and is a sports intern at the New York Daily News. "It will be fun to do it with some structure."
At the end of the spring semester, students will ride an AIDS van with the New York Academy of Medicine, part of Academy's effort to improve the health of urban populations through research. They also will work on a large group project about diabetes in the Bronx.
"I wanted to get a firm foundation in medical and science reporting and learn how to be skeptical about different studies and newspaper articles," Nguyen says. "And that's what I'm doing here."
Students have a wide range of experience before entering the program. Greiner had an internship at Downbeat Magazine and a job in New York with Pace advertising as a creative copywriter. Other students are straight out of college or an internship after college.
A 10-week summer internship is required for graduation. That, combined with three semesters of coursework, makes the program about 15 months long.
Cathy Jedruczek is a student at the CUNY School of Journalism in a print track with health/medical reporting concentration.
