Melba Newsome
Melba Newsome is the new AHCJ core topic leader for health equity. A veteran freelance journalist from Charlotte, N.C., she has more than 20 years’ experience reporting on news and general interest topics.
Over the past year, she has reported extensively on COVID-19 in the Black community, funded by a grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. In the past decade, her work has focused primarily on education and health, with a concentration on disparities and rural health.
Her health and science features have appeared in Health Affairs, Oprah, Prevention, Scientific American, Chemical & Engineering News and North Carolina Health News.
Newsome just received an AHCJ Health Performance Fellowship for a project focused on the underlying racial and ethnic disparities around the opioid crisis in North Carolina and how the face of the epidemic has shifted from white to Black and brown communities.
She will officially begin her duties June 14.
The health equity core topic resources are made possible by support from The Commonwealth Fund, based in New York, which has a profound interest in this area.
Health equity is a topic among an expanding list of health and health care-related core topics that AHCJ believes will help health journalists master the beat they cover.
Send suggestions, questions or resources you’d like to share with Newsome to healthequity@healthjournalism.org.