The Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) recently welcomed seasoned journalist, author, and professor Lara Salahi as its new health equity beat leader.
Salahi, a native of Detroit, is a distinguished professor of journalism at Endicott College, where she was selected as a NorthStar Collective Faculty Fellow in January. She has more than a decade of experience covering health, science, and medicine and worked for seven years in broadcast journalism as a digital producer for NBC. She has covered global health inequities — especially involving infectious disease prevention and response — maternal health disparities, access to mental health services and how chronic diseases disproportionately affect communities of color, among other topics.
“We’re so excited to have Lara join as an AHCJ health beat leader covering health equity,” said Kelsey Ryan, AHCJ executive director. “Health equity is a subject that touches everyone, and it’s so important for journalists to expand and deepen their coverage of equity, inclusion, bias, and disparity in health care and health outcomes so they can better inform their readers, listeners and viewers.”
Salahi is also co-author of “Outbreak Culture: The Ebola Crisis and the Next Epidemic,” published a year before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. An updated version was published in 2021 to focus on the COVID-19 response.
“Readers and public health experts found our work particularly timely, as it shed light on the systemic problems that can plague outbreak responses across different diseases and geographic contexts,” Salahi said.
Her main goal in this new role, she said, is to highlight topics and voices often overlooked in the health equity space.
“Health care disparities are such a crucial issue, and I believe there’s a lot of important work we can do to shed light on these challenges and the people affected by them, and ultimately move policy and practice forward,” she said.
“I want our members to walk away with a stronger understanding of health equity and the factors that contribute to it — whether it’s new ideas for their reporting or a deeper appreciation for the complexities of these issues.”
The work of AHCJ’s health equity beat leader is supported by funding from The Commonwealth Fund.
