This edition of member news includes accomplishments from AHCJ members Benjamin Hardy, Melissa Patrick, Kelsey Ryan and Bram Sable-Smith. Continue reading
Tag Archives: awards
Journalists encouraged to beat the approaching AHCJ contest deadline
While 2020 is coming to a close, AHCJ wants to recognize the year’s demanding work of journalism colleagues through the Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism.
The contest deadline is Jan. 26 at 5 p.m. Eastern Time.
Winners of the contest are recognized at the annual awards luncheon at AHCJ’s annual conference. First-place winners earn $500 and a framed certificate. They also receive complimentary lodging for two nights and registration for the annual conference, June 24-27, in Austin.
AHCJ contest: Ready to recognize 2020 health journalism work
With 2020 as one of the most important times in health journalism history, the Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism is ready to accept entries to recognize the best health reporting in print, broadcast and online media.
First-place winners earn $500 and a framed certificate. They also receive complimentary lodging for two nights and registration for the annual conference, June 24-27, in Austin. Winners are recognized at the annual awards luncheon. Continue reading
AHCJ announces winners of 2019 health journalism contest
Investigations into flawed or corrupt health-care practices won many of the top honors in the Association of Health Care Journalists’ 2019 contest, for which results were announced today.
The Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism drew 454 entries, up 29% from the previous year, partly because of a surge in student-journalist entries.
This was the second year for the contest’s student category, designed to encourage and highlight work by young journalists.
Reporter’s work pushes regulators, legislators to act on opioids

Photo: Sam Owens, Charleston Gazette-MailEric Eyre’s investigative series, Painkiller Profiteers, chronicled massive pain pill shipments to West Virginia. This shows the cremated ashes of a West Virginia woman who died from a drug overdose.
Lack of work, educational gaps, despair, overprescribing – there’s a host of reasons behind the nation’s opioid crisis. It may seem daunting to reporters who want to nail down the epidemic’s causes, but sometimes you just have to keep digging – literally.
West Virginia reporter Eric Eyre realized something was off when, during a trip to the state pharmacy board, he began digging through boxes filled with faxes from drug wholesalers reporting suspicious pharmacy activity. Continue reading
Eyre’s Pulitzer-winning work shows power of hard data, big numbers

Eric Eyre
In two days in December, the Charleston Gazette-Mail published two blockbuster articles about the opioid crisis in West Virginia, the results of months of reporting by Eric Eyre, the paper’s statehouse reporter.
Anyone who read them would recognize that Eyre’s work was outstanding, if only for the numbers he included in each piece. Over six years, the nation’s largest drug distributors shipped 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills to pharmacies in the state, he reported. In that same period, 1,728 West Virginians fatally overdosed on those two painkillers, he wrote. Drug distributors shipped enough hydrocodone and oxycodone for each of the state’s 1.8 million residents to have 433 pills. Continue reading