Photo: Matt Hintsa via Flickr
One challenge when covering medical conferences is that, depending on your publication’s needs, you often must conduct many interviews on the fly both with presenters and with attendees at the sessions.
Since many other people also are vying for the presenters’ attention, you might only be able to get in a few short questions after a session. Continue reading
Writing about health and medical studies is part of the larger genre of writing about science. Perhaps the best science journalism site/blog out there is The Open Notebook, chock full of advice, tips, guides and inspiration.
We’ve highlighted their work here before, and now they’ve gone above and beyond with a special section aimed at new science journalists — though there’s plenty of gold there for veterans as well. Continue reading
Those of us who cover medical studies on a regular basis are always looking for ways to uncover new and interesting research aside from the embargoed releases from the major journals and services such as EurekAlert! Using alerts on PubMed is one option, and now there’s a new app called Case.
I first learned about the app in March when Avikk Ghose, Case’s CEO and co-founder, reached out to me on email. I checked out the app at the time but found some features limited for the way I specifically look for research. (Since it’s aimed at researchers themselves, it was at the time still too hyperspecific for me as a journalist.) Continue reading
In April, several experienced independent journalists shared their advice for having a successful freelance career during a panel at Health Journalism 2017 in Orlando. People in the audience chimed in with contributions.
“Panelists offered dozens of helpful tips and plenty of sound advice — including several ideas that were new to even the most experienced freelancers in the room,” wrote Liz Seegert, AHCJ’s core topic leader on aging and an independent journalist.
Seegert and Tara Haelle, AHCJ’s medical studies core topic leader, compiled an extensive tip sheet from the information shared at that panel especially for AHCJ’s freelance members. See the tip sheet.
Health Journalism 2013, Boston edition, is officially a wrap. I traveled home with tons of useful tricks and story ideas, and because it’s my job to help you do yours… you’re going to get to steal some of my best pickups right here, right now. Continue reading
Journalist Mary Otto will be AHCJ’s oral health topic leader, helping members stay on top of the news as it relates to this important but sometimes overlooked aspect of health care through timely blog posts, fact sheets, tip sheets and articles.
Mary Otto
Otto is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist who began writing about oral health at The Washington Post, where she worked for eight years covering social issues including health care and poverty.
In 2007, she wrote the story of 12-year-old Deamonte Driver, a Maryland child covered by Medicaid who died after bacteria from a dental infection spread to his brain. The death of the boy spurred congressional hearings, a revamping of Maryland’s Medicaid dental system and increased attention to oral health access for Medicaid children nationwide.
After leaving the Post in a newsroom downsizing, Otto spent an academic year as a 2009-10 Knight Science Journalism Fellow studying oral health and public health at Harvard University. Her ongoing exploration of barriers to dental care in poor communities has been assisted by a California Endowment Dennis A. Hunt Fund grant.
Otto has continued to write about oral health and other health and social issues as a freelance writer for the Post, a contributing writer for an online publication for oral health professionals called DrBicuspid.com, and as the editor of Street Sense, a newspaper produced and sold by homeless men and women in Washington, D.C.
The oral health topic pages will join AHCJ’s Core Topic pages on health reform and aging. The Core Topic pages are an effort to curate the organization’s resources, data and story ideas using “topic champions” – lead editors – to shape this material into practical guidance in covering stories on those topics. The oral health effort will be made possible thanks to support from the Pew Charitable Trusts.
Each specialty topic page includes glossaries, key concepts, reporting tip sheets, weekly blog items, first-person stories by fellow journalists, videos, data and more. The topic home page will serve as a launch pad to more resources, on healthjournalism.org and elsewhere.
Future Core Topic pages will include:
Members are invited to contact Otto via email (mary@healthjournalism.org) with questions or suggestions about what to include on the core topic site.