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SHARED WISDOMSometimes all we need is a quick suggestion from our peers to zero in on a good story. Here we turn to front-line journalists for advice, some simple insight to add to our repository of “shared wisdom.” What resources do you use for your ongoing reporting on COVID-19, and what advice do you have for colleagues if they can’t get anyone at a hospital, pharmacy or health care facility to talk to you?
I [also] rely on local universities to connect me with experts. If you're going through academic institutions, [physicians there] often have admitting privileges at large hospitals, and they're able to talk to you [if the hospital] has a restrictive media policy. [Find] locally owned or small businesses [because] they are easier [to find people willing to talk to you] than large corporations. For example, it’s difficult to get CVS pharmacists to comment, so I go to locally-owned pharmacies. Same thing with funeral homes. You just have to keep calling around until you find someone who can talk to you. That's the reality of reporting right now — large corporations have strict media policies — and they dominate the health care landscape. Emily Woodruff covers public health for The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate. She grew up in Tallahassee, Fla. and spent nearly a decade in Los Angeles, where she covered brain health and wellness. In 2019, she returned to her swampy roots in the Southeast through Report For America. She is a graduate of the University of Florida and Columbia Journalism School. What can journalists do better to cover the black community and COVID-19? Where can they find diverse sources?
Tonya Russell is a New Jersey-based freelance writer with a passion for mental health, wellness, and travel. She's written for the Washington Post, The Atlantic, New York Times, and various women's publications. When she isn't writing, she's probably hiking with her dogs or training for a marathon. What were some of your favorite resources, other than social media, for finding story ideas about the pandemic, experts to interview and support for professional burnout?
Chelsea Cirruzzo, based in Washington, D.C., is a local news reporter for Axios. She previously worked for U.S. News & World Report and Inside Washington Publishers. She’s also written for The Washington Post, The Lily News, VICE News, Eater DC, DCist, Washington City Paper and WIRED. Journalists need to have the ability to gather and analyze data, especially when working on investigative stories. What advice do you have for reporters who want to learn how to develop these skills?
Invest in some courses on data journalism. I recommend checking out the boot camps offered by the Investigative Reports & Editors. They have excellent training courses on investigative reporting and data. I think these days, you just can't do projects without data. Jerry Mitchell spent three decades working for three decades for the statewide Clarion-Ledger, Mitchell left in 2019 and founded the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit that exposes corruption and injustices, investigates cold cases, gives voice to the voiceless and raises up the next generation of investigative reporters. He is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a longtime member of the Investigative Reporters & Editors, and a winner of more than 30 other national awards, including a $500,000 MacArthur "genius grant." What advice do you have for journalists who are tracking public health data in their communities to hold officials accountable in their efforts to combat the COVID-19 pandemic?
Take the long view when covering public health. Through much of the pandemic, I reported on details of the cases, hospitalizations and mitigation efforts that at times seemed incremental. However, by closely watching events take place over time, I was able to find stories and develop a familiarity with the issues that few other reporters seemed to have. Alex Smith is a health care reporter for KCUR 89.3 FM, the National Public Radio station in Kansas City, Mo. He’s also a member of the NPR-Kaiser Health News health care reporting collaborative and a frequent contributor to the NPR network. His reporting has also appeared in Scientific American, The Washington Post, The Guardian and Psyche. He won a National Edward R. Murrow award in 2017 for a sound-rich mini-documentary on learning to hear through cochlear implants. Alex grew up in Kansas City, where he now lives with his wife, the writer Gina Kaufmann, and their 4-year-old son, Ari. You write about pain research, neuroscience and COVID-19 long-haulers, who are some of the people you recommend following on Twitter?
Stephani Sutherland, Ph.D. (@SutherlandPhD), is a freelance science journalist and neuroscientist. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, Knowable Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, New Scientist, Pain Research Forum and RELIEF.news. In recent years, she has focused on covering pain research and the public health crisis of chronic pain. In 2020, like so many science journalists, Stephani pivoted to covering COVID-19, and she has authored a series on the coronavirus and its effects on the nervous system for Scientific American. Who would be your favorite experts to follow on Twitter to get the best information and stay on top of genetics and the emerging variants of the COVID-19 virus?
Marla Broadfoot (@mvbroadfoot) is a freelance science journalist with a doctorate in genetics and molecular biology. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, Science, Stat, The Scientist, Discover, Nature News, and Science News, among others. She is president of the Science Communicators of North Carolina, a contributing editor at American Scientist, and an adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. When you are reporting during this pandemic and can't be there in person with someone, what kinds of questions do you ask to help sources re-create their days for you, so that you have the details that you need for your stories?
Jessica Contrera is a reporter for The Washington Post's local enterprise team. She reports on people whose lives are being transformed by major events and issues in the news. A native of Akron, Ohio, she joined The Post as a features writer in 2014 after graduating from Indiana University. What advice do you have for reporters who might be new to covering vaccines and are looking for sources to cover the COVID-19 vaccine regulatory process and its roll out?
Dana Smith is a senior staff writer for Medium.com’s Elemental. Many journalists are covering COVID stories without a health or science background. Can you share some resources for them to get up to speed quickly on a deadline?
And familiarize yourself with PubMed, biorXiv and MedrXiv — a quick search on these can help put the new findings into perspective and help determine whether it is truly new and important. Apoorva Mandavilli is a science and global health reporter at The New York Times. This is an excerpt of article originally published by the National Press Club Journalism Institute and was republished here with permission. How do you prioritize what COVID-19 stories to focus on and what are your favorite resources for finding stories?
I think (about what) the public would like to know about: money, family, health, safety and community. Those are the big five. If it has to do (with one of those), it’s a surefire hit. … And (to find stories) I look for unusual stories like an NPR podcast that isn’t on the NPR [front] news page. On Thursdays, I go to the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report and look there. I look at Stat and The Chronicle of Higher Education and the Chronicle of Philanthropy. I look at newsletters from professional groups, like newsletters for surgeons and nurses and prison guards and political officers. Firefighters have a website called Firehouse. There are all kinds of things like that, which are affinity sites. Like ESPN has had stuff and I look at Facebook pages in groups where journalists share stories that they did. I use things like Google News and Google Alerts. Some of my stories come from readers. Readers who will say, did you hear this or that? I’m also really interested in business stories. … The angles are endless. Al Tompkins spent 30 years working as a reporter, photojournalist, producer, investigative reporter, head of special investigations and news director before joining the Poynter Institute as a senior faculty member for broadcast and online. He is the author of "Aim for the Heart" a textbook about multimedia storytelling that has been adopted by more than 100 universities worldwide. In your recent story on rapid antigen testing in nursing homes, you had to sort through many layers of rules and regulations for testing of residents and staff. How did you keep it all straight?
For reporters, one of the difficulties in covering this pandemic is constantly shifting guidance from both federal and state officials on COVID-19 testing and who should get tested. Nursing homes are subject to their own regulations from state health departments and the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. As a result, for this story, that meant checking all of the following sources:
One of the problems that I discovered along the way is each one of the federal agencies said something slightly different about how the antigen tests should be used. And then, adding to the problem, the misaligned federal guidance sometimes would conflict with what state health departments were saying. That became a significant part of the story but it isn’t unique to nursing homes – this issue could manifest for other COVID-19 testing stories, too. Rachana Pradhan, a Kaiser Health News correspondent, reports on national health policy decisions and their effect on everyday Americans. A recent recent story was about rapid antigen testing in nursing homes. Pradhan came to KHN from Politico, where she covered health care policy and politics on national and state levels. What advice would you have for journalists on how to approach COVID-19 data?
Betsy Ladyzhets is a data journalist and science writer based in Brooklyn, New York. She is a research associate at Stacker, where she manages the publication's Science and Lifestyle verticals. She's also a volunteer at the COVID Tracking Project, where she focuses on data standards and the COVID Racial Data Tracker. She recently started a newsletter covering data on the pandemic, called the COVID-19 Data Dispatch. What tips do you have for reporters breaking news in the time of COVID-19?
They usually have the names and the affiliations. Those people are on the outside, but know people on the inside. Search the Federal Register for notices related, even loosely related, to your subject matter. There is often a contact person listed. That person may not talk to you but you can find out what office or cluster they are in, to find other people. Google strings like: FDA, conference [your subject matter] for speakers’ names. Likewise with medical literature. Look at reports such as from the National Academy of Sciences. NAS reports have a nice listing of bios of people on the committees that write the reports. Kathryn Foxhall (@KathF) is a veteran reporter on federal health issues Her work has appeared in Contemporary Pediatrics, Nursing Spectrum, Government Health IT, FDA WebView and other outlets. What advice do you have to local reporters who are looking for investigative angles on COVID-19?
Katherine Eban, an investigative journalist, is a Vanity Fair contributor and Andrew Carnegie fellow. Her second book, "Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom" (Ecco/HarperCollins, May 2019), a New York Times bestseller, is now out in paperback. What best practices are you following in covering preprints during the pandemic?
During this pandemic, there’s been an even bigger push to get stories out fast, and some coronavirus sources have been more difficult to reach because they have been so busy — I’ve had to work harder as a reporter because of this. But it’s important not to get swept up in a preprint and run with it without vetting it properly. We shouldn’t let journalistic standards become another victim of this pandemic. Roxanne Khamsi is a science writer based in Montreal, Canada. You can follow her on Twitter at @rkhamsi. As a journalist, how do you communicate changing understandings, predictions and recommendations without undermining your credibility?
I think it can be respectful to readers and can defuse some frustration and confusion if we say more explicitly: what researchers do know today, why that's different from what they thought yesterday, and what they still don't know and hope to find out tomorrow. Laura Helmuth is the new editor-in-chief at Scientific American after leaving her position as health, science & environment editor at The Washington Post. She previously edited at National Geographic, Slate, Smithsonian and Science and was President of the National Association of Science Writers from 2016 to 2018. Follow her @laurahelmuth. Any advice for journalists about what we do about media literacy and debunking conspiracy theories in this era of COVID-19?
Marshall Allen is an investigative health care reporter for ProPublica. Allen’s work has been honored with several journalism awards, including the Harvard Kennedy School’s 2011 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting at the Las Vegas Sun, where he worked before coming to ProPublica in 2011. Before he was in journalism, Allen spent five years in full-time ministry, including three years in Nairobi, Kenya. He has a master’s degree in theology. What is your sense of the U.S.’s preparedness in general for a pandemic or a bioterrorism attack? There have been many stories questioning whether the Trump administration has made this a priority.
At the same time, other global health professionals are worried that the administration’s America First approach is going to crush any chance of preparedness, since so much of this requires operating with an understanding of globalization. They believe the administration also generally has a poor concept of why policy needs to be based on scientific evidence. Travel bans are proven to worsen infectious outbreaks, for example. Emily Baumgaertner works in The New York Times's Washington bureau, helping chase down presidential hires, fires, tweets and lawsuits. She has a master of public health degree and reports on health security and bio-defense in her spare time. She previously worked for the Pulitzer Center and reported from sub-Saharan Africa for The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, Scientific American and others. Follow her on Twitter: @Emily_Baum. How do you cope with the information fatigue during the COVID-19 pandemic and decide on what you’ll focus on in your coverage?
I would say to everyone that they should employ good information hygiene. Don't feel like you have to spend an extra four hours every day (or very late at night) reading rumors that won't do you any additional good. Carl Zimmer is an award-winning New York Times columnist and the author of 13 books about science. His newest book is “She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity." Follow him at @carlzimmer. How are you finding diverse sources and avoiding using the same people again and again for your coronavirus/COVID-19 stories?
Wudan Yan is an independent journalist in Seattle who has been covering coronavirus for Huffington Post, MIT Tech Review, The New York Times, Science and more. Follow her @wudanyan and see her coronavirus reporting here. As a writer who has looked into history, what advice do you have for journalists covering this current coronavirus outbreak?
The other lesson is that there is always class stratification in outbreaks. People want to blame poor people for the outbreak. Those with less income are already at a disadvantage and they are extra screwed over when these kinds of things happen, and that should be written about. Everyone wants to protect themselves and other people get thrown under the bus. So, we should be reporting on how are people reacting? And how do we want to react? What are the unintended consequences of blaming others? It will be important to write about how this is playing out. Beth Skwarecki is the senior health editor at Lifehacker and has been writing about health and science for over a decade. Her book, “Outbreak: 50 Tales of Epidemics that Terrorized the World,” is worth taking a look at some context about the history of infectious diseases and their impact on humans. Her other book is "Genetics 101." Why is it important to be sure the person you use as a source has the knowledge, experience, training, etc. in the specific topic area you're writing about as opposed to a generalist?
They might still be able to address it, but they’ll likely lack the depth to be able to put new findings into context or discuss the history of a particular area and how any new information changes the field. They might not know how well a new publication or research finding is accepted by others in the field, or whether it’s controversial and contradicts other published literature. They might not know if the group or person doing the research is reputable or has a history of poor studies or paper retractions. You’re just opening yourself up to unforced errors if you choose an interviewee without solid knowledge of the niche you’re writing about. Tara C. Smith is a professor of public health specializing in epidemiology and infectious diseases at Kent State University. She’s a columnist for Self.com and writes freelance articles for a wide range of other news publications. Follow her at @aetiology. When a fast-moving, high-profile public health story is unfolding, what do you do to ensure the experts you interview are appropriately qualified for the topic?
It’s important to take some time to do this, even in a fast-breaking story. Hypothetical example: If the CDC comes out with startling news about a “vectorborne” disease, you had better do enough of a read on your results to separate the mosquito people from the tick people, and the human disease people from the animal people, or you will waste a lot of time emailing. I also Google to see whether those people have been interviewed, and also, whether they have been interviewed too much — I don’t want to be their 1000th interview, and I don’t want to be copy/pasting what they have said elsewhere. As a reporter who specializes in emerging infections and outbreaks, I feel a special responsibility to avoid showcasing inflammatory language — it’s click-attracting but I think it is harmful to our mission of informing the public. (Sorry, traffic gods.) So when I Google to see whether and how much possible sources have spoken, I am also looking for the quality of their expression. On a spectrum of not-descriptive to OMG, I try to pick people who land in the middle. Maryn McKenna is a freelance journalist who covers public health, global health and food policy. She is @marynmck on Twitter. What can journalists do to prepare for covering a public health emergency?
Also try to find out how the politics of your community might come into play if there is an emergency. Ideally, emergency responses avoid politics, but we rarely see the ideal. Doug Levy is author of the book “The Communications Golden Hour: The Essential Guide to Public Information When Every Minute Counts." He covered science, health, and technology for USA Today during most of the 1990s and was chief communications officer at Columbia University Medical Center in New York and director of communications at the UCSF School of Medicine. He advises police, fire, public health and other organizations on how to communicate with their communities better and faster. What would be some of your lessons learned and your advice to other reporters who may be covering an outbreak, whether it be measles or another disease?As of mid-May, more than 500 cases of measles have been reported to New York City public health officials. Amanda Eisenberg, a New York health reporter for Politico, has been in the middle of covering this unfolding epidemic, which represents the worst measles outbreak in decades. She offers some advice for reporters who are covering the measles outbreak.
My colleague said: “We have an outbreak. What are other ways that you can think about to cover this story?” So I wrote about how hospitals are adding extra measures to ensure immune-compromised people are not exposed to measles on site, which could be deadly. What were [hospitals] doing with those patients that were immune-compromised? How are they making sure a measles outbreak doesn’t happen in their hospital. How do they make sure measles isn’t spread at a hospital? In Rockland County, there was an exposure site at a hospital. Someone was waiting in the emergency room with measles. We got good traction on our story about that and how that hospital made sure that measles wasn’t being spread there. [Write about the fact that] there will be more vulnerable people caught up in this [outbreak] and [about writing about] more than just, this is the latest on the measles count. I suggest that anyone who cares about [outbreaks] get better at data scrubbing and what an outbreak of measles looks like for a community. I wrote a story about 400 schools in the state that had high rates of religious exemptions for vaccinations. The schools spanned from teaching Muslim children to special needs children. It’s not just the Orthodox [Jewish] community that has low vaccination rates. So if you can look at data for an outbreak, then you can find stories out of that. Pay attention to vulnerable populations. They are important. They are the ones who can get the most sick, like kids going through chemotherapy. Amanda Eisenberg is a health care reporter for Politico New York. She also writes Politico New York Health Care, an early-morning email that breaks down the day’s news for health-industry insiders. Eisenberg holds a journalism degree from the University of Maryland and a deep resentment for her favorite football team, the New York Jets. If a reporter is looking to cover an aspect of pandemic preparedness that hasn’t been written about before, what would you recommend?
Ed Yong is a science journalist who reports for The Atlantic, and is based in Washington D.C. His work has featured in National Geographic, the New Yorker, Wired, Nature, New Scientist, Scientific American, and many more. He has won a variety of awards, including the Michael E. DeBakey Journalism Award for biomedical reporting, the Byron H. Waksman Award for Excellence in the Public Communication of Life Sciences, and the National Academies Keck Science Communication Award. "I Contain Multitudes,", his first book, was a New York Times bestseller, and a clue on Jeopardy! He has a Chatham Island black robin named after him. Why should you pay attention to infectious disease threats among hospital workers?
For example, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) was primarily a threat in hospitals before it emerged in the community, and even today the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is wrestling with how to handle health care workers who are either infected or colonized with MRSA. (Health care workers can carry the organisms without having any symptoms.) The epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) killed 1,707 health care workers worldwide in 2002 and 2003 — which represented about one in five deaths from the disease overall. More recently, hospital workers have become infected with Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), a disease that is not easily transmissible. The World Health Organization plans to vaccinate at-risk health care workers in Africa with the experimental Ebola vaccine. You might find the earliest reports of diseases among health care workers from two of CDC’s advisory committees: the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and the Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee (HICPAC). They meet two or three times a year; if you can’t attend in Atlanta, you can tune in via a teleconference. Another division of CDC, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, also investigates disease risks of health care workers. A recent study looked at the toxic effects of cleaning solutions that are meant to protect against disease — so that reveals the complexities of this issue. If you want to contact health care workers who have become injured or ill from their work, you could try the unions or professional organizations: Service Employees International Union, the American Nurses Association, or National Nurses United. Occupational medicine physicians treat work-related injuries and illnesses, and every major hospital will have an occupational medicine physician. You can tap into their network. Michele Cohen Marill (www.michelemarill.com) is an Atlanta-based health and medical writer. She is a contributing editor for Atlanta magazine and has been published in Stat, Nature Medicine, Proto, WebMD magazine, and AARP online, among other publications. She was previously editor of Hospital Employee Health, a newsletter for employee health professionals in hospitals. What advice do you have for journalists covering emerging diseases?
Word choice matters, especially when it comes to covering a deadly disease. You may hear health professionals use the terms “infectious” and “contagious” interchangeably. That is adequate in many instances. However, minor differences between the two terms may play a role in which one you decide to use in a story. Contagious means a bacteria or virus can be transmitted from person to person (a communicable disease), and is quantified by R-nought, a mathematical construct that predicts the number of people a contagious individual will infect. Infectious refers to how many bacteria, virus, or other pathogens are needed to infect an exposed individual. Ebola, for example, is not terribly contagious, but it is dangerously infectious. This matters in determining a person’s risk of contracting a disease. Also be careful with the words “quarantine” and “isolation.” They both refer to separation, but are for different purposes. For example, people who are already infected with Ebola would be isolated, while quarantine is for those who have been exposed and may become sick, but aren’t sick yet. Kris Hickman (@the_index_case) was a graduate research assistant for AHCJ, pursuing a master’s degree in public health. She has a bachelor's degree in anthropology, with a minor in journalism, from the University of Missouri. She spent two years in Zambia as an HIV/AIDS community education volunteer in the Peace Corps. She aspires to be an epidemiologist and science writer. |
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I always tell journalists who are starting out to reach out to
Someone tweeted to me recently saying that they can't find black experts. But I've never had that issue. I think it's about having conversations with the right people. If your network is diverse, then you shouldn't have too much of a problem. If you're struggling, chances are you may need to expand your circles. I talked to a Black microbiologist recently and a Native American sleep specialist. When you expand your network and are willing to have conversations with people that you may not necessarily talk to, you'd be surprised how your worldview opens up and the kind of people that you get to meet. For instance, I'm a member of the 
Save all data and documents. Many of my most important stories came from public data and documents that were later removed from public websites. Also, confirm everything said by elected officials. I was surprised by how often elected officials in Kansas and Missouri made statements that were clearly not backed by their own data or that distorted the data. Often these statements were taken at face value by journalists who had no experience in health care reporting.
Body Politic
I have to admit that I wasn’t a big Twitter person before the pandemic. But it has become one of the best ways to find people to talk to. Among my favorite experts I follow are: 
The thing I do most often is I explain to people why I am asking what I am asking. It helps to say, ‘I want you to paint me a picture of what that room looks like and I am asking this because if a reader can imagine themselves in that room, then they get a chance to walk in your shoes.’ I’ll ask them to tell me, in as much detail as possible, what something looked liked, smelled like, sounded like. The more that I do that, the more that people understand the level of detail of what I am looking for and eventually, they begin to offer it up without me asking. Sometimes, I will try to model the level of vulnerability that I hope they will share with me. So, for example, if someone asks me, ‘How are you doing?’ I will never answer, ‘Fine.’ I will tell them something real about what is going on with my day. My colleague [Washington Post reporter] Theresa Vargas taught me that even before I ask a question, I can show someone the level of detail I’m hoping they’ll give me when the answer. I might say, “I will describe my desk to you. I have crumbs in my keyboard, more pens than I will ever use and a really cold cup of coffee. I have some papers I should probably throw away and a copy of “On Beauty,” one of my favorite books. Then, I can ask them to describe their workspace to me, and get a much more full answer than I might have before.
Read [AHCJ Core topic leader and journalist] 
Having the right experts to comment is very helpful. Follow people who keep up with the literature and put them into context — this 
If you have a question and you think it can be answered by some data, don’t stop with the numbers as the answer to your question. There is probably more there. For example, the other day, my coworker asked me, how many people in the US have been tested for COVID-19? And I had to say that, I can’t tell you how many, because tests are reported differently in each state. Some report how many samples were tested, and some report at how many individuals got a test—in the first type of state, someone who got tested five times would be reported as five test results, while in the second type, they would only be reported as one. With a question like this, you have to keep poking around. You have to ask about the definition of the data, the context of how it was collected, and the source behind it. You can’t just take a number and put it in a headline.
Look at the advisory committees for the many parts of HHS on their individual websites.
Every local paper should be looking at their hospitals, nursing homes, testing, PPE, all of that. I think there are a lot of issues about federal guidelines versus state guidelines versus local guidelines. That was one of the dynamics in my story [about Tulsa and the Trump rally]. There are regional and state health officials that wanted to pass common sense guidelines and they are being overruled by governors. There are whistleblowers [to be found] at every level, but you have to go looking for them. One of the first things I did when I started working this, I called up whistleblower lawyers and said, Hi, I am here reporting on this. You have to put signs up all over town. You have to make your luck. How do you do that? I introduce myself to a lot of people.
I've always sought independent comment on the preprint studies that I've considered covering, but I feel that this pandemic has made me much more vigilant about ensuring the quality of preprints that I report on. These studies that have not undergone a formal vetting by other scientists for the quality of their design and results: so, for starters, asking other researchers to comment on the quality of the methodology of the paper can be very informative. Context is very important when mentioning preprints in stories. I try to give readers a sense of what other papers in the same field have found and whether those conclusions are in line with the preprint findings.
This is one of the hardest parts about covering science as a journalist — explaining again and again that it's an iterative, self-correcting process, and that even when everybody does everything right, some findings won't hold up over time (not to mention fraud, p-hacking, file drawer effect, etc.).
We can't assume that our audience understands anything about what we do as journalists. This is interesting to me as a Christian, with friends and family who are skeptical of the media. They don’t really understand what we do. They are immediately biased against news, because they think we are politically minded. I don’t know why they think that, but I can suspect why. They don't understand the level journalists go through to be very careful. To be fair and to fact check. The general public doesn't understand what we do either. So maybe we need to be more explicit and provide more clarity about how we do what we do, and the lengths that we go through to be careful. We can't assume that they know that.
I think that for some infectious disease scientists, there is solace in this administration’s focus on security and national security. This president has openly said that biological security is a priority. It was encouraging to many people that the administration released a 
When I work on a story about COVID-19, I zero in on the information I need for that story rather than trying to vacuum up everything on Twitter with a COVID-19 hashtag. That sort of unfiltered intake leads to bad reporting, because you lose your focus.
Most of my stories are different enough, so I don't run into re-using experts. One trick I've used is, if I interview a source for a particular story, I'll reach out to them again for a separate story and see if there are other folks they would recommend me to talk to. They're always paying it forward, in some way. And I always make it clear that I'd love to speak with women or people of color.
It is interesting. The more we learn, the more we make some of the same mistakes. So for example, with quarantines, throughout history, when a disease breaks out and there is a quarantine, everyone wants to get out of that city or place and then [as they leave, they] spread it outside of that place. We have clear evidence that quarantines don’t always work the way we hope they will.
When it comes to ensuring someone has expertise specifically in the area I need, it depends on the topic how I assess whether they have the knowledge and experience necessary. For example, almost any epidemiologist could comment on some things, such as the basics of study design or general types of bias, that run through the general epidemiology curriculum. But we have our own niches and specialties just like any other field. Asking someone to comment on an area that’s outside of their particular niche runs the risk of interviewing someone with only a superficial understanding of the topic.
In general terms, when I am looking for story sources, I go to PubMed and try as many keywords as I can think of to see what pops up. Then I look for how frequent, how recent, and who the co-authors are — are they names I recognize? I will also look at their faculty pages.
In your down time, take your community health department’s public information officer out to coffee to get a sense of that [person] … If [you are] thrown into the middle of the story, then you probably [will] need to rely on the PIO more than you ideally want to … Most PIOs in government [health] agencies, … and academia … see themselves as almost journalists. They want accurate stories, and most good PIOs are not going to be hiding the truth … or spinning. I’m not saying don’t be skeptical, but … you should take advantage of PIOs who know their stuff.… In many instances, you have PIOs with journalism backgrounds or scientific experience – or both. That kind of PIO can be a great resource, and it’s worth knowing whether you are speaking with one of those or someone who is merely a political appointee or public relations person.
Distinguish your reporting and find a way to take this to a new angle.
There are a lot of hospitals [throughout the U.S.] that have bio containment units and that do regular training [for pandemic preparedness.] They do mystery patient drills. I wanted to see one of those [for my 
Medically fragile and immune-suppressed patients spend a lot of time in the hospital, where they face an additional threat of getting a hospital-acquired infection. But when it comes to tracking the emergence and spread of diseases, the nurses and other professionals who care for them may actually be the “canaries in the coal mine.” While health care workers take precautions to prevent transmission, they sometimes become infected and their own illnesses can reveal important information about emerging diseases.
