About AHCJ
The Association of Health Care Journalists is an independent, nonprofit professional journalism association dedicated to advancing public understanding of health care issues. We work with thousands of journalists each year to improve the quality, accuracy and visibility of health care reporting and editing internationally.
The Opportunity
The job of AHCJ’s Health Equity Beat Leader is to help our members understand the wide range of issues and concepts related to one of the most crucial topics in health care. The Health Equity Beat Leader will provide resources, story posts, tips and raise questions about how factors like economics, ethnicity, age, gender, disability status, among others, can create disparities in health care.
This part-time year-to-year commitment includes writing story posts for HealthBeat, summarizing key issues, organizing and moderating webinars with experts, interviewing other journalists about their health equity reporting, contributing tip sheets and providing useful, relevant data. This writer will work with AHCJ’s editorial team to encourage reader interaction and should be willing to lead events and share knowledge at AHCJ events.
The writer must be experienced in writing about health with a strong interest in reporting on health equity from a broad perspective. Additional multimedia experience is a plus, as is an existing network of journalists and experts in the health equity field.
This freelance work will pay up to $15,600 a year.
Position details
AHCJ believes there is a core set of health topics that today’s health journalists need to know how to cover well. It has launched several health beats toward that effort, including health equity. These “learning centers” on the organization’s website provide expertise in areas AHC J feels are essential to reporting on health or health care.
Each health beat page includes a glossary, reporting tip sheets, story posts, interviews with journalists, links to useful data and more. The HealthBeat page serves as a launch pad to more resources on healthjournalism.org and elsewhere.
The Health Equity Beat Leader focuses on the complex and wide-ranging set of factors playing a part in the unequal health status of various groups. Research has shown that race, sex, education, income, neighborhood and social networks all play a part, and it’s important that health journalists understand how those elements affect the people they’re covering.
The Beat Leader will:
- Contribute at least two blog posts per month. Posts will highlight good journalistic work being done on the topic, resources or other tools that may help reporters advance their coverage.
- Define key glossary terms related to health equity or write a data dive.
- Organize and moderate quarterly webcasts with experts and journalists to educate reporters on emerging issues.
- Review suggestions from members and determine which to add to our resources and serve as a mentor or expert with whom other reporters can consult, when possible.
- Write Q&As (“How I did It”) about how a reporter/s covered a story related to the topic of health equity. These posts are designed to help reporters work on similar or related stories.
- Pinpoint or obtain related datasets that will allow reporters to deepen their stories and write summaries of them, suggesting best uses and possible stories.
- Assist in setting up panels and finding speakers for AHCJ training events.
The health beat leaders are expected to submit a combination of these resources monthly.
Apply by April 12. Questions about the position? Email Managing Editor Erica Tricarico at erica@healthjournalism.org.