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My introduction to health reporting came from a last-minute change — at least the way I understand it.
I was one of 10 high school summer interns at the San Diego Union-Tribune, my hometown newspaper. During the third week of the program, each of us was assigned to a full-time journalist; for a few days, we would help the reporters, and the reporters would show us what it’s like to produce stories.
Before the program coordinators announced with whom we would be paired, I managed a glance at a sheet with assignments. My name was next to the paper’s renowned investigative journalist. But, when the coordinators made the official announcements, I learned I would be helping one of the paper’s science and health reporters.
That reporter introduced me to ideas about how powerful science journalism can be. By taking complicated ideas and expressing them clearly, he said readers could have more control over their health. That concept captivated me. When I started college a couple months later, I wanted to be a science and health journalist.
Over the next four years, I did some reporting for my college newspaper’s science and technology desk and took classes with health journalists. But my perspective on what health journalism could accomplish changed. I learned more and more about systems that prevented people, often those from marginalized backgrounds, from living healthy lives. By itself, I found that information about personal health decisions often isn’t enough to change how people get sick and which groups are at high disease risks.
To address these disparities and deeply rooted health problems, it felt important to understand how they were caused. So I enrolled in an applied epidemiology Master of Public Health program right after college, as the COVID-19 pandemic took its unequal, inequitable toll on Americans.
I learned more about how and why people got sick and died prematurely, and I practiced using journalism to change them. A kind professor at the School of Journalism let me take her graduate reporting class, where I spent the semester reporting with refugee communities in Greensboro, North Carolina. They taught me how government systems could fail them, leading to worse health experiences for their families.
By the time I finished my master’s degree, I knew the type of journalist I wanted to be: one who combines the narratives of communities experiencing health problems with strong research to write compelling stories.
Mountain State Spotlight was the first place where I could consistently do this work. The newsroom — a West Virginia nonprofit news outlet — hired me to be its public health reporter in 2022. Over the next two years, I spent my days driving across West Virginia, interviewing people experiencing major health problems and researching how these issues could improve.
I learned how powerful groups, like large companies, could harm the health of their neighbors, employees, or consumers. I learned how government groups tasked with fixing these problems could take years before adequately addressing them, fail to do anything at all, or actively make things worse.
Now Healthbeat has hired me to do similar work in Atlanta. I’m thrilled and cautious about the opportunities that come with this job. I’ve seen firsthand what health journalism can do to help people live healthy, happier lives. But I also know reporters have platforms that can be abused, and some stories forsake the people they claim to serve.
My commitment to Atlanta is to do everything I can to report responsibly and honestly. That means always centering the people and communities experiencing public health problems when writing my stories, acknowledging the areas I have a lot to still learn about, and affirming Healthbeat’s mission to serve the public.
I hope you follow along with my co-workers and me as we go about our public health reporting. We have lots of stories to tell.
Allen Siegler is a reporter covering public health in Atlanta for Healthbeat. Contact Allen at asiegler@healthbeat.org.
