With one of the most significant and expensive overhauls of the American health care system about to begin, the City University of New York’s (CUNY) Graduate School of Journalism recently decided to suspend its health/medical reporting concentration due to low student interest.
Students in the eighteen-month program must specialize in one of five disciplines—health/medical, arts/culture, business/economics, international, and urban—in order to complete their master’s degree. But when it came time for the most recent crop of students to pick their concentrations at the end of first semester, only two opted for the health/medical track. Three classes have graduated since the Graduate School of Journalism opened in 2006, and during each of those years the concentration attracted seven to ten students out of fifty to sixty in total.
“There just wasn’t much student interest,” said Trudy Lieberman, the director of the health/medical track at CUNY (and a CJR contributing editor who covers health care for the magazine and Web site). “It’s kind of hard to fathom because this is the story of our time at the moment.”
Moreover, the class that entered in September was 25 percent larger than the year before, having grown from sixty to eighty students. Applications to that class were up 50 percent from the year before. Applications to next year’s class, which were due in December, were up another 25 percent over that, but the school has already decided that it will not offer the health/medical concentration then, either.
Stephen Shepard, the founding dean of the journalism school, said that with the assistance of the faculty he would conduct a thorough review of the track’s design, and eventually hopes to revive it.
“We understand that it may be the smallest [concentration of the five], and that’s fine,” he said. “But what was it that the students didn’t like about it? Or was it simply that they had other preferences?”
The arts and culture, international, and urban concentrations are the most popular at CUNY, according to Shepard. Business/economics is the second smallest track behind health/medical. That somewhat ironic, Shepard added, because he believes that business/economics and, to a lesser extent, health/medical offer relatively good job opportunities.
“Not a lot of places are hiring critics or arts writers,” he said, “but you know, the students choose what they want partly for career reasons and partly because it’s an interesting subject concentration, they like the mix of the courses, or they like the instructors—whatever their personal interests may be.”
Alex Green IV, who graduated in December, said that while he found the education valuable, he did not enjoy his health/medical classes. Green entered the program knowing that he wanted to cover health/medical, and still does. But he said that he and others felt the workload was too heavy, that the instructors could be arrogant and dry, and that there wasn’t a good balance between teaching medical information and teaching journalism.
Because of such factors, Green said, he and some other graduating students discouraged their incoming peers from following the health/medical concentration unless it was something they were certain they wanted to do professionally. “We all felt on edge,” he said. “I’m sure that other students weren’t quite as harsh as I might have been, but they still weren’t enthusiastic.”
At least one of Green’s classmates demurred, however. “The classes definitely pushed me outside of my comfort zone, but in a good way,” said Jeanmarie Evelly, adding that she had had no experience in health reporting prior to enrolling at CUNY and would recommend the health/medical concentration to other students.
Still, Shuka Kalantari, who graduated in 2008, said that some of the complaints that Green mentioned were common during her year, too. She called the curriculum “amazing,” however, and said the rigorous education helped her get her current job as an outreach coordinator for KQED Radio’s Health Dialogues program.
I think Steve Shepard (for whom I worked at Business Week) made a mistake by focusing narrowly on medical journalism, rather than science writing more broadly. The two overlap, and, in my view, much of the reporting on health care reform suffers from the lack of scientific grounding among the Washington reporters and others who are writing the stories.
Additionally, teaching science writing, rather than medical writing, gives graduates the opportunity to apply for science writing jobs, as well as medical gigs.
The same might be said of environmental reporting, which has fallen on hard times at Columbia. To attract students--and to find them jobs when they graduate--journalism schools need to teach what I like to think of as general assignment science writing, not narrower specialties.
Paul Raeburn
http://ksjtracker.mit.edu
#1 Posted by Paul Raeburn, CJR on Mon 11 Jan 2010 at 02:22 PM
Thanks for the comment, Paul. This is a great point. I'm still undecided about whether a focused program like health/med or a general science reporting curriculum is the best way to go. A couple CUNY students told me that they were more interested in the health policy aspects of the program there than in the ones related to medical evidence. So I'm not sure that beefing up the emphasis on science would attract more students - but maybe.
Steve Shepard told me that before it opened in 2006, the school had, in fact, considered doing a general science concentration rather than health/med. He felt that the latter would be better because the students would have the benefit of mastering a single subject area while still learning principles they could apply to all fields of science coverage. Shepard told be that in light of low student interest in the health/med program he and the school will reconsider the general science approach, but that his intuition is still that the focused program is the way to go.
#2 Posted by Curtis Brainard, CJR on Mon 11 Jan 2010 at 02:43 PM
The problem with media coverage of health reform based on my observations over the last two years has not been that reporters did not know basic science. The problem has been a lack of understanding of the health care system, its regulation, the principles of insurance (dry as they may be); the basics of Medicare and Medicaid, how drug companies make their money and how doctors and hospitals are paid. More knowledge in these areas would have resulted in a much more informed electorate that would have been able to understand the ins and outs of the debate.
#3 Posted by trudy lieberman, CJR on Mon 11 Jan 2010 at 04:14 PM
Curtis et al., in my experience what matters most in designing a program is reconciling two key questions. The first is, what's the upper bound of what your students are capable of handling? The second is, what do they NEED to be able to handle in order to succeed in a very challenging job market while also serving the public interest through high-quality journalism? If your answers to the two questions don't align you're going to have a problem. Trudy is a very good teacher and an excellent medical journalist, she had a clear vision of what her students needed. That's not always enough, unfortunately. To me, that's the crucial issue, not the CUNY program's breadth or lack thereof.
#4 Posted by Dan Fagin, CJR on Mon 11 Jan 2010 at 06:22 PM
As a science writer, I'd like to agree with my friend Paul that a closer marriage between science and health journalism would help both. It might on some fronts; and it might also help sell students on any educational program if you get a two-for-one deal. But I don't think it would help the health reform discussion. In fact, I think there's an argument to be made that the U.S. media tends to spend too much time on incremental medical research findings (Breakthrough!) rather than on the health care issues that really affect most people. As a science journalist who also covered reform during the Clinton Admin. and then lost my job when my newspaper (Seattle PI ... not really mine, actually) closed last year, I am now buying my own insurance. Holy crap! If I was actually buying financial peace of mind and better health, I might be okay with this huge chunk of flesh cut out of my withering financial corpus. But I am really just supporting a massively inefficient and unfair system that, according to most statistics, is only getting worse at improving our health and welfare. The problem with health care is mostly a matter of money and politics -- and the long, sad tale of the success of spin. Unfortunately, a big part of that spin has been claiming that our prowess in medical science is evidence of a superior health care system. Apples and oranges. We science journalists have, uh, been part of the problem in this conflation.
#5 Posted by Tom Paulson, CJR on Mon 11 Jan 2010 at 08:10 PM
As a physician and cancer survivor, I see an essential and largely unmet role for well-trained health care journalists who really understand medicine.
Doctors need do a better job talking to their patients, but that's not enough. In an educated society such as ours, people should enter the emergency room or physician's office with some real knowledge – of biology, genetics, immunology and other areas of science in medicine – already assumed. When faced with serious and sometimes urgent decisions in health care such as upon a stroke or a new diagnosis of leukemia, many individuals don't know enough basic science or medicine to understand their options in a meaningful way. The problem stems, in part, from sub-par education in the sciences.
Well-informed health journalists help fill the informational gap and should, in principle, be a good source of objective information that patients need. Sure, we need journalists to cover health care reform and to mind the dollars and cents of industry, but we also need good writers who'll keep the public apprised of medical developments. Reduced training of health care journalists will only compound patients' difficulty in finding reliable sources apart from their personal physicians.
#6 Posted by Elaine Schattner, M.D., CJR on Mon 11 Jan 2010 at 09:59 PM
I run a Masters programme in science journalism at City University’s Graduate Journalism School in London, which is in its first year. After a great deal of debate about content and name, I decided to use the word science so that it would focus on the attributes/skills needed to be a good science journalist. During the programme students can then focus on different specialities in their reporting assignments whilst also publishing their work on multimedia platforms. Recruitment has been extremely successful, way beyond our expectations and student feedback on the course has been extremely positive. It’s too early to know if they will find jobs but the UK science writing market is certainly not as depressed as in the US.
#7 Posted by Connie St Louis, CJR on Mon 11 Jan 2010 at 10:35 PM
The programs at CUNY and Minnesota were well-respected, quality programs and their cancellation narrows the options for students who want to report on health, healthcare and medicine -- topics of tremendous interest to the public.
Although I've been teaching HMJ graduate courses at the University of Georgia for the past three years, our graduate program was just officially launched in Fall 2009. It's too soon to tell what our admission and retention numbers will be, but we expect to find out over the coming years thanks to support from the Knight Foundation, Dean Cully Clark, and our many partners at UGA and across the United States. Our partnership with New America Media and engagement with ethnic news organizations has been especially rewarding.
It's a given that graduate students in such programs should know how to read the scientific literature. But most readers and viewers aren't interested in the kind of "inside baseball" tales that we gossip about at NASW cocktail hours. So our program emphasizes community reporting on individual, structural and environmental factors that influence health -- and how local actions and national policies can help people live longer, better lives.
HMJ students produced seven news segments about sustainable agriculture and shaping childhood eating patterns last semester. These aired on WNEG-TV, which is housed at Grady College. Next week students begin covering health in nine urban and rural counties in Northeast Georgia. Thanks to a grant from the Healthcare Georgia Foundation, advanced students will be paid to report and produce print and multimedia stories for a new statewide news bureau focused on public health issues.
We are doing our best to keep quality health and medical journalism alive in Georgia.
Patricia Thomas
Knight Chair in Health and Medical Journalism
Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication
University of Georgia
Athens
#8 Posted by Patricia Thomas, CJR on Tue 12 Jan 2010 at 10:34 AM
Thanks Pat for your comments. You are right on. Health is much more than the science of a drug or pushing new medicines. It's all about the social determinants--poverty, the built environment, housing, nutrition, transportation, and the public policies that influence them--all the things an urban journalism program ought to be focusing on. We devoted one course in our sequence to this topic and our diabetes project in the South Bronx has been aimed at showing how these issues contribute to disease and using the tools of the new journalism and the old to help people in these communities. As this project moves to the Center for Health, Media, and Policy at Hunter College, we will look to the examples you set in dealing with these issues in the Black Belt.
#9 Posted by trudy lieberman, CJR on Tue 12 Jan 2010 at 12:30 PM
I'm really disappointed that CUNY's health track was dropped, because I had been hoping to someday take advantage of it.
But here's the thing: I'm a mid-career journalist who couldn't drop everything to go to school full-time, not to mention rack up umpteen student loans (even modestly priced as CUNY is). I definitely kept asking about a part-time program, but to my knowledge, the school didn't offer one.
It's a shame, because I was chomping at the bit to enroll, and I can't have been the only one. There are surely plenty of people who know the fundamentals of journalism but are looking for a deeper immersion in a particular subject, while still holding down day jobs.
Do any J-schools offer similar programs that have a part-time option?
#10 Posted by Meredith Matthews, CJR on Tue 12 Jan 2010 at 01:55 PM
I think the approach exemplified in the last two comments, combining health and medical journalism with a social justice element is very appealing to students. We are seeing a return, if you will, to idealistic motivations for students to study journalism in this environment. Our master's program focuses on public affairs reporting, but we offer a Science Journalism concentration at the undergraduate level run by Jeff Lyon, who won a Pulitzer in medical reporting for the Chicago Tribune.
Nancy Day, Chair
Journalism Department
Columbia College Chicago
#11 Posted by Nancy Day, CJR on Tue 12 Jan 2010 at 09:50 PM
As one the six students in the CUNY health classes, I wish Curtis Brainard would have contacted all (or more) of us. J-School required about ten times more work, effort and focus than my undergrad program ever did -- but I found this true in the majority of my classes. At the end of our last semester, when we were all scrambling to finish our work before graduation, both Trudy Lieberman and Ivan Oransky adjusted their assignments to ease our workload. While the program may not have been perfect -- but what three-year-old program is? -- I learned a ton. Health care reform comes up nearly every day on the daily show I'm interning with now, and I would probably be lost without the CUNY health & med classes. I would never discourage other students from taking classes on such an important topic.
#12 Posted by Rachel, CJR on Fri 15 Jan 2010 at 02:15 PM
There's a slight bright light on journalism/public health at UC Berkeley, where I'm with both the journalism and public health schools. We've been working on creating a joint masters program that would take students three years instead of the usual four if both degrees were pursued consecutively. The impetus for this effort was the fact that every year there are journalism students who want to take public health courses and public health students who want to take some journalism courses.
The proposal for the new program was approved a couple of months ago by the graduate division here, which was the biggest hurdle; there's one more bureaucratic step to complete before we can formally announce the program, but we expect that to happen within the next couple of months. We're not planning for a big program--we anticipate 4-6 students a year. We've basically just rearranged the bureaucracy to make it easier for students who know coming in that they'd like to do both, and added a few required interdisciplinary units. Under the current system, students have to be admitted to one school, and then apply to the other during their first year at Berkeley and figure out their own program.
We've had quite a lot of inquiries even though we haven't promoted it yet, so I'm hoping we'll be able to fill those slots. We've told prospective students who have asked about the program to apply to either the j-school or the public health school and indicate their interest in the joint program, and we'll take it up when we get final approval. I guess we'll soon find out if there's a genuine demand or not.
#13 Posted by david Tuller, CJR on Tue 19 Jan 2010 at 03:34 AM
David: I wish you the best in establishing your program. I hope you succeed. As evidenced by my health care posts for cjr.org, we need well-trained reporters to tackle all aspects of the health and medical beat. If the academy cannot provide well-trained trained reporters to do the job, and I do mean reporters, the task will fall even more to the Association of Health Care Journalists, an organization I have been closely associated with over the last decade. AHCJ offers many tools and training opportunities for reporters wanting to cover the beat. Check out the website at healthjournalism.org
#14 Posted by Trudy Lieberman, CJR on Tue 19 Jan 2010 at 09:09 AM
I share the regrets of others commenting here about the contraction of opportunities for obtaining master's degrees in health journalism. However, the good news is that there are opportunities for working journalists to obtain what amounts to no-cost graduate-level training in health journalism in short bursts.
Here at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism, in Los Angeles, we provide professional education through short intensive seminars that minimize time spent out of the newsroom. We’ve “graduated” hundreds of journalists from The California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships since 2005.
Interest in the program has remained high – as has the quality of our fellows -- despite turmoil in the industry. Working journalists like our interdisciplinary approach, especially as traditional beat structures collapse. We train non-specialists and specialists alike in core health journalism reporting skills, as well as content topics focused on community health, health access, and the social determinants of health. Thanks to the generous support of The California Endowment, an independent health foundation, this program is free to journalists and their news organizations. Another route we have taken for health journalism education is the creation of a social community where journalists can swap resources and ideas and inspire and learn from each other. Lauched last year, that community can be found at www.reportingonhealth.org.
#15 Posted by Michelle Levander, CJR on Tue 19 Jan 2010 at 02:55 PM
Echoing Meredith and Michelle's points, I think there's considerable need for science and medical journalism training for reporters already in the field, whether it's a part-time master's, short professional seminars like those offered by Annenberg and Knight, or the training offered through AHCJ, NASW, and SEJ.
I teach part time in the JHU graduate writing program, where there are about 14 students pursuing a master's in science writing. That number seems surprisingly low, given that the program is in both DC and Baltimore, and addresses science, medicine, science policy, and various forms of journalism and nonfiction. Maybe we're just not marketing it right. Maybe students have a hard time getting employers to reimburse them for a master's in writing. Or maybe potential students see less value in that master's than in a communications degree. What do you think?
#16 Posted by Nancy Shute, CJR on Fri 29 Jan 2010 at 04:01 PM