Posts tagged global health

When Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism released the names of the 24 fellows for the 2012-2013 academic year with nary a mention of its Global Health Reporting Fellowship, one was left to wonder whether the program had been cut all together.

Thankfully — for those who appreciate thorough reporting on global health issues — this is not the case.

Stefanie Friedhoff, special projects manager at the Nieman Foundation, says Harvard has no plans to end the fellowship.

But this will be the first time since the Global Health Reporting Fellowship started in 2007 that Nieman will not host a single fellow in global health.

In 2010, the global health program — which traditionally selects at least one U.S.-based journalist and one non-U.S. journalist — did not include a U.S. participant.

“This happens every once in awhile with some of the specialized fellowships. It has to do with the applicant pool in any given year, and how it all shakes out,” according to Friedhoff.

Although there is no global health fellow this coming year, Friedhoff points out that health and science journalist Jeneen Interlandi was selected to study the history of pharmaceuticals. Another fellowship winner, Jane Spencer, international editor at large for Newsweek and The Daily Beast, will examine how to improve news coverage of global women’s issues — but the focus will be on using new technologies for digital storytelling rather than field reporting.

The current class has two global health fellows: Samuel Loewenberg, a freelance journalist who specializes in global health, and Rema Nagarajan, an assistant editor at The Times of India.

It’s also worth noting that this is the first class of fellows to be selected under the oversight of Ann Marie Lipinski, a former Chicago Tribune editor, who became the foundation’s curator in April 2011.

Is this the start of a shift in priorities at Nieman under Lipinski’s leadership? Only time will tell of course, but the selection committee did interview Global Health Reporting Fellowship candidates and had adequate funding for the year.

It just decided not to award any fellowships this year.

Donald McNeil — the Time’s health and science reporter and pretty much one of the only remaining newspaper reporters devoted to global health issues — sent 150 colleagues a cutting email targeting NYT publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. 

In the email, published on Gawker, McNeil notes that Sulzberger “has cancelled his annual State of the Times address.” He also calls him out for not speaking at Anthony Shadid’s memorial. 

McNeil takes aim at Sulzberger’s upcoming trip to Nepal with a management consultant:

But to learn leadership? Shouldn’t a 60-year-old corporate chairman already know whether he’s a leader or not? Shouldn’t that have been decided by age 35 or so? And a trek now? In mid-crisis? We put out a great newspaper every day. But outside the newsroom, at the corporate level, we’re sailing on a ghost ship.

It’s not clear what will come of McNeil’s email. But as Fishbowl NY’s Chris O’Shea suggests, McNeil’s job security might be in question:

Here is something you should know: If you like having a job, don’t send an email to 150 of your co-workers that blasts the owner. Odds are, one — or even a few of them — won’t agree with you and that scathing letter will get leaked. …

Here is something McNeil hopefully won’t ever have to find out: Being unemployed is fun at first, incredibly depressing after a week.

And that would be bad for global health and development journalism. With the state of the newspaper business today, it’s not clear whether the Times would replace McNeil or scrap part — or all — of his beat, leaving no full-time newspaper-backed global health journalists in the US.

There are several fantastic freelancers and other journalists who cover these topics when they can, but without a reporter devoted to these issues, it’s less likely we’ll see the sorts of groundbreaking stories McNeil has produced (such as this series from Uganda).

GlobalPost had a good piece this January about the challenges facing global health journalism. 

An evening spent with a former senior Global Fund leader. Conclusions. The entire Geneva-based system of global health is utterly corrupt.

— richard horton (@richardhorton1) March 20, 2012

Full story.

In advance of the tomorrow’s closed-door World Health Organization meeting, I created a timeline of the bird flu research controversy: The timeline is also hosted on Humanosphere.