The following blog post is written by Patricia Thomas, the Knight Chair in Health and Medical Journalism at the University of Georgia. Above: University of Georgia graduate students Alicia Smith, Julianne Wyrick and Jodi Murphy. 

In my early days as a health journalist, the biggest story of the day was the AIDS crisis.  Today, it’s the conflict and confusion about the future of health care in the United States.

We don’t yet know whether the world’s most expensive health care system can be reshaped into one that is more just and effective. It may be, as with AIDS, that lives will be lost because political will is lacking, big dollars are at stake, and scientific insights are slow to come.

No matter how this story unfolds, today’s health and medical journalists confront demands as tough as the ones faced by the AIDS press corps 30 years ago.

And the University of Georgia’s health and medical journalism graduate program cultivates reporters who can thrive in this uncertain world. There is no shortage of stories to tell in and around Athens, where the state’s flagship university garners all the attention while roughly one-third of the population lives – largely outside the media glare – in poverty.  For the past seven years, health and medical journalism students have been giving voice to this community by telling stories that other reporters overlook or write off as unimportant.

This semester we took our biggest leap into telling the health stories of Northeast Georgia’s working poor. Particularly those too poor even to be required to buy health insurance under the Affordable Care Act but not poor enough for Medicaid. Nine student reporters would cover an audacious plan designed to make health and medical care more affordable for as many as 5,000 of these uninsured Athenians. The plan, still in development, is an alternative to conventional health insurance known as health assurance. New members will enroll in early 2014.

But where could reporters go to analyze a program that does not yet exist in order to see what it can and can’t do for Athens, Ga.?  

The answer is Reno.

When the plan’s local organizers told me that the only program like this was in Reno, Nevada, I tore apart my spring semester syllabus and started over. Students would choose a beat – women’s health, ERs, small businesses – marshal resources for covering it, produce three multimedia stories about unmet needs in Athens that might be helped by the new plan, then travel 2,450 miles to report their capstone feature in a city none of them had ever visited.

It was a crazy idea.  But nothing grows up a reporter like realizing that an editor has invested money in their idea and they have one shot at getting the story. The money was available: the Knight Chair Graduate Student Travel Fund exists to help students participate in professional meetings and report stories. There was enough in the account to cover what turned out to be $11,300 in travel costs.

I also knew that if the stories were good enough, they would reach the influential policy makers, providers and advocates who read Georgia Health News. The site has 15,000 visitors monthly and 1,400 email subscribers. What the students produced could introduce a new idea into Georgia’s conversation about access to health care.

The program has been working closely with Georgia Health News since 2010, when a grant from Healthcare Georgia Foundation made it possible to pay students for print and video stories accepted by CEO and Editor Andy Miller. Students who contribute to the outlet learn to expect payment for their work and to work with editors other than their teachers. They learn that published work can draw criticism as well as praise.

The nine-part multimedia series called “Betting on Reno” began running on May 10 and will continue through June; you can find the stories here. You can learn more about the project’s backstory on my blog, www.healthyjournalism.com.

In that post, I revisit Eric Newton’s advocacy for a “teaching hospital” approach to journalism education. He advocated embedding big name national news people in J-schools where they would lead student investigations of major topics and generate stories suitable for national distribution.  The News21 projects are good examples of this.

The teaching hospital approach wasn’t practical for “Betting on Reno,” however, because Miller could not step away from his daily news operation and spend a semester in residence at UGA.

Instead we operated like a clinic where staff providers do most of the heavy lifting and specialists come in to consult as needed.  So I taught the course, approved the stories, and edited them.

Miller drove to UGA at crucial points: helping the students determine whether they had the right datasets for their beats, providing political and historical context, and ultimately giving the final thumbs-up or thumbs-down to their stories.

The third key member of the clinical team was entrepreneurial journalist Sonya Collins, an HMJ graduate who runs her own Atlanta-based business. She worked closely with every writer, asking hard questions and helping make the prose a pleasure to read. Together the three of us shaped the finished series.    

The key to success with the “clinic model” is for journalism educators to have professional partners such as Andy Miller and Sonya Collins.  These days it’s hard to find distinguished journalists who can leave their jobs for a semester or an academic year. But working pros like Miller, who enjoy mentoring students, can take a day off here and there. And entrepreneurs like Collins can take on projects.

The result, as “Betting on Reno” shows, is that young reporters bring fresh eyes and insight to the most important issues of the day.

 Two years into the AIDS crisis, I had those fresh eyes and I persuaded a national publication for physicians to fly me from Atlanta to San Francisco. This was the first time an editor had backed my story pitches with real travel money.

As promised, I delivered stories about doctors on the front lines at San Francisco General, epidemiologists with predictions that cast a pall over a Super Bowl rally, and a grassroots organization that delivered meals, cleaned apartments, and adopted orphaned pets.

Using the high technology of the time, I faxed the copy to New York.

The editor’s first response was a knee-jerk homophobic slur, but then he ran the stories with prominent display. I will always remember them as my first real contribution to the narrative that was central to my work for decades.

Perhaps the reporting trip to Reno will occupy a similar place for these young reporters, who are positioned to tell hundreds more stories about the struggle to reinvent health care for all Americans.By Patricia Thomas

Related links: “Nevada medical plan inspires new program in Athens,” “An innovative way to aid the uninsured while reducing ER costs,” “Low-wage workers find specialist care within their reach,” and “Nurse practitioners aim to fill care gap” on GeorgiaHealthNews.com