Anna Clark of Columbia Journalism Review looks at the success of STAT, the health care site launched last year by the Boston Globe.
Clark writes, “Headquartered in the Boston Globe building, in the former publisher’s suite on the third floor, STAT also has reporters in Washington, DC, New York City, and San Francisco. As CJR wrote before, STAT is the third standalone site Boston Globe Media has launched since John Henry bought the company in 2013. BetaBoston and Crux are the others, focusing respectively on the city’s tech scene and the Catholic Church. But STAT is a far more ambitious undertaking than its counterparts. At a time when several new national ventures are trying to fill the yawning gap in science and health media, STAT is making a big bet on original content reported by a sizable team of experienced journalists, and it is aiming for a worldwide audience.
“It has about 45 staff members, at least half of whom are in content positions, and the outlet also works with a number of regular freelancers. The new publication’s personality is evident in its early successes, including Megan Thielking’s Morning Rounds newsletter, which is emailed to subscribers around the world at 6am every day and has an open rate of 48 or 49 percent, according to Executive Editor Rick Berke. Senior Writer Sharon Begley’s profile of 34-year-old biologist Feng Zhang is its best-read piece to date; it got about 100,000 page views, and found a secondary readership when it was translated into Mandarin for an international outlet. STAT has also ventured into watchdog journalism with Charles Piller’s exploration of how top research institutions routinely circumvent public reporting requirements for clinical trials. The reporting got a fair share of reverberation in the media and science worlds, and recently, Sen. Charles Grassley cited the investigation when he urged the NIH do a better job about reporting on human experiments.”
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