Trudy Lieberman of Columbia Journalism Review interviewed new Kaiser Health News editor in chief Elisabeth Rosenthal about the health care news service.
Here is an excerpt:
What’s your vision for KHN?
The first message I have to get out is that Kaiser Health News, which is part of the Kaiser Family Foundation, has nothing to do with Kaiser hospitals or Kaiser Permanente [the big medical group]. A lot of people don’t know that. Even some of my colleagues in journalism ask if we’re like the Mayo Clinic newsletter. The Kaiser name is associated with many different organizations, but we have to get out that KHN is independent, nonprofit journalism, not an offshoot of a company or hospital chain.
Kaiser Health News is now a big and growing organization with more than 40 journalists and over 100 distribution partners from the washingtonpost.com to NPR. The plan is now to build out more enterprise and investigative projects. One of my jobs is to be an idea generator at Kaiser. As a result of the Times series, my Facebook group and my [forthcoming] book, I have many more tips for stories than I can do. There are so many things to investigate. American healthcare is like a smorgasbord for good health journalists. I hope to seed a lot of good projects that we’ll share or co-report with our partners.
Read more here.
