Kaiser Health News is expanding its operation and health journalism across the South with $2.3 million in funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
It plans to establish a Southern bureau with a home office in Atlanta and nine new positions to support reporting in at least five states. Kaiser Health also will work with freelancers and media partners throughout the region.
This expansion brings the number of Kaiser Health regional bureaus to four – including those in California, the Midwest, and the Mountain States – in addition to the KHN national newsroom in Washington D.C.
Veteran journalist Andy Miller, CEO and editor of Georgia Health News, will be interim bureau chief of the new outpost, and the nonprofit news service that Miller founded 11 years ago will become part of KHN.
Sabriya Rice, another distinguished journalist and the Knight Chair in Health and Medical Journalism at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, will join the enterprise beginning as Senior Advisor to the bureau.
Kaiser Health will seek to partner with local media throughout the region to produce health care stories.
Kaiser Health stories produced from the Southern bureau will be made freely available for publication by media outlets throughout the region and the country and will be published on khn.org and distributed through KHN’s social media platforms.