Kaiser Health News hires three in St. Louis

Kaiser Health News has hired three reporters in its new St. Louis bureau as part of an expansion.

The strategy is to set up more reporters around the country to cover health news in underserved areas and to let a nationwide audience know what is happening there.

Its three new hires for the St. Louis bureau are:

Laura Ungar joins from Gannett as the St. Louis-based Midwest editor/correspondent. She has been a journalist for nearly three decades, covering health for The (Louisville) Courier Journal and the USA Today Network for half that time. She worked on USA Today’s national investigative team and edited a CJ team focused on opioid coverage. Previously, she worked at The Hartford Courant in Connecticut and The News Journal in Delaware.

Cara Anthony will be a Midwest correspondent after serving as a multimedia reporter at The Belleville News-Democrat across the Mississippi River from the St. Louis offices. She is a native of East St. Louis and previously worked at the Indianapolis Star,  the Frederick (Md.) News-Post and the Daily Press (Newport News, Va.). Anthony co-moderated USA Today events during the 2016 election, and she recently became an Emmy-nominated producer.

Lauren Weber is formerly was a public health policy reporter for HuffPost based in Washington, D.C., who covered everything from Ebola and hepatitis A outbreaks to the health of migrant detainees and rural hospital closures. She was a 2017 USC Annenberg Health Journalism National Fellow. Weber also created and edited The Morning Email, HuffPost’s weekday rundown of the news, that she launched and grew to nearly a million subscribers, becoming a Webby honoree and Digiday Publishing Awards finalist.

Kaiser Health News is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.