Reuters adds Terhune, Schectman to pharma/health team

Elyse Tanouye, global industry editor for pharma and health care at Reuters, sent out the following announcement on Friday:

Colleagues,

I’m pleased to announce two additions to the Pharma/Health team: Chad Terhune, joining us from Kaiser Health News, and our colleague Joel Schectman.

Based in Los Angeles, Chad will break exclusive news and work on in-depth stories about the pharma and health industries.

He previously covered healthcare at the Los Angeles Times, Businessweek, and The Wall Street Journal. At Kaiser Health News, Chad investigated how some companies reap excessive profits from Medicaid and exploit lax oversight at the expense of low-income patients. His exclusive reporting at the LA Times about deadly superbug outbreaks tied to medical devices won recognition in 2016 from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. Chad covered the health insurance industry at The Wall Street Journal and wrote page-one stories about the emergence of skimpy insurance plans and deceptive sales practices that harmed consumers.

He is a graduate of the University of Florida.

Joel will join the pharma/health team in Washington to help drive ambitious coverage of the Food and Drug Administration, pharmaceutical industry and other aspects of the health care economy. Previously, Joel wrote enterprise stories on white collar crime, cybersecurity and foreign policy issues. Joel partnered with others to produce an award-winning series on the 2016 U.S. prisoner trade with Iran, scooping the competition on a key foreign policy milestone of the Obama administration. In 2017, Joel led a team of reporters that discovered American tech giants had allowed the Russian government to hunt for vulnerabilities in security systems sold to the Pentagon. The series won the Reuters 2017 Scoop of the Year and the revelations resulted in a new federal law to curb the practice. Before joining Reuters in 2015, Joel worked for The Wall Street Journal covering corporate bribery, money laundering and sanctions issues. Joel holds a master’s degree in journalism from the City University of New York and a bachelor’s degree in film production from Emerson College in Boston.

Joel and Chad will join the U.S. Pharma/Health team led by editor Michele Gershberg in New York. The team also includes Robin Respaut, who recently moved to the biotech beat in San Francisco; Deena Beasley, who covers biotech in Los Angeles; Julie Steenhuysen on the health beat in Chicago; Yasmeen Abutaleb, our health policy reporter in Washington; and in New York, Caroline Humer covers health insurance; Jilian Mincer is on the hospitals beat, and Michael Erman is responsible for big pharma.