From the editor
A farewell to HPH readers
The bad news is, Harvard Public Health is shutting down. Journalism is expensive and outside of a university’s core mission of teaching and research. It takes time to build revenue streams, and we ran out of time.
What we did was meaningful. I was drawn to start this publication because it presented an opportunity to break out of the typical crisis-driven flow and ebb of journalism about the field. Harvard wasn’t a publisher, but it was in the business of sharing knowledge, and I thought we could do for public health what Harvard Business Review does for business. I believed there was no public health without the public, and while it took some feints and half-steps to figure out what that meant for our journalism, we eventually settled on assessing every story idea with a simple question: “What would this story change?” Implicit was a corollary question: “And for whom?”
In the meantime, we relaunched the magazine as a digital publication, built out a social media presence, and launched a weekly newsletter. We co-sponsored a well-attended structural racism symposium and special issue, a series on public health data, a Public Health in Action collaboration with The Studio at the Harvard T.H. Chan School, and an event on artificial intelligence with Johns Hopkins Bloomberg’s Global Health Now. We had momentum—visitors to the site almost tripled in last year’s fourth quarter versus the prior year. Almost 15,000 people signed up for Harvard Public Health Weekly, close to 90 percent of them not connected to Harvard.
Readers ate up pieces on processed foods, the health effects of alcohol, and mental health. You also read our beautifully written and photographed narratives like the 10th anniversary of the Flint water crisis or our look at Christian Happi’s bold aims for African science, and public health’s role in the recent Puerto Rican elections.
Our goal was to publish stories that would help improve health outcomes. That’s hard to measure in three-and-a-half years. But over 40 percent of you opened the newsletter in a typical week. In the last year, readers shared our articles more than 2 million times on social media. We’ve had at least 25 stories republished on other sites and 40 mentions in newsletters. Our stories have been cited in other publications and used in classrooms.
Public health outcomes change slowly, so it’s harder to measure real-world impact. I would love to hear from you about trying an idea you read about in HPH, or even if you just shared the idea with a colleague. Did you use an article from HPH in a class or a meeting? It would be great to hear from you at our inbox, magazine@hsph.harvard.edu. It will be live for a few more months. So will the site, and I encourage you to download articles you found useful.
The pandemic sparked a surge of public health journalism. These are the sites and newsletters I follow closely or scan regularly, and recommend to you:
- Axios Vitals
- Devex CheckUp
- The Examination
- Global Health NOW
- The Harvard Chan Studio
- KFF Health News
- MindSite News
- Public Health Watch
- The Healthiest Goldfish
- Your Local Epidemiologist
- ProPublica
- STAT Morning Rounds
- TradeOffs (podcast)
Also, the new Healthbeat is off to a promising start, focusing for now on Atlanta and New York City.
I have had a long and varied journalism career, much of it spent chronicling the vast impact of high technology. I have never done more meaningful and important work than what we were doing at Harvard Public Health. I am so thankful to the school, colleagues past and present and our fabulous advisory board, everyone who gave me informal counsel, and all the readers who reached out. I rue that we won’t be able to continue. But a wonderful thing about public health is its focus on the public. It is political with a small ‘p,’ rooted in communities.
What’s most important is that you in the public health community (and in the public) stay engaged in doing the good work you do. Keep telling your stories!
Onward,
Michael F. Fitzgerald
