From Policy to Personal Wellness: Identifying Health Journalism Beats by Specialty Topic and Journalist...

Health journalists provide essential, verified information on a range of topics including wellness, medical research, health policy, and health business. We conducted a national online survey of US health journalists (N = 629) to investigate how occupational practices and perceptions vary for health journalists who specialize in different health topics. Latent class analysis identified four distinct health beats: personal health and wellness, health sciences and research, health business, and health systems. The four beats are associated with variations in how journalists frame stories, the reach of the outlets they work for, whether they are staff or freelancers, how much of their reporting work is about health, as well as their job satisfaction and autonomy to choose topics and frame stories. Comparing health beats highlights distinctions in how health journalists consider health beyond the individual level, including public health, social determinants of health, and health policy, and how local journalists differ from national health journalists in their emphasis on health systems, health policy, and other issues of immediate relevance for communities.