From the current global health emergency from mpox to medical breakthroughs like weight loss drugs, there’s no lack of stories to cover when it comes to the health beat. But that doesn’t mean medical news is always easy to cover.
NBC News medical reporter Erika Edwards and Dr. Vin Gupta, a pulmonologist and NBC News medical analyst, shared what great health news stories have in common:
- Plain language, free from jargon
- The right medical experts
- A hook (introduction or lede) that catches people’s attention
- Characters (subjects) who make the story relatable
- Plenty of visuals, especially to help explain complex ideas
- Clear, actionable advice.
Edwards and Gupta offer more advice for covering health stories in the video above and in the following comments.
How do you choose which health news stories to cover?
Erika Edwards: The most successful medical news stories are ones that impact the greatest number of people. If that’s not the case, find that really interesting nugget. The first person to be cured of HIV, for example, hasn’t really translated into widespread cures. But those little increments of science are very important to talk about.
Vin Gupta: As the medical beat reporter, you are faced with a litany of pitches in your inbox. What is going to impact a large denominator of people hearing the story?
What’s the most important part of a health news story?
Gupta: Lean into visuals. Often the most complicated medical topics are amenable to some visual or graphical presentation that can help convey your point. I think visuals have been very underutilized, especially covering the pandemic.
Edwards: What will be visual about the story? When we get into a lab, what are we going to see? You’re analyzing what mosquitoes cause West Nile [virus] — are we going to put our hands in the cage? Are you going to see little Johnny taking his medication?
Our data graphics team is able to take some of that really complicated math and put it in a beautiful map or a graphic that’s easily digestible.
Why are “characters” important in a health story?
Edwards: Identify the patients or families who have been in the hospital or have had a disease, so they can talk in plain language about what it’s like. What was it like to go through chemotherapy? What kind of feelings did you have?
Gupta: How do we get people to actually care, to listen, to stop what they’re doing? Turn up the volume and lean in. Part of that is storytelling — that person who’s on the screen. “Oh, gosh, I went through that.” It’s a clever, creative and nuanced way to get home a point.
Why did you want to become a health reporter?
Edwards: I’ve been interested in medicine from a very early age. My mother is a nurse, she’s the most influential person in my life. I grew up exposed to doctors, hospitals, science and medicine. As a teenager, I was a volunteer in the maternity ward and took newborn babies to their moms.
I decided not to become a doctor or pursue nursing — I became a journalist. But when I was given the opportunity to focus on the medical beat, I jumped at the chance.
Gupta: Communications in medicine is a calling, a public service. It’s trying to keep people out of the hospital by giving them proper knowledge and awareness.
I was in the military reserves, and one thing they valued more than anything else was simple, clear communication, especially to a lay audience. That’s different from the way we’re taught in traditional medical school to talk in acronyms and very complicated language. Over the last four years, we’ve seen the importance of being able to clearly communicate important facts to a broad audience.
