March 29, 2024

The Medical News Site That Saw the Coronavirus Coming Months Ago

Stat is operated separately from The Globe, but the two split some back-office functions, occasionally run each other’s articles and share a headquarters on Exchange Place. The site’s main source of revenue is subscriptions, starting at $35 a month with discounts available. Stat also publishes sponsored content in its newsletters and has started soliciting donations.

Before it attracted a wider readership through its pandemic coverage, Stat drew praise for its investigations of the marketing and prescribing of OxyContin; IBM’s efforts to harness artificial intelligence to cure cancer, which, Stat found, fell short of the hype; and how groupthink may have stymied an Alzheimer’s cure.

With articles written in a straightforward style, Stat is meant for a general audience. But it wants to win over specialists, too — readers like William Hanage, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, who praised the site’s coverage as “accessible” yet “still rigorous.”

“There is no single place on the internet that I would go to better update myself on the diversity of views that are out and circulating,” he said.

Dr. Hanage added that Ms. Branswell’s reporting on the coronavirus had made her “a godlike figure to people who are infectious-disease epidemiologists.”

Ms. Branswell, who has published about 50 articles on the pandemic, was a health reporter at The Canadian Press before taking on the infectious-disease beat at Stat in 2015. In October, she profiled the World Health Organization’s head of health emergencies, Mike Ryan.

“We’re not ready,” Dr. Ryan told her. “If we can’t stop Ebola, what hope do we have of stopping … Disease X?”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/business/media/stat-news-boston-coronavirus.html

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