Carol Gentry

Wall Street Journal hired me in 1997 after I finished my master's. At first I was based in Boston, covering the health-care industry in New England, but later I moved to the NYC newsroom to cover dramatic changes in the health insurance system as it transformed from fee-for-service to managed care. (That was the research I had done during a fellowship at Harvard in 1994-95). While at the Journal in NYC, I had first-line responsibility for two publicly traded companies, Aetna and Cigna.

Other newspapers I worked for, usually covering the health-care industry, include:

• Tampa Tribune, 2006-7.
• St. Petersburg Times, 1984-94.
• Tallahassee Democrat, 1981-84.

Created and launched a CDC-based training program in public health for journalists. That included:

• Selecting participants for the three-month program from a national competition each year.
• Developing a shorter-term fellowship for journalists who had only a couple of weeks to study.
• Building relationships with public health officers at CDC so that they would mentor the visiting journalists.
• Traveling through India to perform research that a fellow was scheduled to do but that got postponed because of 9-11.
• Helping train Asian and African journalists before the International AIDS conference in Bangkok.
• Providing a workshop on data analysis in Spanish for Chilean journalists in Santiago.

In late 2007 I founded Health News Florida, a non-profit grant-funded website and daily newsletter. I covered the business and politics of the industry as a public service, doing much of the reporting myself and supervising and editing the work of experienced free-lancers. In 2012 Health News Florida merged with WUSF Public Media and I became a WUSF employee. So in addition to reporting and writing stories for the newsletter, I learned broadcasting and generated audio versions that went on the air. I had to learn how to make stories interesting to listen to, not just compelling to read. Throughout the 10 years that I worked on Health News Florida before and during my time at WUSF, I:

• Built strong relationships with trustworthy sources.
• Investigated and broke stories about important state health issues, sometimes affecting state policy.
• Analyzed and explained how changes in national health policy would affect Floridians, given the culture and state laws here.