Naseem Miller wanted to be a researcher until she realized that lab work — getting up in the middle of the night to check on petri dishes and fruit flies — didn’t fuel her passion for science quite like she expected.
Instead, she went into journalism, writing about health and science-related topics after taking a summer internship through the Kaiser Family Foundation with The Washington Post. Now a writer with The Journalist’s Resource at Shorenstein Center at Harvard Kennedy School, she’s fulfilling her passion in a different way.
“Up until the beginning of last year, I was the health reporter at the Orlando Sentinel. A friend forwarded me this job and I applied. At the time, I was like a lot of reporters, I was buried in covering daily news and not really looking. But when I saw the position — and I was receiving their weekly newsletter, I found them super helpful — it appealed to me because it not only helped me stay in journalism, but I really like helping other reporters and explaining things,” she says. “I am very fortunate.”
Part of her drive to help reporters can be found in a piece she published last December, on how to diversify sourcing when it comes to medical and health reporting. Many reporters will reach out to local experts, including area hospitals or, if they have one nearby, university professors who are active in research.
“Really, the best way to find someone to contact is to go through different societies,” Miller says. “They are very good at connecting you with experts in the field if you can’t find someone locally or if you don’t have someone locally. For research studies, you can go to PubMed, part of the National Library of Medicine, to read through a lot of published medical studies. You can contact the authors of those studies to ask for comment or find if they’ll give you someone to talk to.”
Nurses are the key, however, because they’re just as involved in hands-on medical care as doctors, maybe even more so because they spend more time with patients.
Miller was inspired to write the guide after speaking at a conference. “Just being there and talking to nurses about how journalists interact with nurses, hearing other nursing groups talk, it was interesting to me. I did realize that as journalists we don’t go to nursing associations as often as we go to medical associations,” she says. “I have a long list of different nursing specialty groups and their contact people, from critical care to nephrology to neurology, that you can contact if you’re working on a story to find an expert you can talk to about bedside nursing and research.”
Her work in health and medical reporting also make Miller keenly aware of the burnout many reporters are feeling after covering the pandemic for two years and counting. She’s one of the co-founders of the Journalists Covering Trauma Facebook group.
The page was started in 2017 after a series of mass shootings, including the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando and a church shooting in Texas, where her friend was located.
“We started talking about how it affected us, how we held onto things from the early days of covering those events, things people made for us, how newsrooms were sending each other care packages,” Miller says. “We thought about starting a Facebook group to help other journalists going through the same things we were. Of course, then the pandemic hit and the topic stayed more relevant than ever. It can be a grim topic to cover day after day; you can’t take your foot off the gas. Our goal is to post as many useful resources as we can for journalists so if they come across it, they know they’re not alone, they can reach out for help.”
Naseem Miller writes about health and medicine for The Journalist’s Resource at Shorenstein Center at Harvard Kennedy School. She’s also the cofounder of the Journalists Covering Trauma Facebook group. She talks to It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell about resources to help reporters to diversify sourcing in their coverage of health and medicine, as well has how to deal with trauma.
