On its 10th anniversary, health care site STAT is flourishing
STAT, a health care, medicine and biotech news site, marks its 10th anniversary this week with plenty to celebrate.
Even after a small round of layoffs last December, The Boston Globe affiliate fields a staff of about 100. With national and some global scope, it has raked in prizes — Loeb, Polk, broadcast and magazine awards — and was twice a Pulitzer Prize finalist. STAT’s audience is concentrated among high-level professionals, but with a number of general readers on board, too. It does not offer an exact figure for its audience size, in part because many of its sales are to groups at businesses or universities, but the numbers have grown steadily. The group licenses number 520, editor-in-chief and co-founder Rick Berke said, and the site gets 7.5 million views a month.
Twice, journalism lightning has landed on STAT’s turf — terrible situations that made for great stories and played to its strengths — COVID-19 in 2020, then the Trump administration’s deep cuts and odd policies this year.
When the pandemic appeared suddenly, STAT had on its staff Helen Branswell, a veteran reporter on infectious diseases. She was among the first, if not the first, journalist to trace the virus back to Asia. STAT’s coverage picked up from there.
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