Gary Schwitzer has specialized in health care journalism in his more than 35-year career in radio, television, interactive multimedia and the Internet.
He is publisher of the website HealthNewsReview.org <http://www.healthnewsreview.org/>, leading a team of more than two dozen people who grade daily health news reporting by major U.S. news organizations. The project has been honored with several journalism industry awards - the Mirror Award, honoring those who "hold a mirror to their own industry for the public's benefit," and the Knight-Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism. His blog - which is embedded within HealthNewsReview.org - was voted 2009 Best Medical Blog in competition hosted by Medgadget.com.
From 2001-2010, he was a tenured professor on the faculty of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota, teaching health journalism and media ethics. He left that position to devote fulltime to his online publishing work. In 2000, he was the founding Editor-In-Chief of the MayoClinic.com <http://mayoclinic.com/> consumer health web site.During the 1990's, Gary produced groundbreaking shared decision-making videos for the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making based at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.He worked for four years at the National Office of the American Heart Association in Dallas. He was a television medical news reporter for 14 years, with positions at CNN in Atlanta, WFAA-TV in Dallas, and WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee. He was head of the medical news unit at CNN, leading the efforts of ten staff members in Atlanta and Washington, D.C. After leaving the television news business, he has frequently been asked to write or speak on the state of medical journalism.He served two terms as a member of the board of directors of the Association of Health Care Journalists for whom he authored the organization's Statement of Principles. For that organization he also wrote a guide on how to report on medical research studies <http://www.healthjournalism.org/about-news-detail.php?id=105>.
Schwitzer has written about the state of health journalism in JAMA, BMJ, the American Journal of Bioethics, the Journal of Medical Internet Research, PLoS Medicine, Nieman Reports, Quill, Columbia Journalism Review, Poynter.org, The Daily Beast, The American Editor, and MayoClinic.com. In 2009, the Kaiser Family Foundation published and distributed his white paper on "The State of US Health Journalism <http://www.kff.org/entmedia/upload/7858.pdf>."