Hoag Levins
Philadelphia
Covers:
The health services research, health economics, and health care delivery side of health care, i.e. those systems and professionals involved in the financing, management, and quality control.
Doesn't Cover:
I don't cover the biomedical side of health care.
Interview
Have you ever used a typewriter?
Lots. Hermes 300 was the best. I gave up back in the 80s when I went digital.
How is social media changing news?
It's weakening the ability of mainstream journalism to deliver important, factual information to the whole population.
What does it mean to be a journalist?
That's no longer to easy to define when anyone with a computer and net connection has a digital printing press that reaches the world.
How do you prefer to be pitched on stories?
Less than 200 word email.
What tools and software do you use to do your job?
As a staffer within the University of Pennsylvania I have immediate and unlimited access to an amazing range of databases.
What's your favorite social network?
I get a lot of ideas from the Twitter streams of the health care researchers I work with.
Why did you become a journalist?
I stumbled into it. When I returned from the Vietnam War I didn't have a job and a friend at a local paper offered to hire me as a copy boy.
What story are you most proud of writing or working on?
My 1977 my series in the Philadelphia Daily News that closed Philadelphia General Hospital.
What advice can you offer to aspiring journalists?
Learn more than journalism. You have to be a renaissance digital geek to really succeed in today's media market.
When's the best time to pitch you?
Email is open 24/7
What's the best pitch you ever got?
If you promise to write about it, I'll get you inside our hospital as a patient to fully document conditions.
Aside from your own, what's your favorite publication to read?
New York Times
What's the most common misperception about your beat?
Many don't appreciate that the U.S. is the only industrialized nation that fails to provide universal health care coverage for its citizens.
Would you like to take the Muck Rack Interview?
Create a Muck Rack profile.