Caroline Chen, a 2013 graduate of the
Master of Science Program,
Stabile Investigative Specialization, has been awarded the 2020
Livingston Award for Local Reporting for her
ProPublica series "
Heartless Hospital." The series, co-published by
ProPublica with New Jersey Advance Media and WNYC, is an investigation of a hospital transplant team’s efforts to keep a vegetative patient on life support and mislead federal regulators, while failing to consult with the patient’s family on treatment decisions.
The
Livingston Awards for Young Journalists, which are a program of Wallace House at the University of Michigan, are one of the most prestigious honors for professional journalists under the age of 35 and are the largest all-media, general reporting prizes in American journalism.
“I recall being swept away by the power of Caroline Chen’s series ‘
Heartless Hospital,'" said Livingston Awards national judge John Harris. "It exposed an outrageous reality. Imagine doctors keeping a heart transplant patient with no hope of survival alive in a vegetative state in order to bolster their one-year survival statistics and keep federal funding. There’s not any doubt that’s what happened at Newark Beth Israel Hospital. Caroline Chen had it on tape, a tape that came about from long and painstaking work, building relationships of trust with sources. Her story led to public investigations and reforms that will help patients.”
In addition to being a health care reporter for
ProPublica, Chen is an
adjunct professor at Columbia Journalism School, where she has taught the
Data I class, in which students learn how to evaluate and analyze data for appropriateness, context and meaning. Before joining
ProPublica, Chen reported on health care issues for
Bloomberg News. At
Bloomberg, her reporting exposed how a pharmaceutical company altered doctors’ orders to wring more reimbursements out of insurers, how a rare disease drugmaker
scared patients into continuing therapy, and how medically complex babies were
stranded in hospitals because of a lack of home-care nurses.
Chen recently joined
Sheila Coronel, the Toni Stabile Professor of Professional Practice in Investigative Journalism and Director of the Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism, in a video discussion about the
Master of Science Program's Stabile Investigative Specialization and the importance of investigative reporting. They were joined by education reporter Emmanuel Felton, a 2013 graduate of the M.S. Stabile Program. "What motivates me to be a reporter is to tell stories for people who don't have the platform to have a voice and who may not have the power to respond when there is injustice done to them," Chen explained in the roundtable discussion. Please watch the video below.
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