On this episode of Media in Minutes, we welcome health and medicine journalist Shari Rudavsky. Having worked for the Indianapolis Star for 16 years, Shari discusses what it's been like covering the COVID pandemic and how she chooses what stories to pursue.
Read Shari's most recent articles for The Indy Star here: https://www.indystar.com/staff/2684151001/shari-rudavsky/
Follow Shari on Twitter: @srudavsky
On this episode of Media in Minutes, we welcome health and medicine journalist Shari Rudavsky. Having worked for the Indianapolis Star for 16 years, Shari discusses what it's been like covering the COVID pandemic and how she chooses what stories to pursue.
Read Shari's most recent articles for The Indy Star here: https://www.indystar.com/staff/2684151001/shari-rudavsky/
Follow Shari on Twitter: @srudavsky
Welcome to Media in Minutes. This is your host Angela Tuell. This podcast features in- depth interviews with those who report on the world around us. They share everything from their favorite stories to what happened behind the lens and give us a glimpse into their world. From our studio here at Communications Redefined, this is Media in Minutes. Today we are excited to welcome Shari Rudavsky. Shari is a health and medicine reporter for the Indianapolis Star, a Gannett newspaper. She has been with the Star for 16 years and previous to that was a reporter at the Miami Herald. Shari is a graduate of Harvard University and a native of the Bronx. Hi, Shari. So happy to be talking with you today.
Shari Rudavsky:Delighted to be talking to you, Angela.
Angela Tuell:So I've asked several of our guests about the COVID effect, but didn't want that to become you know, really a focal point of the podcast. But today is different. We must talk COVID. What a year to be a health and medicine reporter.
Shari Rudavsky:Yes, it's been a busy year.
Angela Tuell:How have you managed the demand for information?
Shari Rudavsky:Well, certainly working some long days, and also being gifted to have, you know, to have the privilege of working in a newsroom where there are a lot of, a lot of people who've chipped in on the COVID story, which isn't, which certainly does not stop at the medical side but but reach its tentacles into all areas of people's lives, whether that, you know, includes their financial, their housing, their educational experience, nursing home experiences.
Angela Tuell:At what point did you realize this pandemic was as serious and disruptive as it became?
Shari Rudavsky:Um, you know, I don't know, if I, I certainly didn't, didn't think through all of the financial and economic impact implications of it. But back in January, in February, the CDC was having regular briefings for health journalists about what was going on in China. And back in February, I wrote a story interviewing an American teacher in a Chinese city, not Wu Han, I think there were very few cases of, of if any cases of COVID in the city where he was, but he was talking about the lockdown. And and I just, you know, part of me thought, Oh, well, I is that that couldn't happen here. At that time, he was a seventh grader son, he will attest to this when when his school said, Okay, we're going out now it's the week before, I think it was the week before spring break. Maybe it was two weeks before we'll be back after spring break. I looked at my seventh grader and I said, You know what, bring all your stuff home. You're not coming back this year.
Angela Tuell:Oh, my goodness.
Shari Rudavsky:So I think I sort of knew that schools were going to be out for the duration. I certainly didn't know
Angela Tuell:That was before everything was locked down. I mean, that's before.
Shari Rudavsky:Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. But I figured that I, you know, I figured that the schools would be one of the areas where there would be the most disruption. I didn't, I didn't, as I said, I didn't think through what it would mean for restaurants or, or, you know, all those other retail businesses.
Angela Tuell:Right. You know, information about COVID. And the vaccine has evolved as the science evolves around these. Has that made your job difficult?
Shari Rudavsky:No, that's made my job, my job. I mean, that's what health journalists do all the time. So it's just a little bit, well, it's different here in that this is completely new, and no one really knows anything about it. But that's, you know, that's when you cover Health and Science. I mean, science and medicine are always changing and what they know or what they think they know. And I think that's sometimes hard for people outside of those fields to understand, you know, you want to think that knowledge is kind of ossified or hardened. But I think it's, it's always in in a sense of flux. And maybe that's like a useful message for all of us to be reminded about.
Angela Tuell:Yes, absolutely. What have been some of your most memorable stories during this time?
Shari Rudavsky:I mean, a lot of stories have been, have been really memorable. I mean, certainly talking to people who've been affected by it, who've had COVID, who had long COVID, who you know, where you kind of keep on having symptoms after your acute infection passes. I spoke to one gentleman who had a lung transplant after he became infected with COVID, but also speaking to you know, speaking to all the tired doctors and nurses listening to our state health officials. Eventually, week after week before that little bit more often talking about the the kind of tough decisions that they had to make all of these stories stand out in my mind.
Angela Tuell:I find it extraordinary that there's always been vaccine hesitancy. You know, the mass debate raged right here in Indianapolis in 1918. So 100 years ago, and 100 years later, we're in that same position. And but today, we have more technology and information handy. Why do you think that a large percentage of people still struggle to accept and trust in the scientists and doctors?
Shari Rudavsky:Well, I think part of it is, is that the science and the medicine can change and what, you know, you think, you know, in one generation can change in the next. So if there's something that makes you feel uncomfortable, you can look to that, that aspect of science and medicine and use that as as an excuse, like, well, I don't trust this now. Because in you know, and if 15 years or 10 years, they may tell us something completely different. I mean, I, I will be honest, and say I'm fully vaccinated. Everyone in my household who can be fully vaccinated is fully vaccinated. Um, but I can sort of understand the vaccine hesitancy a lot more readily than I could understand the max the mask hesitancy.
Angela Tuell:Yeah.
Shari Rudavsky:I think, you know, I mean, I think people are sometimes wary about what they put in their bodies and our immune systems are miraculous mysterious things, which is what, you know, the obviously the vaccines work on and you know, it, I can understand, I don't necessarily agree with it, but I can be empathetic towards someone who feels such discomfort that that he or she is is hesitant to get a vaccine. And then you know, and then there are people like I said, I mean, there are people, certain communities that have been, I don't know, if I, well, there's certain communities that have been mistreated by, by medicine in the past, certain communities that don't feel that their voices are heard. Whether that be the black community, certain people in the black community, or I know there, there are a lot of white evangelicals, who are also hesitant about vaccines, again, there's a kind of maybe a lack of trust. It becomes a harder entity for me to understand, when you're asking someone to put a piece of cloth over their mouth versus asking someone to put something inside their body. That's new.
Angela Tuell:Right. So how are you choosing which stories to run this COVID still rule? And or do you think there's reader fatigue with that?
Shari Rudavsky:Oh, I think there's definitely reader fatigue, I think. I mean, I think people really are ready to move on if we can, I think there is a small segment, at least readers that are still not feeling that this is behind us. In the end, they keep reading and then you know, we are trying to find. You know, for instance, on Monday, we published the story about variants. And unfortunately, variants make a clue the probably COVID isn't behind us, we've been writing a lot about vaccination rates. Indiana has a pretty low vaccination rates, as everyone I'm sure knows, compared to the rest of the nation. If we don't increase that vaccination rate, there's a chance that we could see outbreaks, particularly among unvaccinated groups of people or, or in counties where the number of vaccinated people is lower than perhaps in some counties where we see higher vaccination rates. So there's definitely reader fatigue. I think we're all just COVID fatigue, we just want to go back to some semblance of normal. And you know, it's probably not, it's hard to imagine how things look exactly the way they looked in 2019.
Angela Tuell:Yes, because you can't just forget about it and completely erase that from your memory, even if you'd like to, you know.
Shari Rudavsky:Right or the impact that it's had on our psyche.
Angela Tuell:Right. Right, exactly. What kind of feedback have you gotten from your articles and stories over the last year, almost a year and a half now?
Shari Rudavsky:I mean, I think I've said this before. I think for me, the most surprising thing about COVID was how rapidly it became a political sized entity. And as a health reporter, I do have this probably naive notion that health and medicine Yeah, we all want better health, we all want. We all want to live healthy lives. We all want to live long lives, we want to do what it takes to stay healthy. And clearly, for many people, learning about COVID or listening to what people had to say about COVID wasn't an issue of personal health but became a political debate. So what surprised me in terms of the feedback I got certainly early on was how politicized this was. I kind of got endured to it after awhile. But I would really get feedback from both sides or all sides of the spectrum of you know, oh my gosh, we should never have opened up society when we did to we should never have closed society when we did. You know, people should still be wearing masks today. People should never have been wearing masks. And it It surprised me how much of an overlay there were between people who disagreed with what the experts were saying and politics.
Angela Tuell:Yeah. And at times, you probably felt like a political reporter a little bit.
Shari Rudavsky:A little bit, though. I think, you know, it was harder to delve into. Where those politicized health beliefs originated. You know.
Angela Tuell:Yeah. All right. And you couldn't give legs to some of the things that weren't simply true, right. I mean, it was right. Yeah.
Shari Rudavsky:Right. Right.
Angela Tuell:So would you change anything about the stories you ran over the past year?
Shari Rudavsky:That's an interesting question. The one thing I wish the Star had been able to do maybe a little bit more of was some more graphics to show the way the cases and the deaths to show that curve. We weren't necessarily always, you know, we could always have have a graphic that communicated that graphically. But I don't know what else what else the Star could have done or could have done differently. Maybe it's just too close to think about that now. You know I think the Star did a really good job. And I this was not I don't, this was not my idea was one of my colleagues of trying to a couple of times. Really do profiles of the many, of many of the people who had died from COVID. To help bring home like this is a real thing. It's killing real Hoosiers. Um, you know, I think my colleagues on the nursing home beat certainly showed you that toll in nursing homes. Um, I don't know what else the Star could have done. Or how it could have approached it differently. I think maybe it's still too steeped in it.
Angela Tuell:We're still still in it. Yeah. Yeah. How - were there non COVID stories that you were, you know, turning down, because you were simply covering, had too much, you know, going on with COVID that you wanted to cover?
Shari Rudavsky:I would say left and right. But also a lot of those non COVID stories, at least in the early part of the pandemic did go away, because everyone was talking about COVID all the time. And, you know, doctors were writing that I mean, I think, um, you know, here's something, we still haven't done a lot on the economics of paying for COVID care, and that how that impacted the healthcare system financially, I think that's an area that we still need to be delving, or I or my colleagues need to be delving into a little bit more. You know, it's like COVID is right in front of you. And it's what everyone is caring about. So here's the thing is, if we did some of those non COVID stories, they probably wouldn't have gotten read that well, unless they were really compelling. So that's something that we take into account. Also, when we're deciding whether or not to do stories is is there a, is there a broad appetite for them?
Angela Tuell:So how do you choose stories? What's gets your attention?
Shari Rudavsky:In general, in general? So in general, it's something that speaks to a large swath of readers. So not, you know, something that you can really tell a narrative about, often is, is what, what I am drawn to, I mean, I am interested in general and public health, which, which obviously, COVID was a perfect example of, you know, I've never covered a pandemic like that before. You know, I, I wouldn't say that there any series on specifically not interested in it sort of you sort of think about it, would I want to open my paper and read the story, would it, would I read the story, but a lot of times, a lot of times, there's stories I'm on the fence about, and then I run it past my editor and our team and say, Would you guys want to read it? Especially because, you know, they may have different perspectives than I have. out of, you know, my immediate team. I'm the only person with kids, they're, they're young, they they're younger than I am, you know, they're they're in a different stage of their life. So it's good to get their feedback on what what they think and a lot of times, they'll be like, Yeah, no, I don't care.
Angela Tuell:So that gives you your answer, right? I have to ask, I know you graduated from Harvard, and received a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. So how did you end up as a medical reporter in Indianapolis?
Shari Rudavsky:Well, I graduated from Harvard and then I worked for a Science Magazine in New York for two years. Magazine was called Omni it was actually run by the same people who ran Penthouse. So that was an interesting office to have as your first office job. There are some interesting graphics on the walls, which we can talk about not on air. But I was always interested in health and medicine, I wanted to delve a little bit deeper academically into some issues, I wanted to get more of a, I was interested in the history of medicine, how American medicine, the entity that we know today came to be that entity. And I had taken some classes in as an undergrad, where we learned that sort of the easiest way to say this to people is history of medicine kind of looks at medical thought much the way art history looks at the production of art. In other words, you look at you look at theories and approaches to understanding of the body, as reflective of where the society is. Because obviously, the people who are just as artists who produce the art are in some way mirrors of the society in which they are doing that work, physicians or medical scientists, or public health officials who are propagating ideas about medicine and science are also a part of the society and but by studying the way experts explain things or understand things, you get a window into what was important to the society at the time. And then by studying how it changed, you see how society changes.
Angela Tuell:And you're actually a Bronx native as well. So what do you love about Indiana? And what do you miss about New York City?
Shari Rudavsky:What do I love about Indiana? Well, I mean, my two kids have grown up here. One of my kids was born here. So I certainly I mean, it's a great place for them to be growing up. It's a great place. It's a very easy place to live. You know, we had lived all over the East Coast. And when we first moved here, I remember one of my colleagues then there was get together at my house. And he's like, Hi, I wonder how much it would cost in Boston? I was like, yeah, there'd be no way we could be living in this house in Boston, where we just came from. So it's, you know, I mean, but but there are definite trade offs. I mean, what I miss most about the Bronx is of course, my, my family. My mother still lives there. And until COVID, we went back six to eight times a year. But I mean, I miss I miss a lot of things. I miss I miss public transportation I miss I even miss apartment buildings. I you know, I watched the trailer for In the Heights. I grew up not a little bit further north of Kazakhstan. But I was like, oh, man, I miss summer in New York, you know, where it's really hot and sweaty, and you can't get cool for about four weeks.
Angela Tuell:If you miss that, you know, you really love it there. Right?
Shari Rudavsky:Well, I mean, I think maybe I think everyone. A lot of people love the place that they're from. I mean, aside from two years after I moved in and went to college, I didn't live in New York again, I made no effort to try to make any sacrifices that were requiring me to live. I mean, New York is a really tough place to live too, so...
Angela Tuell:Yes, incredibly. Well. Thank you so much, Shari. It's been a wonderful conversation.
Shari Rudavsky:Oh, thank you, Angela. I appreciate it.
Angela Tuell:You can find Shari on Twitter. We will link to her account in our show notes, or daily in Indianapolis Star. That's all for this episode of Media in Minutes, a podcast by Communications Redefined available anywhere you get your podcasts. You can find more at CommunicationsRedefined.com/podcast. I'm your host, Angela Tuell. Talk to you next time.