STAT turns 8: A letter from the executive editor

Today STAT turns 8. In these annual letters, I usually talk proudly about all we have accomplished, from our singular coverage of the Covid pandemic to our years-in-the-making court victory to force Purdue Pharma to release documents about its OxyContin marketing efforts, to our success at becoming the go-to media outlet covering health and medicine. Or I express my pride over our staff being named Pulitzer or Emmy finalists, and our consecutive Polk and Edward R. Murrow awards.

Today I have a more pointed appeal: for you to buy a STAT+ subscription.

Our ambitious, impactful, award-winning journalism — including stories and investigations that you can’t find anywhere else — costs many millions of dollars a year to produce. Our margins are slim by design: Unlike many media companies, we pour our revenue back into expanding our work and growing our ambitions, such as our move this year to base a reporter in London, who produces a huge volume of health and science news, sometimes on our site before readers in the U.S. wake up.

There’s something else I usually don’t share but you should know. Our mission as a journalistic watchdog sometimes costs us — literally. Over the years, we have had major advertisers pull their campaigns with us because they don’t like our meticulous, fair, but tough coverage of them. We are never intimidated or scared off when that happens. As we declare in our mission statement, “We cast a critical eye on scientific discoveries, scrutinize corporate strategies, and chronicle roiling battles for talent, money, and market share. We examine controversies and puncture hype.”

By building a revenue model that relies on subscribers, we can operate even more freely from the vicissitudes of the economy, or companies or institutions that don’t care for our coverage of them. But that means we truly need even more subscribers.

We are offering a special 25% off birthday discount for readers of this letter. Just use the promotion code BDAY25 when signing up. Beyond the birthday discount, we also offer academic and nonprofit rates, as well as group subscriptions for teams of two to 10 and licenses. You can get more information here.

While we sometimes produce more than a dozen stories a day, most of the biggest ones are behind our paywall. Here’s a taste of some of them over the past year:

• “The Obesity Revolution,” a series examining the potential of GLP-1 drugs to transform patients’ lives for the better — and also to divide medical experts, worsen inequities, increase anti-fat bias, strain national health spending, and make billions for drug companies. We published 20-plus stories as part of the series, as well as a drug development tracker.
• All year long we’ve produced investigations into how algorithms are driving denial of health coverage claims. Here’s one on Medicare Advantage and another on NaviHealth.
• We delivered a deep dive on the inside story of how data integrity issues roiled a biotech seen as “Moderna 2.0.”

I do hope you’ll consider this special offer and join the tens of thousands of STAT+ subscribers who have unlimited access to our exclusives, investigations, and in-depth daily coverage of biotech, health tech, policy, and more.

Thank you for reading STAT. As always, please reach out to me with feedback. I’m at [email protected].

Please stay safe,

Richard L. Berke
Co-founder & Executive Editor