Ginger Thompson and Doris Burke from ProPublica will be the featured speakers at this year’s Burleigh Media Ethics Lecture on Thursday, Oct. 15 from 3:30 – 4:45 p.m. in the Lunda Room on the second floor of the Alumni Memorial Union. They will discuss their five-part multimedia investigative series, “Sick in a Hospital Town,” which covers how predatory hospital practices led to rising healthcare costs and poor health outcomes for African American citizens in the town of Albany, Georgia.
This lecture is sponsored in part by the O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism.
Attendance is free and open to the public.
The exposé focuses on how residents of Albany, a majority African-American town of nearly 70,000 people in South Georgia, suffer high rates of various health afflictions despite the nearby presence of Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital. Thompson and Burke found that residents of the town pay some of the nation’s highest health insurance rates, but experience diabetes and heart disease far more than comparable areas. Their work won the Dori J. Maynard Justice Award, an honor sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation that celebrates journalism that addresses injustice and inequality.
“Sick in a Hospital Town” reflects the driving mission of the O’Brien Fellowship: Advancing justice and exposing inequities through exceptional journalism,” O’Brien Fellowship Director Jeffery Gerritt said. “The ProPublica series shows that U.S. journalists — despite significant industry-wide challenges — continue to produce groundbreaking and impactful accountability journalism.”
Ginger Thompson is a managing editor at ProPublica, a position that she holds after 15 years at the New York Times as Mexico City bureau chief and investigative reporter. She also was a Latin America correspondent for The Baltimore Sun, where her reporting on a secret Honduran death squad was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She’s won several prestigious reporting honors, including a Maria Moors Cabot Prize and the Selden Ring Award for investigative reporting.
Doris Burke is a senior research reporter at ProPublica covering corporate wrongdoing. A reporter at ProPublica since 2019, Burke previously spend time at The New York Times and Fortune Magazine. Along the way, Burke has reported on the inner workings of some of America’s most consequential companies, including Pfizer, Cargill, Google, Uber, Facebook and Microsoft. Burke has received the Selden Ring Award and IRE Award, among other notable accolades, for her work.
The annual Burleigh Media Ethics Lecture address ethical issues today’s communicators report on, as well as those they wrestle with in their own work. Sponsored annually by the Diederich College of Communication, the lecture honors William R. Burleigh, a 1957 Marquette journalism graduate who was president and CEO of the E.W. Scripps Company.
To read or listen to “Sick in a Hospital Town,” go to ProPublica’s website.
