Not for Sale: Rick Berke of STAT

Rick Berke is no stranger to threats. Investigations from the healthcare and life sciences publication he co-founded, STAT, have elicited ire and intimidation from some of the industry’s biggest organizations. But the veteran editor who broke global news in his high school newspaper doesn’t back down.

In this episode of Commons Healthcare, reporter Danny Funt (The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal) brings us the story of how a healthcare outsider built the publication the industry needed.

From exposing an insurance behemoth to leading Covid-19 coverage, STAT has shaped our understanding of healthcare—warts and all. Find out what that cost in lost advertising revenue and shoe-leather reporting.

Correction: In this episode, we refer to STAT’s cardiovascular disease reporter as Elizabeth Mooney. Her name is Elizabeth Cooney.

Chapter markers

00:00The Watchdog: As organizations try to buy positive coverage, Rick Berke’s healthcare publication won’t take the money.
03:58Taking on a Colossus: Pulling back the curtain on STAT’s landmark investigation into UnitedHealth Group.
16:05A Newsman for Life: Rick’s journey from early scoops to the top of storied news organizations.
23:02A Billionaire’s Gamble: The owner of the Red Sox backs a team of healthcare reporters.
30:01STAT Makes Its Mark: STAT reporters track down and unseal documents from a company linked to the opioid epidemic.
36:43Never Backing Down: Sticking to your principles proves to be a winning formula.

Key quotes

“We have lost millions of dollars in advertising because of stories and investigations we’ve done on companies that don’t like what we do.”

— Rick Berke, Executive Editor and Co-Founder | STAT

“We get intimidated. There’s hectoring going on. You get such threats and intimidation that I just roll my eyes.”

— Rick Berke, Executive Editor and Co-Founder | STAT

“I ran into one of my old Globe colleagues, and he sort of took me aside and was like, ‘This isn’t gonna work out. I mean, you guys are burning money.’ I just used it as motivation and kind of put it in the back corner of my mind and said, ‘All right, well, let’s see.’”

— Casey Ross, Chief Investigative Reporter for Data and Technology | STAT

Credits

Reporter: Danny Funt
Audio production: Joe Steptoe and Anthony Dionne
Hosts: Tom Castles and Jack Murtha
Executive producer: Christie Chisholm
Sound engineer: George Steptoe
Editor: Mark R.
Head of growth: Wynn Hansen

Resources & links

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Transcript

JACK MURTHA: I want you to listen to something. It’s quick. It’s punchy. It’s a little different.

It’s a look inside the mind of the man who’s trying to turn healthcare media from an obedient lapdog into an aggressive watchdog. Check it out.

RICK BERKE: We have lost millions of dollars in advertising because of stories and investigations we've done on companies that don't like what we do.

JACK MURTHA: If that sounds unremarkable, you need to understand this: Healthcare journalism is for sale.

That’s right: Companies are literally buying positive coverage. It happens in a bunch of different ways: explicitly in backroom deals and implicitly through subtle threats to withhold ad dollars. In certain healthcare outlets, you just can’t know whether you’re reading a story that’s bought and paid for. At a time when most media outlets are scraping by, that easy money is attractive. But Rick Berke and the publication he co-founded, STAT News, aren’t tempted. In fact, if you happen to become a subject of one of his team’s investigations, you might say that Rick Berke’s no watchdog. He’s an attack dog. And you might even try to bite back.

RICK BERKE: We get intimidated. There’s hectoring going on. You get such threats and intimidation that I just roll my eyes.

TOM CASTLES: Well, yeah. Hats off to them. But why should the rest of us care?

JACK MURTHA: All right, fair question. This is not a journalism podcast, this is a healthcare podcast. And I’m gonna tell you why, Tom. Because from COVID-19 to the opioid crisis to the scandals surrounding UnitedHealth, STAT has played a role in forming our understanding of almost every major healthcare story of the past decade … And Rick Berke is the man behind it all.

TOM CASTLES: I’m Tom Castles.

JACK MURTHA: And I’m Jack Murtha.

TOM CASTLES: And this is Commons Healthcare.

JACK MURTHA: Commons Healthcare is the podcast where we investigate what it means to succeed in healthcare.

TOM CASTLES: It’s all to help healthcare leaders like you build a career that’s successful by any measure. And especially yours.

JACK MURTHA: If you like what we’re doing here, please rate, subscribe, and review. And sign up for our newsletter, Healthcare People. That way, you’ll never miss our behind-the-scenes stories and ideas, straight from our journalists and the leaders they cover.

TOM CASTLES: Today on the podcast: the story of Rick Berke and STAT News.

JACK MURTHA: Every up-and-coming reporter finds out sooner or later that they have a lot to learn from the journalists who’ve come before them. There’s really no teacher like an editor who’s seen it all.

TOM CASTLES: So we figured: What unexpected lessons might healthcare leaders take from a hardened, veteran journalist?

JACK MURTHA: You also hear a lot about outsiders coming into healthcare. You know, quotes like: We need new perspectives to disrupt this industry! Or, on the other hand: Outsiders who think they can disrupt healthcare eventually find out what we already know: that healthcare is just too complex, and too slow, and too hard.

TOM CASTLES: Whatever your opinion is, one thing’s for sure: Rick’s an outsider who came into healthcare journalism and changed the way it worked.

JACK MURTHA: And getting to know Rick might just help change the way you work.

TOM CASTLES: Our friend, the renowned reporter Danny Funt, has the story.

DANNY FUNT: UnitedHealth Group is the largest health insurer in the U.S. It generates nearly as much revenue as Apple. It wields unparalleled influence over American medicine. And, in the eyes of its critics, UnitedHealth epitomizes the greed and heartlessness of the insurance industry.

But for years, the exact methods that the company uses to rake in billions were mostly a mystery — to the public and even many healthcare professionals. It remained unknown in large part because of how effectively UnitedHealth guarded its secrets from the press.

Here’s Casey Ross, a reporter who used to work on the famed Spotlight investigative team at the Boston Globe, describing the challenge of covering UnitedHealth:

CASEY ROSS: It was extremely difficult to get people to go on the record. … People's livelihoods are tied up in that, and there's tremendous reputational risk for them, financial risk that they're taking on in criticizing such a powerful entity that really controls the fortunes of a lot of medical groups. If you get cut out of UnitedHealth Group's network, or you're a doctor who works for them, you can lose your job, lose your livelihood.

DANNY FUNT: Yet in recent years, stunning revelations about UnitedHealth came to light in vivid detail.

Casey and a few of his new colleagues uncovered how UnitedHealth pressured doctors to exaggerate their patients’ health problems, bilking the Medicare Advantage program for tens of billions of dollars. The reporters showed how UnitedHealth used predictive algorithms to override some physicians’ judgment and deny insurance claims for elderly patients dealing with serious illnesses and injuries. The stories revealed how UnitedHealth made hundreds of millions of dollars using a device to test for peripheral artery disease, despite concerns from clinicians that the device was faulty.

And that’s just a small sample of what these reporters turned up.

Their investigation was grueling and time-consuming. You might be guessing that it was published by The New York Times, or 60 Minutes, or The Atlantic.

But the eye-opening investigation into UnitedHealth, like so many of the splashiest exposés of healthcare companies these days, came from STAT News, a healthcare and life sciences publication affiliated with the Boston Globe that launched barely a decade ago.

As STAT’s reporters dug deeper into UnitedHealth, the stakes only grew higher.

At first, company officials had been willing to answer some questions on background. Then even that limited access was shut down, says STAT reporter Bob Herman:

BOB HERMAN: It really started to turn into full-on like here's statements at best and no comments at worst. We were bending over backwards to try and interview people. We said we will go to your headquarters to sit down and talk to you guys, and they never bit.

DANNY FUNT: And get this: On two separate occasions, UnitedHealth appeared to mistakenly email internal memos to STAT reporters detailing the company’s plans for countering fallout from negative coverage.

But although UnitedHealth wouldn’t authorize interviews, over time STAT earned the trust of potential sources.

BOB HERMAN: The more reporting we got out there, the more people wanted to talk to us. Honestly, it's a reporter’s dream because you start to reach more people that you don't even know exist.

DANNY FUNT: All this enabled STAT to publish a tour de force about UnitedHealth called “Health Care’s Colossus." But after STAT had published six installments of the series, the story took a shocking turn.

It happened December 4th, 2024, the morning of UnitedHealth’s investor conference in New York City:

NEWS CLIP: UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was fatally shot outside the New York Hilton in Midtown Manhattan, this morning.

Police say he was targeted in this morning’s premeditated attack.

The killing is drawing unexpected reaction on social media. Many people expressing support for the shooter. … This has everything to do with the high cost of healthcare.

DANNY FUNT: The murder of a healthcare executive sparked a national conversation about the ways Americans are denied insurance claims and the morality of the people making those decisions. The gunman’s apparent motive added fuel to the fire.

NEWS CLIP: CBS News also confirms law enforcement found shell casings at the crime scene with the words “Deny, Defend, and Depose” written on them.

DANNY FUNT: And this happened smack in the middle of STAT publishing the findings of this major investigation into UnitedHealth Group.

The company, I should say, has challenged many of the findings in STAT’s reporting, saying it carefully follows regulations and industry best-practices. But after the murder, UnitedHealth grew even more hostile toward the press, accusing reporters of being insensitive as they continued to report on UnitedHealth while the company mourned the death of Brian Thompson.

Yet after careful deliberation, STAT decided to press onward with the “Health Care’s Colossus” series. Despite this tragedy, shedding light on UnitedHealth was as valuable as ever.

With that being said, it did come as a relief when the alleged assassin’s manifesto surfaced and STAT wasn’t mentioned. Here’s Rick Berke, the executive editor of STAT News:

RICK BERKE: We just didn't want to be connected to that despicable crime. We were very conscious of not looking like we were leveraging it in any way, but at the same time, we've written all these foundational stories that really get to the heart of how the company operates, and so we haven't shied away. We thought it's part of our obligation.

DANNY FUNT: Before co-founding STAT, in 2015, Rick spent more than 25 years as a reporter and high-ranking editor at The New York Times, and his convictions about journalism — especially the watchdog variety — are at the heart of what has made STAT News such an unlikely success.

Rick was supportive when four of his reporters wanted to devote a couple of years to investigating UnitedHealth, one of the biggest healthcare companies in the world. And he wasn’t deterred when that company grew increasingly hostile toward coverage. Or by the chance that it might sue them, something STAT has dealt with more than once. Or when UnitedHealth, one of STAT’s biggest advertisers, responded to critical coverage by pulling those ads. That wasn’t a first, either.

RICK BERKE: We have lost millions of dollars in advertising because of stories, investigations we've done on companies that don't like what we do.

DANNY FUNT: On the surface, Rick is nothing like the stereotypical swaggering editor. But to those who know Rick best, there is a lot more than meets the eye.

Take it from Julie Rovner, a longtime health reporter at NPR and KFF Health News:

JULIE ROVNER: He seems very meek, which I think has been sort of his way of being since he was a teenager. And underneath is, you know, one of the most ferocious journalists I've ever met.

STAT EDITOR: Turning to tomorrow, for First Opinion, how to counter the business model of misinformation. Anything else?

RICK BERKE: Yeah, I want to just express my gratitude for the great blockbuster investigation today. It was months and months of back and forth and very pointed notes from the company and I think it came out really beautifully and is an important public service. And let’s hope it gets lots of subscriptions, too.

DANNY FUNT: That’s Rick Berke this past summer, meeting with fellow editors to discuss upcoming stories. I spent a couple of days shadowing Rick at STAT’s newsroom in Boston. They recently downsized to a smaller office adjacent to the much larger digs of the Boston Globe.

Rick says the move simply reflects the fact that many STAT employees have spread out from Boston since the pandemic. One, for example, now reports from London. The staff, along with the publication’s ambitions, is growing. When I visited, STAT was in the process of hiring a reporter for a new beat that’s distinctly of-the-moment: It will focus on declining trust in science. The job went to longtime STAT reporter Nicholas Florko, who left to join The Atlantic in 2024 only to rejoin STAT for this role two years later.

The new space in Boston was sparsely decorated. A small bookshelf displayed a handful of awards. It couldn’t possibly hold all of the trophies STAT has collected: Murrows, Polks, Livingstons, a National Magazine Award. STAT was twice a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. Over the past decade, STAT is one of the most decorated publications of its size.

STAT is an outlier in more ways than one. The business of journalism is facing unprecedented turmoil, and even some of the top organizations—from The Washington Post to ESPN—have shed staff. STAT, meanwhile, turns a profit. It does so by rejecting clickbait in favor of meticulous, insightful, often expensive reporting—supported by an undisclosed number of readers who are willing to shell out $399 annually for a STAT+ subscription.

RICK BERKE: My guiding light at STAT is the reason I'm in journalism: I want to do provocative, interesting stories that no one knew about. I don't have any interest in boring. I don't have any interest in commodity. the biggest subscription drivers for our coverage are the investigative stories. People pay big money for subscriptions because they're stories they have to read.

DANNY FUNT: STAT covers some phenomenally wealthy companies, many of which have big budgets for marketing. But time after time, STAT has refused to pander to potential advertisers.

Rick and his colleagues believe standing on their principles has been the key to their success.

It got me thinking: Is STAT News a fluke? Or does it offer a blueprint at a time when hard-hitting and commercially viable journalism—in healthcare and so many other areas—is more desperately needed than ever?

WYNN HANSEN: Hey, this is Wynn Hansen, and I wanna talk about a trap that a ton of healthcare organizations fall into. Picture this: You hire a traditional comms or PR agency. They turn your money into disjointed tactical deliverables, and then they applaud themselves for pumping vanity metrics, even though you did most of the work. Too many of these agencies are operating in a world that no longer exists, and if you’re following their lead, you might be, too. It’s time to opt out of this race to the bottom.

In the real world, growing your business means building real relationships with real people who drive real business outcomes. Map Change was purpose-built to do just that. We’re the closest advisors to the C-suite at Series A startups and $8 billion enterprises. They trust our team of pedigreed journalists at Map Change to put them in the right rooms, to deliver an undeniable message, and to bring industry-shaping deals within reach. Find the story only you can tell. Tell it where it matters most. Join us at mapchangenow.com. That’s M-A-P-C-H-A-N-G-E-N-O-W dot com. All right, back to the show.

ARCHIVAL CLIP: A crackling exchange between Nixon and Khrushchev. … Every aspect of the Cold War and Soviet-American rivalry is argued in blunt and forthright terms. The threat of atomic warfare, diplomacy by ultimatum, economic progress … “Every word that you have said has been taken down, and I will promise you that every word you have said will be reported in the United States, and they will see you say it on television.”

DANNY FUNT: Rick Berke’s first big reporting scoop involved a famous trip in 1959 that Richard Nixon, then the vice president, made to Moscow to meet with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Their exchange became known as the Kitchen Debates.

Fast forward to 1976, when Rick and a colleague, Michael Gill, broke the news that Nixon had been exposed to high levels of radiation at the U.S. ambassador’s mansion, where he slept during the visit. It was an apparent Soviet assassination attempt, and that revelation made headlines around the globe.

Even more impressive? Rick and Michael published the story in their high school paper.

RICK BERKE: Ten years later, I'm at the New York Times in the Washington bureau. I'm kind of a lowly person. I'm like the person not going to lunch. I'm working, and our national security reporter said, "I just got this amazing story, this classified document that Nixon was exposed to radiation during the kitchen debates,” and I said, “Oh, I broke that in high school.”

DANNY FUNT: Rick grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, the son of a social worker mother and a father who served as an economist in the Justice Department’s antitrust division. Michael’s family was friends with a former Secret Service agent, who tipped the high school seniors off. Their story rippled across the front pages of the biggest newspapers. Yet in Walt Whitman High School’s paper, the students had buried the article on page 3.

RICK BERKE: Everyone said like, "Why didn't you put it on page one?” And I said, "Well, we don't normally cover that, so let's put it on page three.”

DANNY FUNT: This was right after “All the President’s Men” hit theaters, with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as the Watergate reporters Woodward and Bernstein. Investigative reporting had never seemed cooler, and it would inspire a generation of journalists. But by then, Rick was already a seasoned reporter. In third grade, he’d published a newspaper for his family.

RICK BERKE: I loved going to the library and making copies of it. I love the production. I love the layout. I loved writing stories. Every element of it really appealed to me. And someone showed me a copy of my family newspaper back for a surprise for a birthday party for me, and it had a house ad that said, quote, “We have the best reporters.” and I thought, "Oh my God,” because the best reporters … I was the one reporter. And it's kind of bizarre because that's been my mantra all my life. At the New York Times: We have the best reporters. At STAT: We have the best reporters. It's the same thing I've said since I was a little third grader.

DANNY FUNT: After high school, it was on to the University of Michigan, where — naturally — Rick wrote for the campus daily. After getting a master’s at the Columbia Journalism School, he wrote for the Baltimore Evening Sun. Then, at age 26, Rick was hired to work a night shift at the New York Times’s DC bureau. In time he was promoted to cover politics, from the White House and Congress to the campaign trail, which he did for 17 years.

RICK BERKE: I was at the time the longest, I still think, the longest serving single national political correspondent at the Times.

DANNY FUNT: Then he served two stints as assistant managing editor.

RICK BERKE: I would run the front page meetings I essentially organized the day-to-day coverage

DANNY FUNT: He also became a mentor, trying to bridge generational divides at the Times, which is notorious for its testy office politics.

RICK BERKE: I organized lunches across the newsroom for years with groups of reporters and the executive editor, or other people, or myself, because I thought it was really important to bring people together, especially at an institution like that that didn't always feel friendly. I so believed in the institution and the possibilities that I thought, There's more we can do.

DANNY FUNT: I don’t mean to question the sincerity of Rick’s motives. But he had spent years covering politicians, noting when they seemed to be positioning themselves for a shot at higher office. In a similar vein, it’s hard to hear about Rick’s initiatives at the Times and not wonder if he had his own ambitions.

Given all that, were you ever thinking, maybe I'm on a track to be executive editor?

RICK BERKE: No, I never in a million years coveted or thought I would be executive editor. Never.

DANNY FUNT: That’s not how one of his oldest friends remembers it. Julie Rovner, the accomplished health reporter, has known Rick since nursery school.

JULIE ROVNER: I am one of the last people on earth who can still call him Ricky. … He was always a news hound.

DANNY FUNT: They even went to Michigan together, serving as co-managing editors of the Daily. In 2011, Bill Keller stepped down as top editor of the Times. That job went to:

NEWS CLIP: Jill Abramson, named today to be the executive editor of The New York Times.

DANNY FUNT: Abramson ended up being ousted just a few years later after a rocky tenure. As for Rick’s decision to leave the Times, in 2013:

JULIE ROVNER: My impression was it was a succession issue, and he was not named successor and decided to look elsewhere as often happens.

DANNY FUNT: Rick went to serve as executive editor of Politico, allowing him to move back to D.C. But as excited as he was to finally lead a newsroom, he left after less than a year, frustrated by red tape. Politico, he found out, was just as political as the Times.

So, for basically the first time in his career, Rick was a free agent.

RICK BERKE: I had crossed paths with a guy named Mike Sheehan, who was CEO of the Globe at the time. When I left Politico, I had all these people come and say, "Oh, you're available.” And one of the first calls I got was from Mike Sheehan saying, "I'm here working with John Henry, and he wants to create a life sciences publication. And my reaction was, I don't know anything about life sciences. I don't want to move to Boston. All this, and he said, “Well, you know, he's got a lot of money.”

JACK MURTHA: Your host, Jack Murtha here. Let’s take stock of where we are in this story for a second: Under Rick Berke’s leadership, STAT News has taken on one of biggest companies in healthcare, UnitedHealth Group. But the story began much earlier, in a pretty strange way, with Rick breaking major Cold War news while still in high school. Then he shot up the ranks of The New York Times, Politico, and journalism in general. And then he caught the interest of the billionaire businessman John Henry. Tom Castles, what do you make of this?

TOM CASTLES: Well, one quick thing.

That status quo is there to be challenged. UnitedHealth was considered, in some ways, beyond reproach. That is, until STAT started digging. Healthcare is rife with quote like “untouchable” things that are actually very touchable once you reach out and try. I’m thinking about things like the move away from paper health records, the creation of Medicare, even the rise of physician assistants and nurse practitioners amid these crippling physician shortages. These are all things that at one time seemed impossible, and yet here we are.

JACK MURTHA: And I’d add something to that.

TOM CASTLES: What do you got?

JACK MURTHA: When you f[bleep] with that status quo, a lot of people aren’t going to respond with praise. They’re gonna feel uncomfortable, they’re gonna feel defensive, and they’re gonna be mad. Even your friends—they’re gonna fear for you. The question every healthcare leader needs to answer before they pursue change, is something like this: … How can I make this worth it … for my colleagues, for the people we serve … for me?

TOM CASTLES: You’re listening to Commons Healthcare. Back to Danny Funt and the story of Rick Berke.

JOHN HENRY: Best champagne I’ve ever had.

DANNY FUNT: This is from 2002, when John W. Henry, the founder of an investment management firm, became principal owner of the Boston Red Sox. Two years later, the team overcame a curse that had lasted nearly a century.

ARCHIVAL CLIP: Back to Foulke. Red Sox fans have longed to hear it: The Boston Red Sox are World Champions!

DANNY FUNT: In 2013, John Henry paid $70 million to acquire The Boston Globe from The New York Times Company. With print circulations plummeting and ad spending drying up, many newspapers were in freefall. Twenty years earlier, the Times had bought the Globe for $1.1 billion.

Here’s how he explained his decision at the time to acquire that distressed asset:

JOHN HENRY: I see my role at the Globe as roughly identical to what was needed when we purchased the Red Sox. We knew if we were going to compete with the Yankees we had to substantially increase revenues. The Boston Red Sox didn’t have a curse, and the Globe doesn’t. But if newspapers have a curse, it’s what you would call the secular decline that newspapers are in.

DANNY FUNT: Around this time, a number of other ultra-wealthy people acquired prestigious news outlets. Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post. Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes bought The New Republic. Soon, Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, would acquire The Atlantic, while Patrick Soon-Shiong, a pharma entrepreneur, would buy The Los Angeles Times.

Some people hailed these billionaires as saviors of journalism. Others were more wary. Rick says back then, he was open-minded.

RICK BERKE: With billionaires going into the media, my only opinion is if someone is spending money to produce great journalism, that's great.

DANNY FUNT: He came to Boston to hear what John Henry had in mind.

RICK BERKE: John Henry was prescient in all this. He made the point that in health and medicine, there are trade publications, there are consumer publications like WebMD. There's academic publications. There's high-end publications like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal that aren't wholly focused on health and medicine, but there's nothing quite for people who care deeply and sort of are touched every day by health and medicine, and so we saw this vacuum, and John's whole mantra was: Boston is the epicenter of health and medicine, the world epicenter, and all these stories aren't being covered.

DANNY FUNT: So, the natural thing to do, would be to quadruple their health and science section in the Boston Globe. John did not want to do that. John said, "This is a global publication. This is a reach beyond a regional newspaper.”

So Rick considered John Henry the right person to bankroll STAT News. But why was Rick, who had essentially no experience with healthcare journalism, the right person to lead it?

RICK BERKE: I think you'd have to ask him what sold him on me, if you can. Good luck.

DANNY FUNT: I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask, even though John Henry hasn’t granted an interview request in years. I tried, but I couldn’t get him on the phone.

Anyway, Rick Berke had only one hangup with John Henry’s vision: what the boss wanted to call this new publication.

RICK BERKE: It was Bionomy. … I hated that name. And there were other names that I didn't like, like Medico. … To his credit, Mike Sheehan came up with, you know, months later we came up with STAT, and it was perfect.

DANNY FUNT: STAT News launched in November 2015, aiming to be what it described as “the country's go-to news source for the life sciences.” STAT hired journalists away from outlets like The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Bloomberg. According to Rick, he couldn’t always match what they’d been making. Everyone was taking a gamble.

Casey Ross, the investigative reporter, was an early hire. He’d left the Boston Globe to work for the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, but this seemed worth returning to Massachusetts for.

CASEY ROSS: I ran into one of my old Globe colleagues, and he sort of took me aside and was like, "This isn't gonna work out. I mean, you guys are burning money. … I hope it lasts for a while, but you know, I'm really concerned that this is not going to work out very well for you.” I just … used it as motivation and kind of put it in the back corner of my mind and said, "All right, well, let's see.”

DANNY FUNT: Just a few months after STAT started publishing, one of its reporters discovered something intriguing about Purdue Pharma, the disgraced company whose illegal marketing of a potent pain pill, OxyContin, was widely blamed for helping fuel the country’s deadly opioid epidemic.

Dr. Richard Sackler, Purdue’s former president and a member of its controlling family, had been deposed in 2015 as part of a lawsuit brought by the state of Kentucky. It may be the only time a member of the Sackler family had been questioned under oath about how addictive OxyContin could be and how it had been marketed.

But the deposition, like so many court documents involving Purdue, never saw the light of day. As part of a settlement, Kentucky’s attorney general said he would destroy documents collected in the suit’s discovery phase.

But the STAT reporter, David Armstrong, learned that some copies, including of the deposition, had been preserved — in nine sealed yellow envelopes stored at a small-town courthouse.

RICK BERKE: David Armstrong learned of these sealed documents. He said, "Can I pursue it?” We consulted the lawyers and they said, "You'll probably lose this case, and it'll cost tens of thousands of dollars.” And we were brand new. I thought, really, is that responsible for STAT to take on Purdue Pharma this early in our being? And so I asked John Henry, and he unequivocally said, “Absolutely. Go for it.”

DANNY FUNT: A judge ruled that the public deserved to see the files, but Purdue kept appealing, dragging the fight out over three and a half years. Finally, in August of 2019, the Kentucky Supreme Court sided with STAT News. That cleared the way for the release of the Richard Sackler deposition, along with emails and other internal Purdue documents detailing its overaggressive marketing strategies.

For example, a 1997 email chain showed Purdue responding to Merck Medco, then a top pharmacy benefit manager, which had been cautioning doctors that prescribing OxyContin for chronic pain could lead to abuse.

Richard Sackler wrote that the addiction concern could be quote “obliterated.”

In another email, he said Purdue should draw attention to its lawsuits over patent infringement so that, quote, “We are feared as a tiger with claws, teeth, and balls.”

RICK BERKE: That was a big, impactful effort we made. So, when you talk about legal costs and everything, it's a good reminder to all of us. Not every place has such benevolent owners that understand why we do what we do and are willing to spend the money.

DANNY FUNT: A few weeks after STAT News was finally able to publish the Purdue documents, the publication got another chance to make its mark.

Helen Branswell was one of STAT’s earliest hires. She had worked for nearly 30 years at the Canadian Press, Canada’s AP equivalent, about half of which were devoted to health reporting. The Canadian Press wanted to assign Helen to a new beat, but she had found her calling.

With so few full-time health reporting jobs available in Canada, she was willing to sell her house in Toronto and move to Boston. She brought a wealth of expertise, especially when it came to infectious disease.

HELEN BRANSWELL: You may remember that in 2003, there was the original SARS outbreak, and Toronto was really the only place outside of Asia that got hit very badly. I mean, Toronto had an actual outbreak that got into the hospitals and infected a lot of healthcare workers, The following winter H5N1 bird flu rematerialized after having been sort of off the radar for a few years, and it looked for a number of years like there might be a bad flu pandemic in the making, and so I just spent a lot of time over a lot of years learning about infectious diseases, particularly the kinds that can cause pandemics.

DANNY FUNT: So, early reports of unexplained pneumonias coming out of China caught Helen’s attention before just about any other journalist in North America.

HELEN BRANSWELL: The tweet, which will … when I die, it'll be in my obituary for sure. It's on New Year's Eve of 2019. I read something about what was happening in China, and I tweeted about it and said, "Hopefully this is nothing, but it's giving me SARS flashbacks.”

DANNY FUNT: Two days later, Helen tweeted a South China Morning Post article about the outbreak and added, “Not liking the look of this.”

HELEN BRANSWELL: I started really in essence … writing about what was going on in China and reaching out to people and hearing that it was a probably a coronavirus and it became apparent fairly quickly that this was taking off in a way that looked really bad. I mean, the types of things that China was doing were not things that you do if you have any other choices. You don't lock people into their apartment buildings. You don't build hospitals in a week if you don't think you're going to need them.”

DANNY FUNT: She published her first article about what came to be known as Covid-19 on January 4, 2020.

RICK BERKE: Not only was Helen the first reporter in the U.S. to warn about COVID, we had hundreds of stories. We just covered it nonstop … we had reporters who, for years, had been covering drug development and vaccines and infectious diseases. So they just got to work. We decided immediately to put all these stories in front of the paywall. I don't know if that was a good business decision, but that was driven by our public service mission.

DANNY FUNT: With the paywall down and STAT publishing some of the most insightful reporting on Covid, the site exploded from 1.5 million unique visitors a month to more than 23 million.

To make up for all the lost subscription revenue, STAT began accepting donations. Most ranged between $25 to $150, although:

RICK BERKE: One anonymous donor gave us $100,000.

NEWS CLIP: Moderna says its coronavirus vaccine is almost 95 percent effective. … (Fauci) The results of this trial are truly striking.

Shares of Moderna shot up nearly 10 percent at the market open.

Moderna plans to develop and begin testing vaccines targeting 15 of the world’s most worrisome pathogens by 2025.

DANNY FUNT: STAT News chose Boston for its headquarters precisely so that it would be well-positioned to cover a company like Moderna. The biotech startup was based just across the Charles River, in Cambridge, and after racing out a miracle Covid vaccine, the CEO of Moderna began using a phrase again and again: “This is just the beginning.”

In almost no time, that prediction looked laughable. In fall of 2025, STAT News reporter Jason Mast wrote a captivating inside account of how things had unraveled at Moderna, based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former employees. The company’s market value had plunged $185 billion from its 2021 peak, down to around $10 billion. It should be noted that in the summer of 2026, Moderna’s stock jolted upward after its personalized mRNA vaccine for melanoma reduced the risk of the cancer returning in a phase III clinical trial.

During Covid, Moderna proclaimed that its mRNA technology could transform medicine. It spent like crazy to pursue that, quadrupling its staff, leasing a $1.1 billion headquarters in Cambridge, even hiring the band Maroon 5 for a private concert.

Jason’s story had some other unforgettable details. Like that as things went south, Moderna downgraded the quality of bagels available to manufacturing staff, or that it had stopped offering free canned seltzers at its gleaming headquarters.

RICK BERKE: That was our biggest subscription converter of the year. … It was my example of a perfect STAT story, which is like authority and excellence on the science that no one else had, cool new details that no one had, new business details that you couldn't get anywhere else, and the frame of a compelling narrative. It had all those elements that you don't normally find in many publications.

DANNY FUNT: The Moderna story was different. It was colorful and thorough. It was rooted in deeply held journalistic principles. And, as the influx of new subscribers showed, it turned out there was money in that combination.

On one of the days I visited, STAT published another big profile of a once-ascendant company. I won’t say which, because Rick didn’t want me to mention that within hours of the story appearing online, the company sent a six-page legal threat. Rick seemed totally unfazed.

RICK BERKE: We get intimidated. There’s hectoring going on. You get such threats and intimidation that I just roll my eyes.

DANNY FUNT: STAT once revealed that the TV personality Dr. Phil had a financial stake in a questionable addiction treatment program that he was using his show to promote. Dr. Phil threatened to sue, Rick said. Another investigation found that Sam Isaly, the head of OrbiMed, a powerful biotech hedge fund, had been accused of sexually harassing women. He did sue, but a judge sided with STAT.

For the staff, it’s reassuring to know the editor has their back. Here’s the reporter Bob Herman:

BOB HERMAN: My colleague Tara Bannow and I wrote about this big private equity firm that does a lot in healthcare called Welsh Carson, and they sent these silly cease and desists, like oh, you know, how dare you. … If there's ever a moment where a company comes knocking and they're pissed about some story. Rick will— he will defend us. He will not let that company try to bully us at all.

DANNY FUNT: From the various conversations I had, STAT News sounds like something close to a reporter’s paradise. Yes, these people knew I was profiling their boss, but I heard versions of that again and again, like from Casey Ross:

CASEY ROSS: It’s my favorite journalistic experience that I've had. I've worked in a lot of different newsrooms, and this is by far and away the one where I felt I could really focus on quality work.

DANNY FUNT: Or Elizabeth Cooney, who covers cardiovascular disease:

ELIZABETH COONEY: This job is the best one I've had in my life, and I've been around for a while.

DANNY FUNT: Or Helen Branswell:

HELEN BRANSWELL: He's a phenomenal boss. … He built a very congenial place to work.

DANNY FUNT: Helen and two other STAT reporters, Andrew Joseph and Sharon Begley, went on to be named Pulitzer Prize finalists for their coverage of the pandemic. When I spoke with Helen in September 2026 and she joked that her prescient tweet about Covid would be in her obituary one day, I had no idea that she was battling cancer. She died six weeks later, at age 69.

Her New York Times obituary did, indeed, highlight her Covid tweet. But Helen’s accomplishments went so far beyond that. Rick Berke posted that she had quote “represented the heart and soul of STAT.”

In their Boston newsroom, Helen had sat next to Sharon Begley, another veteran reporter, who died of cancer in 2021. Working at STAT was so rewarding, Helen had told me, in part because it’s so rare nowadays to find an outlet with a sustained commitment to covering health, especially the science behind it.

HELEN BRANSWELL: When there's something big in health, publications amp up their coverage staff, and then when you know the issue sort of dies down, those jobs go away pretty quickly.

DANNY FUNT: STAT does, after all, have a lot of special circumstances going for it: the support of a billionaire owner, an affiliation with one of the country’s few resilient metro newspapers, and a coverage area with a lot of affluent potential readers and advertisers. Rick declined to go into many specifics about the state of STAT’s business, apart from saying it generates tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue and that John Henry has rebuffed multiple inquiries from people interested in buying STAT.

But as to whether its success might show the way for other enterprising journalists, Rick seemed convinced.

RICK BERKE: I absolutely think it could be emulated. I think it's grounded in quality journalism that you can't get anywhere else. … If you have a publication that owns the coverage that people have to read, that’s just singularly focused on that subject, and doing high quality journalism, I think we've shown that you can really be ambitious and go for it.

DANNY FUNT: Getting people to pay for journalism is daunting, especially when a subscription isn’t bundled with puzzles, recipes, and shopping recommendations. The more I thought about how Rick and STAT have pulled that off, the more I wondered if how they approach covering healthcare might offer a lesson for how people who work in healthcare approach their own career.

When STAT was building out its audience, it would have been so easy to pander, especially to the biggest names in the industry: a glowing profile of an executive, a gushing writeup about a new product. But instead, STAT had a clear sense of purpose and stayed true to it at all costs.

Their most valuable asset was their credibility. Even if some powerful companies would love to be able to ignore STAT News they can no longer afford to.

JACK MURTHA: There you have it: the story of Rick Berke. The ethical newsman and the outsider who stormed his way into healthcare, reshaping our very understanding of this industry in the process.

TOM CASTLES: Proving over and over again that it can pay to stick to your principles.

JACK MURTHA: If you like what we’re doing here, please rate, subscribe, and review. Even better, head over to commonshealthcare.com and sign up for our weekly newsletter. That’s called Healthcare People. And find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Threads.

TOM CASTLES: This episode of Commons Healthcare featured archival tape from Bloomberg, CBS News, Fox 11 Los Angeles, the Associated Press, CBS Boston, PBS, Fox, GBH News, Reuters, and ANC 24/7.

JACK MURTHA: Danny Funt reported, wrote, and narrated this episode. Special thanks to him for crushing it and also for traveling to Boston to do the job. And thanks to Joe Steptoe and Anthony Dionne for their great work on audio production.

TOM CASTLES: The Commons Healthcare team is executive producer Christie Chisholm, sound engineer George Steptoe, editor Mark R., and head of growth Wynn Hansen. I’m your host, Tom Castles.

JACK MURTHA: I’m your host, Jack Murtha.

TOM CASTLES: And this is Commons Healthcare. See you next time.

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