About Healthbeat

Healthbeat is a team at Civic News Company and KFF Health News working to report the story of public health in America. It's an essential story for these skeptical times, when people need reliable coverage of the safety net our public health system is supposed to provide.

We will cover the news around the systems of prevention - infectious diseases for sure, but also air and water quality, food safety and the research in a quest for breakthroughs to shore up our collective well-being.

Think of our reporting as a community health forecast.

Public health is grounded in data and science. It's often described as invisible, but it touches all our lives.

We will work to connect the dots among all the players - nurses and other front-line healthcare workers, government agencies, community organizations, social workers, schools, businesses and others - working to make sure communities have what they need to stay healthy.

We are starting with bureaus in New York City and Atlanta - supported by national reporting from KFF Health News - with a third location to come next year. To nominate your community, email us at expansion@civicnews.org.

We are launching with multi-year support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and support from Katelyn Jetelina, founder of Your Local Epidemiologist.

Our reporting will be guided by what we hear from you. Tell us how the public health system is working for you. Where is it failing? What solutions do you see? Whose voices are being left out of the conversation? Email us at contact@healthbeat.org.

We'll share your stories and work to get answers.

As with all our Civic News Company newsrooms — Chalkbeat and Votebeat — our stories will be available for republication under a Creative Commons license.

We're building Healthbeat to help everyone understand how the public health system works so we can all work to make it better.