News Reporting and Writing

Sarah Varney is a Nieman fellow at Harvard University and a special correspondent for PBS NewsHour who focuses on reproductive and sexual health care and racial and ethnic health disparities. Reporting from around the country, she works across platforms, and regularly produces feature-length segments for both PBS NewsHour and NPR. Her stories have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and the Los Angeles Times. Since the end of federal abortion rights in the US, she has chronicled the seismic fallout on medical care and documenting what lies ahead for women's rights. Her Guardian series on India's booming opioid market won the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing (SABEW) international reporting award, and her New York Times story on the Affordable Care Act's benefits for victims of gun violence won the top newspaper award from the National Association of Black Journalists. Previously, Varney established the health beat for San Francisco-based NPR station KQED and its statewide news program "The California Report," shaping coverage to include the connections between economic and social conditions and disease. That work won dozens of awards from the Association of Health Care Journalists and the Society of Professional Journalists.