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yanickYanick Rice Lamb’s mission is to give voice to the voiceless and share the gift of knowledge through the written word. An award-winning journalist and author, Yanick has had an impressive career. She is associate publisher and editorial director of Heart & Soul, the health and fitness bible for black women, with a readership of 1.5 million. She also shares her expertise at Howard University, where she is an associate professor, coordinator of the Print/Online Journalism Sequence and adviser to 101 Magazine.

She was also at the helm of Heart & Soul under Vanguarde Media Inc. and the BET Publishing Group, where she was a vice president and editorial director following her success as founding editor of BET Weekend. Her editorial vision led to BET Weekend becoming the second-largest publication targeted to African Americans. Under her leadership, the publication’s circulation increased nearly 40 percent, from 800,000 to 1.3 million in just three years. She was also an editor-at-large at Essence and a contributing editor for Emerge.

Previously, Yanick worked for the New York Times Company for 10 years in various newspaper roles, including assistant style editor, deputy home and living editor, assistant editor of Connecticut Weekly, metropolitan copy editor and a layout editor on the news desk and senior editor at Child magazine. She was also a copy editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a reporter at The Toledo Blade. Yanick and her staffs have won numerous editorial and design awards, including a Folio: Editorial Excellence Award and five Salute to Excellence Awards from the National Association of Black Journalists. Her individual honors include a McDonald’s Black History Maker of Today Award in Journalism, a Health Performance Fellowship from the Association of Health Care Journalists and the Commonwealth Fund, a Cancer Issues Fellowship from the National Press Foundation, a Knight Digital Media Center fellowship and an entrepreneurial fellowship from UNITY Journalists of Color and the Ford Foundation to launch Fully-Connected.com. Lamb is also a former president of the New York Association of Black Journalists.

Yanick is co-author of Born to Win: The Authorized Biography of Althea Gibson (Wiley 2004), Rise & Fly: Tall Tales and Mostly True Rules of Bid Whist (Random House/Crown, 2005) and The Spirit of African Design (Clarkson/Potter, 1996). She was a contributor to Aunties: 35 Writers Celebrate Their Other Mother (Ballantine Books, 2004); Health & Healing for African-Americans (Rodale, 1997); and Sisterfriend Soul Journeys (PromoTrends, 2000). She is completing her debut novel, Nursing Wounds.

A native of Akron, Ohio, Yanick holds a bachelor’s in journalism from Ohio State University and a master’s in business administration from Howard University.

Yanick Rice Lamb’s mission is to give

Senior Fellow Liz Seegert is a healthcare journalist, writer, and consultant with a focus on social and human welfare.

This time of the year inevitably generates a plethora of “top 10” lists – the media’s bid to condense and summarize the “best of” or “worst of” [insert your topic here]. Health care, of course, is no different. A quick Google search of “top 10 health stories 2011” yielded a staggering two million plus results.  Let’s get serious, folks.

Can there really be only ten health stories that are worthy enough to talk about? Or just one that rises to the top? Lists like these are so subjective.  Boiling down this tumultuous year in the world of health into less than a dozen highlights all depends on perspective.

WebMD points to the changes in the food pyramid as a key issue, as well as changes in prostate cancer screeing guidelines and the widespread listeria outbreak from contaminated canteloupes. Fox News leaned more towards the sensational – asking if multivitamins were killing us, touting the ability to turn brown eyes blue with a laser, and reporting that baby shampoo may be toxic. Nothing like scaring millions of parents in one fell swoop.

The Atlantic Magazine focused on controversies – do cell phones harm people or not? Is coffee/red wine/chocolate good or bad for you? What about prostate exams? Or the fiery reaction provoked by HHS Secretary Sebelius’ decision to overturn the FDA’s proposal allowing the morning-after contraceptive Plan B to be sold over the counter? How about the links between autism and vaccines?

If you’re more of a policy wonk, then maybe your pick is the administration’s recent decision to allow states to determine minimum insurance benefits under health reform. Boston.com stretched their list to 15 top stories – including the full first face transplant, the resignation of Don Berwick, and a new way to look at the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.  If you’re a baby boomer, then perhaps 50+ Magazine’s selections are more your speed – suicide prevention, stem cells, and Steve Jobs’s death were all high on this list.

Of course, this pre-election season could not go by without the candidates weighing in. Like when Michelle Bachman claimed that vaccines causes mental retardation. Or Mitt Romney tried to distance himself from his own Health Reform initiative when he was governor of Massachusetts. Newt Gingrich seemed to play both sides, as Salon magazine pointed out last week, while Ron Paul remained consistent in his libertarian views about the free market being the best option to control health costs.

However, perhaps the most chilling story that appeared on list after list is the growing childhood obesity epidemic in this country. As long as fast food chains, junk food, and soda manufacturers are allowed to aggressively market to children, it is unfortunately going to continue to be a top story well beyond 2012.  If this problem isn’t brought under control soon, none of these other health stories will really matter.

Liz Seegert

Senior Fellow Liz Seegert is a healthcare

Angilee Shah’s Career GPS blog for ReportingonHealth.org  interviewed Senior Fellow James Stubenrauch, who co-taught the first narrative writing course to students in the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing along with CHMP Senior Fellow and Poet-in-Residence Joy Jacobson. Her post, Why Health Care Professionals Should Write, addresses the reasons and benefits of writing for health professionals. Jim’s quote “”It’s part of a self-care strategy as well as making a better provider out of whoever does this kind of work,” he told Career GPS. “What I’m trying to do in this course is give people permission to get their own voices in the room and down on paper.”  Archived posts on Narrative Writing can be found here.

Reporting on Health is a project of USC Annenberg’s California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships.

Angilee Shah's Career GPS blog for ReportingonHealth.org