When teenaged Fabiana Cambricoli applied to the University of São Paulo, she was troubled by the social inequality she saw around her, and she wanted a profession that would let her understand people better and help those who needed it most. She believed that by pursuing journalism, she could uncover and bring awareness to societal issues.
After getting a degree in journalism from the University of São Paulo, she worked for a while as a communications assistant for a human rights nonprofit before landing a job as a general reporter at a local news outlet in São Paulo. She began covering issues within Brazil’s healthcare system, exposing extreme overcrowding in emergency rooms, delays in medication delivery to homebound patients, and other serious problems.
That’s when Cambricoli fell in love with health journalism. She completed a master’s degree in public health and has been working as a health journalist for over a decade. She has reported on topics such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the Zika virus outbreaks in Latin America, and the Venezuelan migration crisis in Brazil. She’s now on leave from her role as a senior health correspondent for the Brazilian newspaper Estadão and spending the year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism (KSJ) Fellow.
I spoke with Fabiana about contrasts between health journalism in Brazil and in the U.S., writing about sensitive topics, and her career goals. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Paulina Rowińska: Why did you decide to come to KSJ?
Fabiana Cambricoli: I’m here to think about new ways to tell my health and science stories, new formats, how to attract an audience, how to fight misinformation. It was like a dream to have this time to study and train, and also have the opportunity to live here in Cambridge.
Last fall, I attended some events at the Cambridge Science Festival and I was like, oh, my God, this city breathes science and education. It’s so rewarding. It’s so inspiring to see everything happening here and to have the opportunity to study in top universities like Harvard and MIT that for us in Brazil would be very difficult to pay a tuition fee for. It would be almost impossible. And to have access to all the experts and to all other science journalists.
PR: Is there any difference between the way journalism, and especially science journalism, is done in Brazil versus here?
FC: Probably because the United States has more funding and investment for journalism and science, there are more media outlets specialized in health and science here and greater coverage of these topics in major news outlets. In Brazil, it’s not so common for every newspaper or outlet to have a science or health reporter. Sometimes there are journalists who do different beats. And here in US, usually, the big newsrooms have more than one science journalist. Sometimes they also cover different beats in science, like chemistry, physics, mathematics. Within health coverage, some outlets have journalists covering different topics, like global health , infectious disease.… We don’t have these in Brazil, unfortunately. It’s so uncommon. So I think here the main difference is that they have a greater variety of outlets and different beats being well covered.
I also have the impression that in many outlets in the US you have a more critical coverage of science. In Brazil, among so much scientific misinformation, health and science journalists often feel compelled to defend science and the scientific method and sometimes hesitate to critically examine scientists’ work. [KSJ Director Deborah Blum] has something that she says that I really love: We as science journalists don’t have to be cheerleaders for scientists. We have to make [them] accountable. So sometimes I think that some pieces of science journalism in Brazil are like we were being cheerleaders.
PR: You write about really tough topics. I’ve read your articles about children’s suicide, and they are heartbreaking. How can reporters protect their own mental health while covering such difficult stories?
FC: First, be empathetic and responsible with your sources so you feel that you could do something good for society and for the sources. Second, take care of your mental health, and this includes going to a therapist or psychiatrist , if necessary. And a third thing that I would like to mention is something that maybe I found out just in the last few years: You have to have time for things not related to journalism. Because in our profession it’s very common that you think that you have to live as a reporter 24/7. You have also the pressure for breaking news scoops, and you think that you have to be alert all the time, read all the news. And this is not good.
We need to exercise, to do something fun, to learn a new thing, not related to journalism. It’s also good for our brain and probably would make us better journalists as well.
PR: What are your hopes for after the program? What do you think you’ll take away from this experience? How will this year impact you?
FC: I’m very interested in cognition and mental health issues, so I aim to really broaden my knowledge about these topics, to become more of an expert. I’m taking cognitive neuroscience courses, psychological science courses. I think that knowing more about the mechanisms of our brains is going to help me not just in my project about the impact of technology on mental health and cognition but also in other coverage.
Also, I want to bring to Brazil a more science-based coverage of these issues because everyone thinks that they know things about mental health, right? So that’s one of the main difficulties of taking care of patients, because sometimes if you tell someone, ‘I’m struggling with mental health issues,’ someone is going to give you some recipe for what to do. If you have cancer or some other disease, probably the person that you talk to is going to say, ‘Look for a doctor,’ right? But in mental health issues, it’s not like that.
The second thing is to improve my knowledge as a storyteller and multimedia journalist. Because we really need to find new ways to tell our stories, to capture the attention of our readers, our audience. And that’s why I’m taking documentary courses and reading a lot of pieces of health journalism that have been done here in the US and have inspired me to do more critical coverage.
I think having this time away from the newsroom is going to also be a possibility for my creativity to flourish — for me to think about new ways of working as a journalist.
And I hope to be a better journalist when I come back to Brazil. To have more tools and resources, to produce deeper, more meaningful coverage.
Paulina Rowińska is a student in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing.
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