Gaylord Hosts Physician Journalist in Partnership With the Pulitzer Center

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A pediatric physician in the final months of his residency and an award-winning journalist, Eli Cahahn argues that student journalists need to learn how to write like he did—by writing obituaries.  

That’s how the Pulitzer Center grantee cut his teeth on a writing career with The Rolling Stone and ABC Nightline, among others: by interviewing grief stricken families of health care workers who had died during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cahan, 32, who began reporting while in graduate school at Stanford University, encouraged students to look beyond the surface level in health care.

His first stories for The Guardian about restoring agency to those who were lost caring for others was, “the best J-school I could have had,” he told University of Oklahoma Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication students.

For students, his visit provided crucial advice over how to approach reporting about healthcare. Throughout his time in the classroom, Cahan emphasized the importance of asking 'why.'

• Why are there certain demographics that are more likely to appear in public hospitals?
• Why are suicide rates in some jails as compared to others?
• Why does this information matter?

These questions, and others, challenged students to think beyond the common healthcare questions posed by reporters.

But Cahan’s visit did not just appeal to journalism students. He also sat in on a human relations class dealing with war and gender. In this class, Cahan spoke to the disparities he observed between the statistics and his own lived experience, specifically as it ties to the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine.

For outsiders to the conflict, Cahan explained that the question 'What, if anything, could be useful for me to contribute to this conversation?' is a more productive way of looking at the conflict as a whole.

As for data, Cahan recommended that students examine the language of their data. Meaning, what are the units, absolutes, or rates contained in their dataset, and how does this language affect the outcome of the data. “All of this data conveys a different message,” he added.

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For example, police and first responders fill out forms for every response. Obtaining one of those forms can sometimes offer a key to a larger story.  “Just sending the blank form, the template, can help to identify what data even exists,” he said. “And they're less likely to say no to giving the blank form,” responded Gaylord Professor John Schmeltzer.

Throughout the day, Cahan answered questions of several Gaylord students and gave advice on how to approach work in the future.

To Graham Dowers, a Gaylord senior currently working on a dataset from the Russia-Ukraine War, Cahan recommended he think about what he actually want to communicate with his data: "You need to think, ‘Do I want to communicate relative risk… or do I want people, in broad strokes, to understand this way more complicated issue.'”

Throughout his time at Gaylord, Cahan explained his journalism work in terms of his experience as a pediatrician. His experience working in the pediatric ICU showed him that that low income and migrant communities faced more respiratory diseases because of their public housing. “I often see the product of immigration manifest in illness,” he said.

Although this visit was short, students and staff remain impacted by Cahan’s perspective. This event offered valuable insight into an issue that affects Oklahoma and the entire world and gave students new ideas of how to approach their current work.