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Silberner inducted into hometown hall of fame
June 17, 2011
Artist in Residence Joanne Silberner is an accomplished journalist who has worked as a health policy correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR) for 18 years. She has traveled all over the world covering stories concerning mental health, neglected diseases, the Food and Drug Administration, and medical and health policy issues. This October, she will return to her hometown of Livingston, New Jersey, to be inducted into the Livingston Hall of Fame.
“It’s pretty exciting. Livingston’s a great town, so I’m pretty proud,” said Silberner. This fall, she’ll meet with high school students and teach them a few things about journalism. She’ll also attend the fundraising dinner, hosted by the Livingston Education Foundation, as a guest of honor, along with four other inductees.
What some people don’t know, is that Silberner wouldn’t be a journalist today if a course catalog had been up to date. In fact, she said, “it was a complete accident,” that she stumbled into the world of journalism.
As an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University, Silberner majored in biology. In the midst of her studies, she thought it would be nice to experience a school on the West Coast. “Baltimore is a pretty gritty city, and I had friends going to school in beautiful places, and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t that be fun?’” she said. So, she applied and was accepted into the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she planned on spending one quarter immersed in their scientific offerings.
Before making her trip across the country, Silberner spent some time at the library going through UC, Santa Cruz course catalogs to choose her classes. She had picked out a course about the study of mosses and fungi, another in endocrinology, and for her third course she would be characterizing the flora and fauna of a strip of land. “I was really excited!” she exclaimed.
Once situated in Santa Cruz, it came time to register. Much to her dismay, Silberner learned that the courses she had chosen weren’t being offered anymore. “I had been looking at a two-year-old course catalog! It wasn’t like the internet where everything is current,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh, my god. What am I going to do?’”
Two nights before classes began, Silberner found herself scouring the pages of the current course catalog for new choices when she came across a science writing course. She thought she would give it a try.
Thanks to the encouragement of her professor in that course, Silberner completed her quarter at UC, Santa Cruz with a new outlook on her career. She then returned to Johns Hopkins and completed her BA in biology in 1977.
Silberner worked at a number of internships after graduation; her first in endocrinology, where she witnessed a professor lose a grant for a study he was conducting. “I thought, ‘Well, I don’t want that to happen to me,’” she said.
Deciding it would be a good idea to get more training in journalism, she attended Columbia University, where she earned her master’s degree in journalism in 1979.
“I had every intention of being a scientist,” Silberner said. “I wanted to work in endocrinology and get a Ph.D. in the study of hormones. But it was going to a school that wasn’t giving the courses I wanted, and taking, as a last-minute choice, a course and having a very encouraging and very good professor,” that steered her toward journalism.
Once she graduated from Columbia, Silberner worked at the small magazine, Science News, for five years after serving a short stint as an intern. “I just kept coming into work after that. Nobody’s going to turn down free labor,” she said. “They gave up and hired me.” Then she moved on to U.S. News & World Report and, after that, NPR as a health policy correspondent.
She’s covered hundreds of stories in her time at NPR.
In 1997, Silberner worked on a year-long report on the closing of the Haverford State Hospital, outside Philadelphia. She tracked three patients throughout the process, asking why they were in the hospital, how they might handle leaving, and where they would go after the closing. She still keeps in touch with them.
She also remembers trekking though the Amazon to do a health study — and how she almost didn’t make it through that journey.
The goal was to walk the trail of a road under construction, take note of how many people were sick with malaria, and then come back when it was complete to see if there had been any improvement in health. Silberner said, “There had been a study showing that malaria had actually decreased when they put in a road in another part of Peru, because the water runoff from the road had oil slicks in it and the mosquitos that carry malaria couldn’t use the water for breeding.”
Along with a group of scientists, she began the walk, but a little over a mile into the trail, downed trees, cut to prepare for construction, were blocking the roadway. “It was like pick-up sticks. We were climbing over them. Plus, these five-year-old stumps were coming up in between them,” she said.
Compounded with the heat and humidity, the hike nearly knocked her out. “At one point I just lay flat out on the floor of the jungle saying, ‘Just leave me!’” she said. When one more person dropped, the group decided it would be a better idea to go to the tributary and hail a boat. “They had just gotten cell phone service in the area, so we called a water taxi – in the middle of the Amazon.”
Teaching part-time in the UW Department of Communication has been a change of pace for Silberner, and she said she enjoys interacting with her colleagues and students. She’s given guest lectures before but, until she came to the Department, she’d never had an entire quarter with students. “This is the first time,” she said, “with 20 people looking at me waiting for me to tell them something they need to know.”
For her first course, Advanced Reporting and Writing, she co-taught with Roger Simpson, “which was wonderful for me because he’s such a master teacher.” She also co-taught Global Health Reporting with Jim Simon, assistant managing editor at The Seattle Times. “That was really fun because he knows everybody,” she said.
In the health reporting course, Silberner sent her students into Seattle to give them hands-on experience. “There are so many immigrant communities, and you’re in a place where the people don’t speak the same language. They may not trust you culturally, and you may not understand their culture,” she said. “It was really great being able to teach them about issues and send them out to actually report locally.”
When she’s not working on her communication courses, Silberner keeps busy with her assignments from NPR, The World, a Public Radio International (PRI) show, and print stories. Next winter, she plans to work on a PRI series about health in the developing world.
“What I really love is reporting. It’s such a privilege to go into people’s worlds and ask them, ‘What happened to you? What are you doing? Why are you doing what you’re doing?’” she said. “I would do it probably even if I didn’t have a microphone or pen and pad with me.”
