‘Journalism Is Expensive’: Harvard Public Health Magazine Closes After Financial Struggles

More than a decade after its launch, the Harvard Public Health Magazine announced on Monday that the publication has shut down after struggling to turn a profit.

The magazine, which is owned by Harvard’s School of Public Health, primarily published work from freelance journalists. Michael F. Fitzgerald, the editor-in-chief who previously worked at The Boston Globe, announced the closure in a letter on the website.

“Journalism is expensive and outside of a university’s core mission of teaching and research,” he wrote. “It takes time to build revenue streams, and we ran out of time.”

In an interview, Fitzgerald said he was first told that the publication would shut down in early January, adding that writers were allowed to finish their existing projects before the official closure.

‘They basically said to us, ‘We are not to going to pull the site down,’” he said. “‘You can keep publishing the things that we have in house — don’t assign new stories, because you shouldn't be spending money.’”

Stephanie Simon, Dean for Communications and Strategic Initiatives at HSPH, said that although the magazine “was doing a really, truly exceptional job,” its work “was not core to the school's mission of research and education.”

“That ended up being a place where we decided we could save,” Simon added.

Along with the closure, Simon said that four positions affiliated with the magazine were eliminated, and three employees were laid off.

Fitzgerald said he established the magazine to examine public health solutions in an “institutionally agnostic way.”

“The work that we were doing was looking for public health solutions — meaning things that could improve health outcomes for specific communities and covering what ideas seem to work,” he said.

Fitzgerald added that he viewed the HPH as the “Harvard Business Review, but for public health.”

“We had done a lot of good things to try to execute that,” he said. “We built up a certain kind of audience, and we needed it to be bigger.”

The magazine published two times a week on its website, according to the Association of Health Care Journalists, and released print editions three times a year. Fitzgerald said that the magazine pivoted to publishing the majority of its content online as a cost-saving measure.

“Paper costs during the pandemic soared. Postage costs went up sharply,” Fitzgerald said. “By moving away from print, it gave us more money to put into freelancing.”

Fitzgerald said that the publication was “too small to be easily economically viable,” adding that the magazine “had to do a little pivot” after their launch.

“I don’t think we got this right out of the gate,” he said. “But I felt like we had done some stuff that was really meaningful.”

The magazine has recently published issues on indigenous displacement, reforming global aid work, and structural racism in the healthcare system. Their coverage spans opinion pieces, investigations, and analysis work.

Going forward, the magazine’s website will be archived, and Simon said that HSPH still aims to distribute public health news.

“We do press releases about research that goes on. We have videos featuring faculty and students,” Simon said. “We are certainly trying to keep the public informed about developments in science and public health, as well as solutions and ideas that our faculty come up with.”

—Staff writer Kaitlyn Y. Choi can be reached at kaitlyn.choi@thecrimson.com.

—Staff writer Sohum M. Sukhatankar can be reached at sohum.sukhatankar@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @ssukhatankar06.