Tom Koch’s vision for public health

By Doug Meigs, IRE & NICAR

Journalist and scholar Tom Koch built his career writing at the intersection of public health and social justice.

Now, the longtime IRE member is helping a new generation of public health reporters and journalists working with disabilities. Koch himself has low vision, and he had to fight for fair working conditions as a newspaper reporter.

“There is a crying need for us to spend more attention to issues of public health and welfare and disease studies than most have been able to do to this point,” said Koch, 75, a Canadian American. “There are important stories in health and in disability where good news and good technique can make real change – especially with mapping and data.”

Recognizing that cutbacks in the industry have led to a lack of resources for covering public health and disability issues, Koch has worked with IRE to set up the Koch Continuum Grant in Public Health and Disability Investigative Reporting. The deadline to apply for a grant is April 6. His hope is that this is just the start of broader support for specialized reporting on these vital topics. To contribute to the fund, go to ire.org/donate.

“This is work worth doing,” Koch said. “My hope is that we can support individuals seeking out the stories that need to be told, the voices that need to be heard, and get them the public recognition they deserve.”

Koch’s fields of expertise include disease mapping, gerontology and bioethics. His prolific work spans newspapers, magazines, broadcasting, academic articles and books. He is currently an adjunct professor of medical geography at the University of British Columbia and director of a Toronto-based consulting research firm, Information Outreach, Ltd.

His latest book, “Seeking Medicine’s Moral Centre,” was just published by Ethics Press in January and focuses on ethics, bioethics and assisted dying, also known as medical termination (MAiD). 

Koch began working in journalism as a freelancer in the 1960s, while studying at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. He sold photos and stories from his travels south of the U.S. border.

“My job was to report and not engage,” Koch recalled. “My model was Levi Strauss, the anthropologist, who talked about the disengaged field researcher. But I soon learned it wasn’t that simple. I was engaged, and troubled, when photographing, writing and assisting at a clinic in Guatemala in 1970 during an unofficial civil war where medicine was embedded in a culture in violent disarray. 

“It is still the only country where I was shot at on one day by both government troops and revolutionaries,” he said.

One year after graduation, he found his first full-time newspaper job. He soon also discovered a niche covering disease and public health issues.

Then an editor in the 1980s told Koch about an annual gathering of like-minded journalists. That’s how he joined IRE and attended his first IRE Conference. His newspaper didn’t have an investigative desk, but he was doing that work. Koch said his reporting changed health policies in British Columbia and across North America.

When his eyesight began to decline, his life turned upside down. All the important policy-shaping reporting he had accomplished did not seem to matter anymore.

“I lost my career as a daily news man because of my vision,” Koch said. “They wanted to put me on permanent disability leave because I couldn’t use their computers. But the problem wasn’t me, it was the computers.”

He filed a workplace grievance against the newspaper and won. “It cost them about $350,000 to upgrade the lighting and computers in two newsrooms, and set the first standard for ergonomics within newsrooms in North America,” he said.

When the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation offered him a job covering the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, he was happy to accept. But another major career change was in store. After the Olympics assignment ended, he got a call from his brother in New York – there were complications from their father’s hip surgery. 

Koch suddenly found himself in a caregiver role. The experience inspired his interest in ethics and writing on gerontology, including his 1990 book, “Mirrored Lives: Aging Children and Elderly Parents.” 

In the 1990s, Koch worked as a research associate in bioethics at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. He completed an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in medicine, ethics and geography at the University of British Columbia in 2000, writing about euthanasia and organ transplant policy.

Throughout this time, his commitment to journalism persisted. Praising his first book on the news industry in 1990, The IRE Journal described “The News as Myth: Fact and Context in Journalism” as iconoclastic and “definitely worth reading.” In 1991, he published the first book on news and public information online, “Journalism for the 21st Century.” In the mid-1990s, he lectured widely on journalism. He even taught the first data journalism program at the European Journalism Centre, Maastricht, The Netherlands.

Koch’s book publication schedule accelerated in subsequent years. Among others, there was “The Wreck of the William Brown: A True Tale of Overcrowded Lifeboats and Murder at Sea” (2004), a historical exploration of “lifeboat ethics,” along with his books on GIS mapping, “Cartographies of Disease: Maps, Mapping, and Medicine” (2005) and “Ethics in Everyday Places” (2017).

He has published more than a dozen books.

Looking back on his career, Koch is especially proud of his work that bridged academic research and journalism that led to tangible change in government policy, such as his work on anesthetic disconnects for Posey restraint vests, the laws surrounding graft organ transplantation, food-borne illness in British Columbia and New York school funding inequality. Koch said the COVID-19 pandemic only further emphasized the importance of this interdisciplinary approach to public health journalism.  

“I’ve been misfortunate in losing my career, and fortunate in being able to create a new one,” Koch said. “It’s not about us. It’s about the work we do as the bridge between the academic, the political and the real. That’s where we should be.”

“For a newsie, the way you win is not the awards,” he added. “It’s how many policies and programs you can change. That’s really what the game should be doing, and that’s what I’m hoping the Continuum will support.”