FELICE J.
FREYER
Health care journalist
About me
I've been a health care reporter for most of my career. As a staff writer at the Boston Globe and, before that, the Providence Journal, I’ve covered all aspects of health care and medicine. I get the facts right. I meet deadlines. And I write with grace and clarity about topics both deeply human and highly technical.
I love the health care beat because it encompasses everything that matters: science, politics, education, society, economics, social justice -- indeed, life and death.
Early in my career, I chronicled the final months of a man with ALS who crusaded for the right to physician-assisted suicide but who in the end, even while bedbound, just wanted
to keep living. More recently, I explored the opposite paradox: People whose lives were extended by a revolutionary drug for cystic fibrosis, and yet who found that sadness and anxiety accompanied the joy of newfound health.
As the opioid crisis was unfolding in Massachusetts, I showed how opioids destroyed lives, but also how fear of opioids was harming people with chronic pain. In a nine-part series, I revealed the failures of addiction treatment and showed how some people nevertheless find their path to recovery. When the pandemic struck, I embedded at a
hospital coping with the crisis, followed a Boston woman’s slow progress from ICU to home, and exposed the plight of those with “long covid.”
I've won a number of awards over the years, most notably being named "Master Reporter" by the New England Association of Newspaper Editors and being a member of team whose work was finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.
My commitment to the craft extends to my long involvement with the Association of Health Care Journalists. I've been AHCJ president since 2021, having joined its Board of Directors in 2009. AHCJ is the world's largest organization of health care journalists with a mission of elevating the quality of the work we do.
I left the Globe in April 2024 to pursue a freelance career and devote more time to teaching. But I remain what I've always been: a journalist who loves covering health care.
Teaching
As an affiliated faculty member at Emerson College since 2019, I have developed and taught these courses:
Feature Writing
Students learn the literary and narrative techniques that underlie compelling feature stories. They study the work of masters and award winners, and get to interview them during several guest speaker appearances. They practice the skills of storytelling, description, and explanation, writing several small features. And throughout the semester students work on a major longform story, a project that encourages them to dig deep as reporters and spread their wings as writers.
Health Care Journalism
This course prepares students to cover the health care stories they will inevitably encounter as reporters. They learn to write responsibly about medical research, to understand the role of social determinants of health, and to recognize and combat misinformation. Students get an overview of institutions and professions but most importantly they learn what questions to ask and where to go for answers when covering the complexities of health care in America.