SoJ Web Report | Feb. 20, 2012
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| Courtesy California Watch |
| Christina Jewett, BAJ'02, is one of a team of reporters to win a George Polk Award. She works at California Watch. |
Jewett and colleagues at California Watch, a nonprofit investigative reporting group, produced a yearlong series of articles that demonstrated how a California hospital chain increased its Medicare reimbursements by classifying patients as suffering from rare medical conditions, according to a press release from Long Island University, where the Polk award program is based.
The stories appeared in newspapers across California and offered a glimpse into the broader problem of waste, fraud and abuse within the nation’s $2.5 trillion health care system. Using a computer-assisted data program, the reporters sorted through more than 2,500 pages of legal filings and examined more than 51 million patient records of hospital and emergency room visits.
Jewett said she was especially proud of this piece, which she worked on with colleague Stephen K. Doig, that examined medical chain’s “aggressive” billing for treatment of rare and high-risk illnesses.
Jewett credits many of her School of Journalism experiences in preparing her for her work. From the first day of freshman year, she worked at the Indiana Daily Student, eventually serving as editor-in-chief. She understood the importance of internships, too.
“I interned sophomore year at the Times of Northwest Indiana, after junior year at the St. Petersburg Times and after senior year at The Washington Post,” she said in an email. “I probably would not have had my amazing first job at the Sacramento Bee if not for the great boost that I got working for the IDS and getting those internships.”
When she came to IU, Jewett planned to major in education. Sophomore year, IU student media director Dave Adams encouraged her to pursue journalism, she said of her late mentor who died in 2007. The day the Polk awards were announced, she said she wished she could have picked up the phone and thanked Adams for his part in her success.
The George Polk Awards in Journalism honor investigative and enterprise reporting. The program was established in 1949 by Long Island University in honor of George Polk, a CBS correspondent murdered in 1948 while covering the Greek civil war. The awards will be presented in New York April 5.
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