Health Reporter
Jess Mador is WABE’s Health Reporter. She follows public health issues, health policy and health disparities and explores their impacts on people and communities across the Atlanta area and beyond. In this role, she also participates in the National Health Reporting Partnership between NPR and KFF Health News. Her stories can also be found at NPR News and at KFF Health News, through a partnership with NPR and public radio stations around the country. Mador is a 2024 Reporting Fellow with the Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ).
Mador’s prior public radio and multimedia journalism work has taken her around the country. She is very happy to have landed in Atlanta! She joined WABE after a stint producing podcasts for Georgia Public Broadcasting. And she relocated to Atlanta from Ohio Public Radio station WYSO, where she worked as a regional reporter, engagement producer and newsroom editor.
Mador has been a regular contributor to West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia podcast. She has reported stories for the nonprofit news outlet 100 Days in Appalachia, including a series tracing the impacts of opioids and Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome on families and communities in East Tennessee.
She created TruckBeat, an independent health journalism project at Knoxville Public Radio station WUOT, part of AIR’s national Localore engagement initiative. Her TruckBeat audio and video stories focused on health disparities, documenting efforts to improve community health and address the region’s addiction and mental health crisis.
Previously, Mador was a reporter at Minnesota Public Radio based in the Twin Cities, where she covered daily news, housing issues, military veterans and more.
Her background also includes time in the commercial film industry and in PBS television, where she worked on programs for Oregon Public Broadcasting, PBS station Thirteen, and for TV journalist Bill Moyers. She first got hooked on public radio as a news intern at New York Public Radio station WNYC.
Mador’s stories have won many awards, including one in 2017 from the Online Journalism Awards, the only comprehensive set of journalism prizes honoring excellence in digital journalism around the world.
She has a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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