Staff Member Honored for Health Journalism.
Lisa Chedekel, senior writer and media director in the communications department, was honored by the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame (CWHF) on November 2.
The 23rd Annual Induction Ceremony & Celebration was titled “Women’s Wellness: Awareness, Advocacy & Action.” Around 1,000 people attended the event, including Connecticut’s governor, senators, and representatives.
Three Connecticut women were inducted into the Hall of Fame at the ceremony: Rebecca Lobo, Olympic gold medalist and advocate for breast cancer awareness and research; Jane Pauley, broadcast journalist and advocate for children’s health; and the late Joyce Yerwood, first African American woman physician in Fairfield County and a pioneer in drug treatment programs.
Chedekel was one of 11 Women’s Wellness honorees at the ceremony. She was recognized with Lynne DeLucia as co-founders of the Connecticut Health Investigative Team (C-HIT), one of the nation’s only women-run nonprofit news sites.
“Use your words,” Chedekel said in her speech, in which each honoree was asked to come up with advice for women to improve their well-being. “Words have the power to expand the space you occupy in the world. Challenge bad decisions. Speak truth to power. Say ‘I love you’ to your kids. Don’t leave your best material in your notebook.”
Both part of a 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning team from the Hartford Courant, Chedekel and DeLucia founded C-HIT in 2010 as a nonprofit news service to provide in-depth stories on health and safety. C-HIT content is now distributed to more than 1.2 million readers through unique media partnerships. C-HIT also runs summer journalism bootcamps for high school students at Yale University and the University of Connecticut, and sponsors free community forums on women’s health issues.
Chedekel, who continues to be involved with C-HIT part-time, has previously received a George Polk Award, the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting, and was a 2007 finalist for a second Pulitzer in Investigative Reporting for a series on mental health in the military.
“Health journalism will always be my passion, whether it’s working with media at SPH to promote our research or doing some of my own reporting on the side,” Chedekel says.
“If we’re going to keep public health on the front burner in the months and years ahead, journalists and researchers are going to have to work closely together, in new and creative ways. I’m excited to be part of that.”