Q2 Media Minds Roundtable Event – From Newsroom to Newsletter: Why Healthcare’s Top Journalists Are Going Independent

​Liz Kelly Nelson is dedicated to helping independent journalists and media creators build sustainable careers in a rapidly evolving media landscape. With a background in newsroom leadership, digital media strategy and creator economy expertise, Liz has worked across the journalism ecosystem – supporting reporters, advising media startups and collaborating with major institutions on the future of independent journalism. As the founder of Project C, a concept she developed during her 2024 Sulzberger Fellowship at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, she is focused on empowering journalists to embrace new models, find sustainable revenue, and create impactful work outside of traditional media structures. As co-founder of The Independent Journalism Atlas, Liz is working to both quantify – and build infrastructure for – independent journalists. Liz was one of The Washington Post’s first bloggers and prior to Project C, she led teams at Vox, USA Today, Gannett, and AOL. Liz sits on the Board of Visitors of the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford University, is a member of the Beehiiv Media Collective advisory board, serves as a Knight Center for the Future of Journalism Fellow at Arizona State University’s Cronkite School of Journalism and Communications and is a 2025-2026 Terker Fellow at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs.

Tara Parker-Pope is an author, book collaborator, and award-winning journalist whose work focuses on empowerment across multiple domains of life. She has written or collaborated on books spanning personal health, relationships, leadership, personal finance, and work in the age of AI.

Across all of this work, her focus is the same: helping writers and readers gain clarity, confidence, and a sense of agency in decisions that matter.

I have an MPH from the Yale School of Public Health and is the founding editor of Well at the New York Times and Well+Being at the Washington Post. She also wrote the Health Journal column for the Wall Street Journal.

Brian Reid has nearly three decades of experience in health care journalism, public affairs, and public relations with a specialty in explaining the economics of the health care system. He is the founder of Reid Strategic, a communications consultancy; the editor of the daily Cost Curve newsletter on pharma pricing and policy; and a senior fellow at the Center for the Evaluation of Value and Risk in Health (CEVR) at Tufts Medical Center.

At Reid Strategic, Brian counsels industry leaders on the best way to communicate on complex policy, access, pricing, and reimbursement issues in ways that critical audiences can understand. Brian’s core belief is that we can’t build a better health care system until everyone understands the system we have today. That is the motivating force behind his foray into newsletters with Cost Curve.

Reid Strategic offers communications strategy and execution around corporate, brand, and policy challenges, from pre-launch approaches to lifecycle management.

Brian has written extensively for a range of audiences. His past experience includes coverage of the health science/policy beat for Bloomberg News, creation of patient education materials for the National Institutes of Health, and features in publications ranging from the Washington Post to Nature Biotechnology to Men’s Health.

He has a B.S. in biology and political science from Emory University and a M.S. from the Columbia University School of Journalism.