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Outlet profile

STAT News

U.S. center-left

Owned byBoston Globe Media, owned by billionaire John Henry and Linda Henry
FundingPrimarily reader subscriptions (STAT Plus and enterprise tiers), supplemented by advertising, sponsored reports, and paid research calls; no state funding or major foundation grants
On the administrationbroadly critical

Background

STAT News launched on November 4, 2015, as a standalone digital outlet within Boston Globe Media, founded by John Henry — the billionaire who also owns the Boston Red Sox and Liverpool FC and purchased The Boston Globe from The New York Times in 2013. It was conceived as a test of whether readers would pay for high-quality, in-depth coverage of the life sciences, filling a gap in serious health and medicine journalism. The outlet's name derives from the medical shorthand for 'statim,' Latin for 'immediately.' Starting with fewer than two dozen employees, STAT grew to a staff of roughly 100 journalists with offices in Boston, New York, Washington D.C., the Midwest, and California. Its executive editor, Rick Berke, came from The New York Times and Politico, giving the outlet a blend of science-journalism and political-reporting traditions. By its tenth anniversary in 2025, STAT had surpassed 30,000 paid subscribers and approached $20 million in annual revenue, making it one of the more financially stable specialized digital news outlets in the U.S. Media bias analysts, including Media Bias/Fact Check, rate it as left-center in its editorial perspective, with high factual accuracy; it has consistently reported critically on anti-science or anti-public-health positions across administrations, and its second-term Trump coverage has focused heavily on proposed cuts of up to 40% at NIH, restructuring of HHS, and the rollback of federal public health programs.

Sources

  1. STAT Marks 10 Years of Reporting from the Frontiers of Health and Medicine | Boston Globe Media
  2. Stat (website) — Wikipedia
  3. Stat's 10-Year History Coupling Quality Reportage With Paid Subs — A Media Operator
  4. Stat Tops 30,000 Subscribers, Nears $20 Million in Revenue — Adweek
  5. Stat (News) - Bias and Credibility — Media Bias/Fact Check
  6. STAT News 10th Anniversary — statnews.com
  7. Timeline: How Trump is roiling science and health | STAT
  8. NIH consolidation and 40% budget cut outlined in leaked document | STAT

Profile compiled 2026-08-03; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

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