Carey Goldberg is a longtime journalist for top media outlets from The New York Times to Bloomberg News, with a particular focus on science, health and medical stories. She ratcheted back her career for many years while her children were young, and is also happy to talk about work-life balance issues. (They feature in the triple memoir she co-authored, “Three Wishes: A True Story of Good Friends, Crushing Heartbreak and Astonishing Luck On Our Way To Love and Motherhood,” published by Little, Brown.)
Carey is fluent in Russian and became a Moscow correspondent for the AP and the Los Angeles Times just in time for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the stormy period of nation-building that followed. She came home to work for The New York Times, ending up as Boston bureau chief. She then spent a year at the MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship to transition to science journalism, and from 2002 on covered health and science for The Boston Globe and WBUR. In early 2021, she joined Bloomberg News as its Boston bureau chief, but left in late 2022 to focus only on science and medical stories that struck her as most meaningful to tell. She has also been co-authoring a book on the new ChatGPT-type of AI and what it will mean for medicine.
Carey graduated summa cum laude from Yale a very long time ago, and went to grad school in Soviet Studies at Harvard but never got her master’s because once she finally got a visa to get in to Russia at a time of momentous change, she couldn’t see going back to academia. Her trajectory exemplifies a dramatic mid-career shift: She had dreamed since high school of being a Moscow correspondent, but when that dream had been realized by her mid-thirties, she decided that the most important news in the world was scientific progress, and that was what she wanted to cover. She has no regrets, though she has yet to feel like she’s really mastered the craft of science narrative. She can offer guidance on: Text and audio journalism, science communications, health-care communications, work-life issues.
Carey is one of the more brilliant, idealistic, and dynamic people that I am privileged to call a friend. She entered my world years ago through Iris when Iris was Director of WBUR's Innovation Lab, and has been an effervescent, thoughtful influence in our lives. Her concerns are never petty, they are always ethical and marked by independent thinking. One of her recent articles is: Eric Lander is getting uncanceled.