How the COVID pandemic hypercharged Stat

Illustration (cc) 2020 by Prachatai

Luke Winkie has a terrific piece up at the Nieman Journalism Lab about the five-years-in-the-making overnight success of Stat, the health- and life-sciences site that’s part of Boston Globe Media.

The newly unionized Stat was designed as a niche site at is launch in 2015, which I wrote about for GBH News. Now the project is growing by leaps and bounds — from 1.5 million unique visitors a month in 2019 to 23 million, and, more recently, back to around 7 million. Stat has about 50 employees, which is about the same as when it started, though up slightly over its pre-pandemic head count. And it’s looking to hire another 20. Executive editor Rick Berke tells Winkie:

Stat has changed forever after last year. As a media company, we were on a good trajectory before the pandemic. But there’s no going back to the pre-pandemic reach that we had.