by Yasmine Dabash
This is part five of a five-part series for Yasmine Dabash’s Fall 2017 Honors Project. For this project, Dabash interviews five journalists about their journalism careers. Here, Dabash speaks with Brooklyn-based health writer Brittany Risher.
Brittany Risher is a writer, editor, and digital strategist based in Brooklyn, New York. I discovered Risher through an iOS app called MyFitnessPal. (I found her article “This is Your Body on Sleep Deprivation” fascinating—you can read it here. She said her inspiration for that article was that her editor wanted a piece on sleep and, upon research, Risher found that there were a plethora of studies on how sleep deprivation negatively impacts the brain and its performance.
Although Risher has been writing for over a decade and the bulk of her work has been in the realm of health and wellness, her favorite article that she has ever written was a piece for sonima.com called I Don’t Have a Best Friend. Am I Normal? She says that the article was different for her because she usually does not write first-person pieces, but that it was the most rewarding piece of her career so far. This article was particularly rewarding because it was a “challenge” for her to write and it prompted a lot of feedback from her readers.
Aside from being a journalist, Risher is a digital strategist. When I interviewed her, she said that meant that she helps brands strategize how they post their content to various social media platforms, such as blogs.
Risher advises aspiring journalists to fact-check their pieces and “make sure [they’re] getting the truth out there.” She also stresses that journalists should do their reporting themlves]” because the internet is chock full of false information.
If you are interested in more of Brittany Risher’s work, visit her website or reach out to her via Twitter. Also, do not hesitate to Google her; she has written for a wide range of websites. Here are her stories and author’s pages on just some of those websites:
The Scribe 