Beth Fagan
Beth Fagan reports and presents local news for VOCM, focusing on health, public safety, housing, and the way policy decisions play out in everyday life. Her coverage often links health outcomes to issues like emergency response, traffic safety, housing stability, and access to community supports. She works across broadcast and digital formats, reading newscasts, supporting talk programming, and filing short, straight news pieces from the field.
Housing, Cost of Living and Social Support
Housing affordability and the conditions around where people live run through much of Fagan’s work.
She covers efforts to accommodate residents in facilities such as Horizons 106, following calls for proposals that address how people will be housed and supported. She reports on fundraisers that keep basic needs within reach, such as variety shows that raise money for a furniture bank supplying essential items like beds and couches. Her coverage of changing home prices and cost-of-living pressures ties these stories together, giving a clear sense of how market shifts affect everyday households.
Fagan also follows how infrastructure projects reshape daily life, reporting on work to improve traffic flow and pedestrian safety along busy urban corridors. These stories sit alongside updates on serious highway collisions and closures, giving a full picture of how transportation systems intersect with safety and access to services.
Health, Safety and Emergency Response
Public safety and emergency response are central to her health-focused reporting. She tracks changing fire hazard conditions across the province, detailing periods when risk reaches extreme levels and what that means for communities. Her stories highlight how local fire departments equip themselves, including donations that leave volunteer brigades fully outfitted to respond.
Fagan’s crime and collision coverage includes motorcycle crashes that lead to multiple charges and major incidents that close stretches of the Trans-Canada Highway until authorities can safely reopen them. She reports on public warnings from law enforcement about thefts from unlocked vehicles, treating these notices as part of a broader picture of community safety.
Health-specific pieces in her portfolio connect fundraising and recognition to outcomes, from motorcycle rides that raise significant sums for prostate cancer research to honours for researchers who helped guide the provincial pandemic response.
Justice, Governance and Indigenous Issues
Beyond immediate health and safety stories, Fagan covers how policy and governance decisions shape people’s lives. Her reporting on the NunatuKavut Community Council documents setbacks in efforts to secure recognition of Inuit rights, explaining key decisions at the federal level and their implications for the council.
She follows major energy and resource agreements, including analysis of timelines and political pressures around Churchill Falls and the role of provincial and Quebec politics in reaching deals. This strand of coverage shows her attention to long-running files where legal agreements and government negotiations influence economic stability and public services.
On-Air News and Community Presence
Fagan’s role extends beyond written pieces into live broadcasting, where she anchors news updates and participates in call-in programming. She voices midday news segments and supports the Open Line show, taking calls, managing the queue, and helping keep the program moving through complex local issues.
She also appears at festivals, concerts, and other public events, bringing the station’s presence into community spaces while promoting contests and giveaways. Across these roles, her work keeps health, safety, and local policy stories closely tied to the everyday experiences of listeners and readers.
4 more health journalists.
Alanna Smith
Alanna Smith is a national health reporter whose work links health policy and politics to real access to care, with a constant focus on health equity, infectious disease and the toxic drug crisis. She reports for The Globe and Mail on infectious diseases, hospitals and long-term care, mental health, drug policy and the pressures on health systems in Western Canada. Her stories connect big-picture decisions to patients, families, front-line workers and volunteers, showing how funding, privatization and federal standards shape public care. She has covered trauma care inequities, proposed public‑private models in Alberta, drug toxicity and overdose policy, respiratory virus surges, measles elimination, gene‑editing advances and gender‑affirming health care laws. Her work combines narrative reporting, data, legal and policy analysis, and has been recognized by national journalism and press freedom organizations.
Allan Levine
Allan Levine is a historian and author whose journalism uses the past to explain present-day issues. He writes for the Winnipeg Free Press, including the Now & Then column, which examines current events through history. His subjects include public health, disease, medical treatment, health systems, politics, social conflict, strikes, wars, antisemitism and Canadian public life. His polio reporting traces Manitoba epidemics, hospital pressures, treatment, mortality and the arrival of vaccines through archival data and medical history. He also writes about the Winnipeg General Strike and Jewish communities, including discrimination, rights and security. His work draws on books about Canadian political leaders, Jewish history and the wartime economy, including The Dollar A Year Men. He writes long-form, analytical pieces that combine dates, statistics, policy decisions and narrative storytelling to connect people and institutions with broader historical change.
Angela Amato
Angela Amato is a digital news producer with CTV News, and her coverage is distinct for linking health research and public safety concerns to legal and policy decisions that shape daily life. She reports on health, justice, politics, business, arts and culture, crime and public-interest stories. Her health work covers academic and clinical research, including studies on vaping and lung blood flow, exercise tolerance and early heart dysfunction in young adults. She also reports on motorcycle gang arrests, homicide and death investigations, Indigenous justice stories, wildfire evacuations, ambulance contracts, property taxes, labour negotiations and political advocacy rules. She explains complex findings in plain language and stays close to documents, data and expert sources. Her background includes investigative and daily newsrooms, and she has earned nominations for national journalism awards.
Apoorva Mandavilli
Apoorva Mandavilli covers the collision of infectious disease science, vaccine policy and public health agencies for The New York Times, following how research, regulation and politics shape outbreaks and access to vaccines. She reports on science and global health with a steady focus on infectious diseases and pandemics, including Covid-19, mpox, H.I.V., malaria and tuberculosis, treating them as ongoing global threats. Her work explains complex epidemiology and virology in clear narratives about risk, evidence and the consequences of scientific decisions. She repeatedly returns to vaccine policy, law and misinformation, tracing how court fights and agency disputes affect immunization schedules and public trust. She also reports on global health programs, funding cuts and inequity in care and technology. A longtime science journalist and former founding editor in chief of Spectrum, she has written widely on science and health and received major honors for medical science reporting and pandemic coverage.