Sophie Buchan
Sophie Buchan writes consumer health, wellness and lifestyle service pieces across Reach-owned titles, focusing on practical advice around everyday health risks, diet and personal finance. She concentrates on health stories with a concrete angle, from hidden side effects of common medications to heart health and diet guidance that readers can apply in daily life. Her remit also extends into money, shopping and travel coverage, where she links wellbeing, consumer choices and personal finance in accessible terms.
Health warnings and medical explainers
Health coverage is anchored in clear warnings and explainers that translate clinical risks into plain language. Her work includes pieces on serious but often overlooked conditions such as gastric dilatation volvulus, also known as bloat, where she works with veterinary professionals to outline symptoms, urgency and prevention for pet owners. She also reports on issues like persistent coughs triggered by everyday medication, using doctors’ guidance to connect a familiar symptom with a specific pharmaceutical risk and advise what patients should watch for.
Across these stories she foregrounds the consequence of missing these signals, using expert quotes and straightforward descriptions to keep the focus on early recognition and practical next steps.
Diet, nutrition and everyday wellness
Diet and nutrition are a recurring strand of her health beat, often framed through what to eat or avoid in common high-risk scenarios. In coverage of high cholesterol, for example, she builds articles around a doctor’s own food choices, turning professional advice into a simple template for readers who need to rethink their meals for heart health. Her wider portfolio emphasises consumer health, diet and nutrition and fitness, with stories that translate broad wellness goals into specific habits around food, activity and routine.
She uses the health and medicine lens to keep these lifestyle pieces grounded in evidence, while still presenting them as manageable changes rather than abstract recommendations.
Money, consumer advice and lifestyle shopping
Sophie Buchan also writes extensively on money and lifestyle topics, reflecting a dual focus on finance and everyday living across Reach’s digital network. Her work spans personal finance, banking and consumer issues, using a service approach to explain how changes in costs, rates or policies affect day-to-day decisions.
Directory profiles of her output list themes such as business, finance, bank coverage and commercial banking alongside lifestyle and culture, underlining that she treats money as part of a broader consumer picture rather than a standalone specialist beat. When covering shopping, she tends to connect products, deals or trends back to wellbeing, value for money or practical usefulness, keeping health, comfort and budget in the same frame.
Food, travel and trends across Reach titles
Beyond core health and money topics, she contributes food, travel and trends stories to multiple Reach mastheads.
Listings of her work and professional bios place her as a trends writer for Glasgow Live with features in outlets such as the Daily Record and Scottish Business Insider, and note further publication across other regional and national titles in the Reach group. Additional profiles describe her as a money and lifestyle writer at the Daily Record and highlight coverage ranging from health and wellness and travel to broader lifestyle and culture pieces.
Topic tags associated with her reporting include food, health and medicine, travel and commerce, showing that she moves easily between service-led health content and lighter lifestyle or trends features while keeping a consumer perspective at the centre.
Across this body of work, the consistent thread is practical, reader-facing service journalism: she takes expert advice and evolving consumer issues and turns them into direct, usable guidance on how to stay healthier, spend more wisely and navigate everyday choices.
4 more health journalists.
Alan Booth
Alan Booth is distinctive for linking infectious disease, laboratory research and emerging health technologies rather than treating them as separate beats. He is a senior editor at Labmate-Online, where he covers outbreaks, vaccines, drug development, antimicrobial resistance, gene therapies and laboratory innovation. His reporting has examined tuberculosis, measles, cholera, influenza and malaria, including a major tuberculosis outbreak, vaccine and drug advances, and a malaria vaccine designed to block mosquito transmission. He has also written about antibiotic-resistant bacteria, new gene therapy centres and SinS Brighton 2025. Booth reports news, research updates, interviews and event coverage for a broad laboratory audience. He presents LabMatePod, discussing AMR, emerging pathogens, public health responses and scientific history. Across articles, interviews and podcasts, he connects laboratory findings with health policy and technology using clear, well-researched science communication.
Alex Storey
Alex Storey is a journalist at LBC whose work is driven by specific cases that test professional conduct and accountability in health and the public sector. He covers health as his main beat, focusing on the point where individual decisions by clinicians or officials meet public trust in institutions. His reporting is incident-first and case-led, using concrete episodes to show how rules, ethics and policy work in real life. Recent pieces include a disciplinary case where a nurse was struck off after linking a patient’s cancer to Covid jabs, and coverage of civil servants being “paid to play Grand Theft Auto” as “lived experience” training. Across these stories, he examines how professionals, regulators and officials explain their decisions, and what that reveals about trust, responsibility and the standards expected of people in positions of authority.
Alexandra Thompson
Alexandra Thompson is an assistant news editor focused on health who treats health claims as hypotheses to be tested rather than messages to be repeated. She works at New Scientist, combining editing with frontline reporting on ageing brains, cognitive health, chronic illness, contested treatments and infectious disease. Her beat centres on how neuroscience and psychology intersect with everyday health choices and on how scientific findings translate into real-world outcomes for people living with illness. She examines lifestyle advice, rehabilitation programmes and outbreak guidance against current evidence, clarifying risk without overstating it and giving space to controversy without sensationalising it. Alongside written news she appears in audio and video formats, bringing the same clear, news-driven approach to live discussions and helping shape the daily health agenda while keeping a tight focus on evidence and impact.
Alice Wilkinson
Alice Wilkinson investigates how everyday habits, products and routines shape sleep and long-term wellbeing, using test-driven health features to separate hype from real benefit. She holds a senior role on The Telegraph’s health features team, writing and shaping consumer-focused coverage that blends personal trial with clear expert evidence. Her core beat is sleep as a practical, solvable part of daily life, from detailed comparisons of magnesium supplements to service pieces on how sleeping position affects health over time. She treats supplements as a crowded, over-claimed market that demands careful testing and clear-eyed reporting. Alongside long-form features she writes weekly health desk dispatches on sleep, stress and concentration. Across her work she combines substantial self-testing, specialist insight and plain, unfussy prose to give readers measurable, realistic changes they can make.