Chau Lam and Caroline Lewis join WNYC

Chau Lam joins as the Poverty and Economic Instability Reporter;
Caroline Lewis as the Health and Science Reporter
Read more in this December 2, 2021 note from WNYC Deputy Editor Stephanie Clary

I’m very excited to announce that two more reporters will be joining our newsroom next week.

Chau Lam will be joining as the Poverty and Economic Instability Reporter, reporting to Karen Rouse on the Economics and Equity desk. Chau has more than two decades of experience covering national and local news, and has worked on major breaking stories, including the 9/11 attacks, the Boston Marathon bombing, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, and Occupy Wall Street protests. At Newsday, Chau covered a wide range of topics, including the criminal justice system, transportation, and local politics. Her work uncovering public employees who collected both government salaries and pensions for the same job and her reporting on jet noise plaguing the areas around New York’s two major airports led to reforms at the local and state levels. 

Chau shares two Pulitzer Prizes: one for coverage of the crash of TWA Flight 800 with the Newsday staff and another on the devastation of the Northridge earthquake with the Los Angeles Times staff. Her work has also earned her a New York Press Club Award and a New York Emmy. Chau was born in Vietnam, grew up in the Bronx, and currently lives in Long Island City, Queens.

Caroline Lewis will be joining us as the Health and Science Reporter, reporting to Nsikan Akpan on the Community Health and Environment desk. Many of you know Caroline, as she has been contributing to WNYC and Gothamist for several years. She was the lead reporter on PriceCheckNYC, a year-long, grant-funded project that combined crowdsourced and investigative reporting that gave listeners a chance to compare the costs of their medical procedures. Caroline has more recently reported on the city’s response to the pandemic with a focus on how the crisis has highlighted inequity in health care access and outcomes. She broke several stories as a contributor, including the largest health care union in the country vowing to fight vaccine mandates and the rise of fentanyl contamination in cocaine. 

Previously, Caroline was a health care reporter at Crain’s New York Business. Caroline is fluent in Spanish and  was awarded a Fulbright grant to research community radio stations in Chile in 2011. Caroline is a native New Yorker; originally from the Upper East Side, she now lives in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.

Chau and Caroline begin on Monday, December 6.