Welcome! I’m Brian Rinker, a versatile freelance writer with over a decade of journalism experience. 

 

I specialize in health care and health policy, mental health and drug addiction, child welfare and juvenile justice and startups and innovation.

 

As one of the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism's 2023 California Health Equity Fellows, I am reporting on California's closure of its state-run youth prisons for Youth Today, an independent news organization.

 

At the University of California, Berkeley, I honed my journalism craft and deepened my subject matter expertise in public health while earning a master’s degree in journalism and a master’s degree in public health. For my public health research project, I developed a grant proposal for an ethnographic study to examine the medicalization of residential drug treatment; and my reporting project on the lack of opioid treatment options in a rural region in California was co-published by Kaiser Health News and STAT. 

 

I am most passionate about producing compelling, deeply reported and people-centered stories that shed light on complex issues at the intersections of health policy and mental health and drug addiction. In order to explore how public health policies geared toward distributing opioid overdose reversal medication impacted those at high-risk, I spent days photographing and reporting San Franciscans who smoked and injected fentanyl on the city's downtown streets. The article — co-published by The Atlantic and Kaiser Health News — trended as a top story on Apple News. 

 

To bring to life the consequences of an arbitrary state rule that denied foster youth special housing and financial benefits if they happened to turn 18 while incarcerated, I demonstrated the implications by following the very different paths of two brothers in foster care. The article inspired a California state senator to propose a bill to change the law.

 

I earned my daily reporting chops as a startup and innovation beat reporter at the San Francisco Business Times, juggling multiple stories a day online with in-depth news features, profiles and awards sections for the weekly print edition. During this time, I gained an appreciation for digital health, entrepreneurship and startups, eventually leaving to become a solopreneur. 

 

Today, I focus my time on the journalism I'm passionate about and harness my years of experience to help digital health startups, nonprofits and organizations write, edit and strategize fact-based content — profiles, blog posts, white papers and thought leadership articles.