Instead, Bannan, a registered dietitian, now provides information about food and nutrition to thousands of people at
a time through stories on national television.

Since July 1999, Bannan has worked as a free-lance reporter and producer for CNN, putting together news segments on health and medical issues in the Atlanta-based cable network's New York City bureau.

It's a career she says she could not have imagined as an undergraduate.

"Even though I've always been interested in the creative process, I never felt that English was one of my strengths--and I didn't even know what public relations was," she says. "But, when I did my [registered dietitian] internship at the National Institutes of Health after graduation, I started to become aware of PR. When I looked into it, I found that I really loved it."

Her newfound interest led Bannan to a job with Porter Novelli, an international public relations firm, in Washington, D.C., where many of her clients were companies and organizations in the food industry. For two years, she did general public relations work, including a great deal of writing based on research findings and various professional outreach projects with her clients. When she found herself becoming more interested in news reporting than in public relations, she decided to make a change.

"I wanted to communicate what I thought was important for people to know, not just what my client wanted them to know," she says. "I decided one way to do that was to move from PR into the media."

Bannan enrolled in graduate school at Tufts University, where she earned her master's degree in nutrition communication and interned at CNN in Atlanta. Two months after graduating in May 1999, she began working for the network in New York. As a producer for CNN's medical news unit, she says, she comes up with ideas for stories, lines up and shoots the relevant interviews and explanatory video, writes the scripts and puts everything together into what is typically a two-minute segment. If the story focuses on her specialties of nutrition or diet, she often does the on-camera reporting as well. For some other health segments, she serves as producer for the physician-reporter who narrates the story on the air.

In the news business, in general, today's viewers and readers are demanding more coverage of medical, health and wellness issues, Bannan says. Entire magazines and cable networks are devoted to health, a topic that she says has expanded to include more aspects of the subject than ever before. "And, there's a growing interest in subjects like alternative medicine, as well as in more traditional health and medical topics."

At the same time, Bannan says, the media are increasingly interested in showcasing some reporters who have been educated and trained in specific medical fields. She points out that a fellow registered dietitian worked at CNN for many years without promoting her credentials, because of a belief in the business that having a medical background might bias a journalist. Now, she says, that attitude has changed, and television stations often seek out doctors and others with medical backgrounds to report some stories, giving viewers the advantage of their expertise.

"I know my credentials as a registered dietitian were a big help to me in making the switch from PR to news, which isn't an easy move to make," she says. "Those credentials are what got me in the door. Of course, after you get in, then you still have to compete with everyone else." To compete, Bannan spends time polishing her skills--working on her writing and taking voice-over lessons, for example. And, she says, she's learning to take a broader view of the news.

"There's a lot of interest in medical stories, and on any given day, I might have one that's especially interesting," she says. "But, you still have to weigh where your story fits into the day's news as a whole. Depending on what else is happening that day, it may not be a priority for viewers or for editors."

At CNN, Bannan has worked on consumer-oriented stories, including how to use the Internet to find a good diet plan, which to her means not just a diet that works but one that is easy to use and is based on solid research. She recently did a business story on popular milk-substitute products, such as soy drinks and calcium-fortified orange juice, and their effect on economics and marketing in the dairy industry. And, in a story about new research results, she reported on a mechanism found in dairy products that might promote weight loss.

That last story, she says, is a good example of the need for reporters to put medical research--especially preliminary research--into perspective. "In that case, it's a report of one interesting finding in a body of ongoing research," she says. "It's not some kind of final result that can be put into a simple statement like, 'Eat dairy products, and lose weight.' You have to be careful that you don't do viewers a disservice with these kinds of 'study of the week' reports."

Bannan's long-term goal is to work on a show devoted to health news, where she could produce and report longer segments and explore topics more thoroughly, perhaps with panels of experts to share their knowledge and opinions with viewers. In the meantime, she says, she is happy to be developing her skills in the challenging world of television journalism and enjoying life in New York.

"I look at my career so far as a series of stepping-stones, with each one getting me ready for the next stage," she says. "I think UD had a very good program that gave me a great foundation for my internship as a registered dietitian. My internship prepared me for my PR job, and that prepared me for grad school and the CNN internship, which led to my current job. I try to look at the big picture of where I've been and where I'd like to go."