The Center for Health Journalism launches the 2025 Ethnic Media Collaborative
The USC Center for Health Journalism has launched the 2025 Ethnic Media Collaborative, named “Healing California,” with a symposium hosted on the USC campus from January 29 to 31, bringing together eight California outlets serving Black, Latino, Mandarin and Vietnamese audiences and readers.
The Ethnic Media Collaborative, now in its second year, is a yearlong initiative of the Center for Health Journalism. The Center partners with ethnic media organizations in California to report together on health equity, community well-being and gaps in health care.
“The venture is built on the belief that the state’s vibrant ethnic media is uniquely situated to chronicle the health circumstances of California’s diverse communities, sharing perspectives historically overlooked or often ignored by traditional media,” said Michelle Levander, founding director of the Center for Health Journalism.
“Ethnic media have the most direct and trusted connections with diverse communities of California,” said Jaya Padmanabhan, the editor of the Ethic Media Collaborative. We are honored to partner with such a talented group of reporters, editors and news directors in 2025.
The innovative initiative is built around a collaborative approach where outlets and journalists jointly choose health topics to explore over the course of a year, supported by a learning curriculum developed by the Center in response to the interests and priorities of participating outlets.
The initiative is made possible thanks to the generous support of Blue Shield of California Foundation, The California Endowment, the California Wellness Foundation and the California Health Care Foundation.
The symposium will explore health and health equity, community engagement, and topics around mental health. We will have rich discussions from interactive story brainstorming sessions and deep dives into mental health care barriers facing California’s diverse communities, to discussions about news strategies for reporting on immigrant mental health in an era of mass deportations. While leveling up storytelling prowess, the symposium aims to equip participants with resources needed to report successfully in the months ahead.
The newsrooms participating in the 2025 Ethnic Media Collaborative are the Telemundo affiliates Telemundo 33 (Sacramento), Telemundo 48 (Bay Area), Telemundo 52 (Los Angeles); the Black-owned Sacramento Observer; The Stoop, a podcast from Radiotopia/PRX exploring Blackness in America; World Journal, a leading Mandarin publication in Los Angeles; Nguoi Viet Daily News, the largest Vietnamese publication outside of Vietnam, also in Los Angeles; and El Tecolote, a bilingual digital outlet reporting on the lives of Latinx people in San Francisco.
Participating outlets will spend a year collaborating with one another and the Center for Health Journalism, producing explanatory, narrative, and investigative stories to drive meaningful change and broader policy and community awareness.
The core reporting themes of the 2025 collaborative — selected by the eight outlets — are mental health, immigrant health, and economic insecurity. The Collaborative will explore challenges and promising interventions, and the ways that these storylines play out for each community.
The Ethnic Media Collaborative is entering its second year. The 2024 Ethnic Media Collaborative — consisting of Spanish, Mandarin, Korean, Black and pan-Asian newsrooms — produced a rich repository of stories that highlighted the health and health equity experiences of communities of color in California. This column provides details about the year-long initiative and its objectives.
About the Center for Health Journalism
The Center educates journalists and builds news partnerships through a variety of programs, all while providing grants and training, to nurture ambitious investigative and explanatory reporting about systemic forces that limit opportunities for good health, the social determinants of health, and the factors that contribute to health disparities.
This effort builds on the Center for Health Journalism’s history of launching and managing reporting collaboratives for more than a decade, bringing together mainstream and ethnic media for bilingual collaborations. Our previous yearlong collaboration, Uncovered California, focused on chronicling issues, challenges and opportunities for Californians who were uninsured. Those stories, senior state leaders told us, helped elevate the issues for ordinary people throughout California and for policymakers in Sacramento, bringing urgency to needed reforms. Another collaborative, in 2012, explored Valley Fever, a rare disease endemic to the Central Valley. That reporting won a coveted Columbia Journalism Review “laurel” and brought millions in funding to valley fever prevention efforts and a first ever convening of the heads of the NIH and the CDC in Bakersfield focused on the disease, leading to new federal research funding.