
Michelle Levander
Editor and Founding Director
Editor and Founding Director
Michelle Levander is the founding director of the Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Journalism. Since she launched the Center in 2004, the professional journalists who have participated in its journalism fellowships have published more than 4,200 major investigative and explanatory articles in partnership with the Center as well as multi-outlet collaborations. Those journalism projects have won top journalism honors, changed laws, reinvigorated policy discussions, and provoked new community discussions across the nation. Under her leadership, the Center has launched initiatives that nurture collaborative reporting and engagement, building an interdisciplinary community of practice. Among the Center programs she founded, its Data Fellowship, launched in 2015, equips reporters to do their own data analysis to report investigative and explanatory stories on health and health disparities. Its engagement initiative helps reporters to build their reporting around community perspectives by relying on creative strategies to connect their voices to policy action. Levander launched the Center after more than 15 years as a staff reporter and editor in New York, California, Hong Kong, and Mexico, working for Time Magazine Asia, the Asian Wall Street Journal and the San Jose Mercury News. She has received journalism awards from the Overseas Press Club of America (Best Reporting in Latin America), the Inter American Press Association, the Society of Professional Journalists L.A. (Distinguished Work in New Media) as well as a Northern California Co-Producer Emmy Award (Spanish-language Outstanding Achievement Health Journalism). A former Inter American Press Association fellow, she spent a year in Mexico, at El Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City and Michoacán, researching migrant culture from rural Mexico. She has a bachelor’s degree in history and literature from UC Berkeley and a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Californians remain without a scorecard to track the performance of Medicaid provider groups, and state officials don't seem eager to change that.
The Center for Health Journalism will welcome 22 journalists from around the nation on July 22 to USC's Annenberg School of Journalism.
A yearlong effort to obtain basic Medicaid provider data in L.A. was rebuffed. Some health care leaders shut their doors gently. Others slammed them shut.
With the support of the California Wellness Foundation, the Center for Health Journalism at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism has awarded $30,000 in reporting grants from its new Impact Fund.
It’s hard to imagine a more urgent time than this one, when it comes to supporting great journalism on the health challenges facing Californians.
With our new blog “The Health Divide,” our aim is to inspire conversations and help journalists portray how larger forces outside of the doctor’s office can shape community health.
The newly announced Center for Health Journalism Impact Fund will provide reporting grants of up to $10,000 news outlets, news collaboratives or individual reporters to undertake investigative or explanatory health reporting projects in California.
In recent months, Fresno School Board President Brooke Ashjian has launched a series of attacks on Fresno Bee reporter Mackenzie Mays over her reporting on the district's failure to provide basic sex ed to students.
For two decades, New America Media nurtured journalists for ethnic media outlets and helped make the concerns of America’s ethnic communities part of the national conversation.
The Center for Health Journalism at USC Annenberg will bring 10 California journalists to Los Angeles this month for the 2017 California Data Fellowship, which helps reporters learn the skills to become investigative health data reporters and produce ambitious journalism projects.