Michelle Levander
Editor and Founding Director
Editor and Founding Director
My life has been enriched by work as a reporter, editor and, currently, as a journalism educator.
In 2004, I became founding director of USC Annenberg's Center for Health Journalism. Before that I worked in daily journalism in California at the San Jose Mercury News and in Asia for the Asian Wall Street Journal and Time Magazine Asia. I also spent a year in Mexico, studying and later writing about immigrants and the tug North as an Inter American Press Association Fellow at El Colegio de Mexico and El Colegio de Michoacan. I'm a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and UC Berkeley.
To learn more about the initiatives I've launched and now manage at the Center, click here.
I welcome your feedback and ideas on the work we do. Please contact me at editor@centerforhealthjournalism.org.
The nurse wheeled my young friend Alexander’s gurney into the emergency room. As she walked away from him, she shot out a parting remark: “This is how you lose a leg – or your life.”
<p>Diving deep into data can be daunting for journalists on deadline. Our new e-book on community health and data reporting makes it a lot easier.</p>
<p>We figure that Reporting on Health can stay innovative and relevant to you by constantly adapting to your ideas and the enormous changes reshaping the media and health landscape around us. Please answer our survey to help with our next steps. </p>
<p>Reporters have an unprecedented opportunity this year to chronicle a historic battle in the unfolding story of federal health reform. Yet getting the story right will depend on mastering the details.</p>
<p>How does our urban environment affect our health? A new PBS documentary series hosted by public health expert Dr. Richard Jackson examines the issue in depth.</p>
<p>Agile project management is built around flexibility, quick decision-making and an ability to make course corrections when confronted with new ideas and new information. Agile reporting approaches news gathering as a two-way conversation with the audience.</p>
<p>We award $53,500 in reporting grants: “We need high-quality, high-impact health journalism now more than ever to keep community health issues squarely in the public spotlight,” said Mary Lou Fulton, program manager, communication and media grants, at The California Endowment.</p>
<p>Check out our upcoming webinars on how to build your own "health reporting survival kit" and embedding multimedia content on your blog or website!</p>
<p>Susan Mernit and Staci Baird, social media gurus, had a message for reformed journalists and New Media entrepreneurs participating in our pilot program melding online community engagement and health journalism: "We come in peace."</p>
<p>It takes a certain kind of stubbornness and stick-to-it-ness to develop a successful online news site or a popular blog, especially if you are writing about the civic life of your community — not fashion tidbits or celebrity gossip. We are working with these news innovators to expand their health reporting.</p>