Michelle Levander

Michelle Levander

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.

Articles

A New Look for ReportingonHealth: Share Your Feedback

<p>ReportingonHealth celebrates its two-year anniversary this week. To celebrate this milestone, we are introducing a new look – one that puts the contributions of our community members at center stage.</p>

Six California Endowment Health Journalism Fellows win journalism prizes

<p>We are proud to have six California Endowment Health Journalism Fellows among the winners this year of the Association of Health Care Journalists’ Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism.&nbsp;And we are grateful to the AHCJ for offering these valuable prizes. The Health Journalism Fellows'&nbsp;commitment to quality health journalism is apparent both in their selection of topics and their execution of complex pieces. One Fellow, Caitlan Carroll, was honored for Fellowship Project. Others were honored for other work outside of our program.</p>

Health Reporting Misadventures: My Mom, the Private Detective, Trolling for Alligators in Florida, Calm in a Prison Garden

<p>The other day, Reporting on Health asked its friends to share stories about their best health journalism adventures and misadventures. We made it a contest on our own <a href="http://www.facebook.com/ReportingonHealth">ReportingonHealth Facebook</a> page and offered prizes of a $50 itunes card (1st prize) and <em>In Pantagonia</em>, Bruce Chatwin's adventure saga (2nd Prize).</p>

Youth Voices and a New Community Newspaper for Boyle Heights

<p>Boyle Heights is a neighborhood populated by restless souls. Its small houses, windows barred more often than not, hold within them stories of journeys and reinvention; these days, it’s Spanglish and café de olla served at a Formica table covered in flowered oilcloth. Before that, the kitchen conversation was sprinkled with Yiddish or Japanese, as earlier generations of immigrants made their mark on these streets.&nbsp;But who captures the stories in these days of diminished newsroom resources of this working class neighborhood? Who shares the yarns that help people feel, as one teenager told us recently, that "No estamos solos," that we are not alone?&nbsp;In a few months, we will have a chance to see what stories emerge from this Latino immigrant neighborhood of about 100,000, located a few miles east of downtown Los Angeles. And we will learn how the community responds to journalism written, not by outsiders, but by local youth writing "<em>por la comunidad y para la comunidad</em>&nbsp;"– for the community and by the community -- as Pedro Rojas, the executive editor of La Opinión, put it as we planned this venture in community journalism together.</p>