We're expecting great things from our 2016 National Fellows

The upcoming National Fellowship will include field visits to innovative sites in the L.A. region.

June 28, 2016

As July approaches, we at the USC Center for Health Journalism are enjoying the thrill that comes from being on the cusp a major new development. We’re about to bring in 23 talented reporters from around the nation for our National Fellowship who will be completing ambitious fellowship projects under our auspices over the next six months. 

Our National Fellows will participate in an intensive five days of seminars, workshops and trips in the field. This year’s program will focus on vulnerable children and families and the community conditions that contribute to — or threaten — their well-being. Each Fellow returns home to complete a reporting project over the next six months, with guidance from senior journalists.

Participating reporters will receive reporting grants from the Center’s Fund for Journalism on Child Well-Being, the Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism or the Center to support ambitious investigative and explanatory journalism focused on vulnerable children and families. We’re also provided support for community engagement to help reporters and newsrooms make strides in this emerging area for journalistic impact and influence.

The 2016 National Fellowship is funded by generous grants from the Annie E. Casey Foundation and The California Endowment.

The topics our National Fellows have proposed are urgent and often underreported. We hope that in-depth explorations will bring needed attention and change. Among the topics the Center for Health Journalism National Fellows will explore in their projects are how contaminants in the environment imperil the futures of children in Cleveland, Philadelphia and other communities around the country; the impact on children in Oklahoma of their mothers’ incarceration; the effects of a five-decade opioid epidemic on a community in New Mexico; how chronic poverty and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina are affecting children in New Orleans and what schools are doing about it; the word gap between low-income and affluent children and efforts to close it; the reasons for the high prematurity rates in Milwaukee and Indiana; and unequal representation in Los Angeles County’s juvenile justice system.

Since 2005, the Fellowships program has educated more than 800 journalists on the craft and content of health journalism, with an emphasis on the relationship between health and place.  Past Fellowship projects can be found here. 

Here are the 2016 grantees:

Fund for Journalism on Child Well-Being

Dennis A. Hunt Health Journalism Fund

Fund for Journalism on Child Well-being and Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism

 2016 National Health Journalism Fellows

Our National Fellows will be blogging about their upcoming projects in the next couple of weeks and we’ll be sharing insights from our speakers as well. So tune in at the CenterforHealthJournalism.org to learn more, by following us on social media or subscribing to our weekly newsletter.