This Sunday evening, we began our week-long National Health Journalism Fellowships, which brings together 20 journalists to discuss, debate and learn about health journalism topics. At our keynote dinner, we had a chance to meet and hear from our National Health Journalism Fellows and the grantees of our Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism who had joined us from across the country.

Former health journalism Fellows Suzanne Bohan and Sandy Kleffman, colleagues at the Bay Area News Group, teamed up to write Shortened Lives, a groundbreaking series on how where you live affects your health – and won a White House Correspondents’ Association award for their efforts.

Mary Lee knows firsthand the fallout from living in an area without proper access to fresh, healthy food: She drives past three South Los Angeles grocery stores offering expired tortillas and wilted produce to get to a better supermarket in a more affluent area. [In the audio clip below, she discusses the goals of her work.]

"We're homogenizing the way the world goes mad," Ethan Watters, author of "Crazy Like Us," today told USC/California Endowment National Health Journalism Fellows gathered in Los Angeles this week.

A young black man is rolled on a gurney into an emergency room in an inner-city neighborhood. What assumptions do health care providers make about why he is there? What assumptions do journalists make?

Dr. John A. Rich laid out the basic assumption this way: "Young black men don't just get shot, they get themselves shot."

In a little more than two weeks, we will launch our 2010 National Health Journalism Fellowships. Of course, we hope and expect that the talented journalists who participate will produce great stories. But we will know this program has succeeded if it prompts participants to challenge conventional notions of what constitutes a health story. Seminar speakers will touch upon topics as varied as international trade and gang violence. But running through the Fellowships' weeklong extended conversation is a common theme: the links between Place and Health.