The National Health Journalism Fellowships are offered over a six-day period, beginning with an evening keynote address on Sunday night and ending with a midday wrap-up session the following Friday. Partipants are expected to attend all sessions.

To encourage journalists and their newsrooms to aim high in reporting on health at a time of scarce resources, we offer a $2,000 stipend to fellows in this track upon completion of what are expected to be ambitious, major fellowship projects. To stimulate collaboration between mainstream and ethnic media, we encourage applicants to propose a joint project for use by both media outlets. Up to two collaborators for each project may receive a stipend. 

• John A. Rich, M.D., M.P.H, a MacArthur Genius Award winner and author of Wrong Place, Wrong Time: Trauma and Violence in the Lives of Young Black Men, spoke about youth violence, strategies to prevent it, strategies to report on it, as well as the impact of recurrent trauma and violence on the health of young black men.
• A visit to Homeboy Industries provided a closeup view of one program in action. Fellows heard from a panel of experts about different strategies for gang and violence prevention, including Olis Simmons, executive director of Project Youth Uprising, Father Stan Bosch, a priest and psychotherapist who provides group counseling to gang members, and Dr. Theodore Corbin, an emergency room physician and medical director of Healing Hurt People at Drexel University. Patrick Boyle, editor of Youth Today, moderated.
•  A how-to talk by Suzanne Bohan and Sandy Kleffman, former Health Journalism Fellows and Bay Area News Group reporters who won a White House Correspondents’ Prize for their project, Shortened Lives: Where You Lives Matters.
• A conversation with Mary Lee, from PolicyLink, on “Health and Place.”
• A unique view of the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, the nation’s busiest ports, on the Urban Ocean: World Port and Sealife Cruise hosted by the Aquarium of the Pacific. The tour provided a first-hand look at what happens when heavy industry and the natural environment share the same landscape.
• A briefing by key thinkers who have studied, regulated, managed and challenged the Port of Los Angeles as it launched historic air-quality improvements. In a discussion led by Journalist Deborah Schoch, Fellows learned about the economic and community health impacts of the goods movement industry (shipping and trucking).
• A briefing by two of the country’s top diabetes experts, Dr. Fran Kaufman and Dr. William Knowler, on diabetes research, including Kaufman's study of a school-based obesity prevention and reduction strategy and Knowler's research on exercise and nutrition-based interventions for adults at risk of diabetes. 
•  A look at novel technologies for participatory mapping (and community journalism) using mobile phones.
• A case for the value of using maps to tell stories about inequity, with Ann Moss Joyner, head of the Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities. 

•  2010 NATIONAL HEALTH JOURNALISM FELLOWS and DENNIS A. HUNT HEALTH JOURNALISM GRANTEES

  Fellows:

  Alicia DeLeon-Torres, a freelance journalist in San Diego, will produce stories on Filipino American gangs and problem gambling in Asian American and Pacific Islander communities for The Filipino Press.

  Pedro F. Frisneda, health editor of El Diario/La Prensa in New York City, will explore several serious threats to the health of Latinos in the United States: disparities in health care access and outcomes; obesity and diabetes; and HIV/AIDS.

  Joy Horowitz, a freelance journalist in Los Angeles, will explore the connection between the use pesticides and the high rate of Parkinson's disease in California’s Central Valley for Sierra magazine.

  Danielle Ivory, a reporter for the Huffington Post Investigative Fund in Washington, D.C., will examine how the overwhelmed and problem-plagued Medicaid system can serve millions more Americans with its expanded role under health care reform.

  Lisa Jones, a freelance writer in Boulder, Colorado, will write pieces for High Country News and Indian Country Today that explore the health impact of the construction of the Garrison Dam on residents of the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota. 

  Alison Knezevich, a state government reporter for The Charleston Gazette, will explore prescription drug abuse in West Virginia, a state hard hit by an epidemic of painkiller abuse.

  Heather May, a reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune, will look at why children in some racially diverse neighborhoods in Salt Lake County are more likely than their neighbors to be born with birth defects, die from prematurity or SIDS or be hospitalized for asthma.

  Gregory Mellen Jr., an editor at the Press-Telegram in Long Beach, will use personal stories to explore mental illness and treatment in the city’s Cambodian refugee community.

  Linda Carolina Pérez, a health and education reporter for Mundo Hispánico in Atlanta will explore the challenges to accessing health care for Latino immigrants.

  Rochelle Sharp, a freelance reporter in Boston, will look at the reasons for women's declining life expectancy in some U.S. counties for the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.

  Elizabeth Simpson, the medical reporter at The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Virginia, will examine the contributing factors to infant mortality in African American neighborhoods throughout the Hampton Roads region.

  Carol Smith, a Seattle-based reporter for InvestigateWest, will take a look at the health of predominantly minority communities that live and work along the Duwamish River in Seattle. 

  Frank Sotomayor, a freelance writer based in Los Angeles, will look at the reasons for the shortage of donor organs in southern California for La Opinion, Nguoi Viet Daily News and LA Beez.

  Mark Taylor, a freelance writer based in Munster, Indiana, will produce a series of stories for the Post-Tribune that will examine the high rates of disease, infant deaths and chronic health conditions in Gary, Indiana’s poorer neighborhoods. 

  Daniela Velazquez, an online producer and multimedia reporter at Tampa Bay Online in Tampa, will examine the social and environmental factors that affect the everyday choices people make, with a particular emphasis on obstacles to healthy eating and exercising habits.    

   

   

  2010 National Fellows and  Hunt Grant Recipients

  Christina Hernandez, a freelance writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer, will receive a $5,000 grant to examine a troubled health care system in a New Jersey city and local attempts to find solutions.

  Kari Lydersen, a freelance writer in Chicago, will receive $8,000 to produce stories for the Chicago Reader, The Progressive and The Christian Science Monitor on the health effects of the goods movement industry on workers and residents.

  Maureen O’Hagan, a staff reporter for The Seattle Times in Seattle, will receive $3,000 for a project exploring the role food marketing has played in the childhood obesity epidemic and efforts to combat it. 

  Mary Otto, a freelance writer for the Washington Post and editor-in-chief of Street Sense, will receive $5,000 to explore the impact of untreated dental disease in Maryland and community health reform efforts to address it.

  Emily Ramshaw, an assistant managing editor and investigative reporter at The Texas Tribune in Austin, will receive $4,000 to analyze efforts to improve public health in colonias -- 2,300 unincorporated and isolated border towns.