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. Each collaborator receives the stipend. This portion of our program is offered in collaboration with our partner, New America Media.

Last year, from Oct. 4-9, 2009, our 15 National Health Journalism Fellows and the five grantees of our new Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism participated in an exciting week of workshops and field trips. You can also read entries in our  Fellowships blog to learn more about last year's National Fellows. Our 2009 events included:

• A keynote address by Anthony Iton, M.D., J.D., MPH, a public health visionary who questions how much health reform will accomplish if underlying community health issues linger unaddressed. Dr. Iton's creative data crunching on local health conditions has provided story ideas for many a journalist. So be sure to read our Fellowships blog post on his talk.
• A briefing on how to use mapping as a tool for citizen engagement and community journalism, by the award-winning husband-wife team of Sean Connelley and Katy Newton, who produced "Not Just a Number" for the Oakland Tribune.
• A discussion on how to tackle long projects in short-staffed newsrooms with two award-winning news veterans, Alison Young, president of Investigative Reporters and Editors and a reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Robert Rosenthal, executive director of the Center for Investigative Reporting. 
• A briefing on Health Reform: "What's Hot, What's True and How to Report on It," with a distinguished trio: Stan Dorn, of the Washington D.C.-based Urban Institute, Peter Harbage, of Harbage & Associates, based in Washington D.C. and California, and Noam Levey, the Washington, D.C.-based Health Policy Reporter for the Los Angeles Times.
• A visit to slum housing, located in the shadow of Los Angeles' biggest downtown development project, to talk about the health impacts of substandard housing with tenants themselves, with organizers from SAJE (Strategic Actions, Just Economy) and Rebecca Morley, executive director of the Washington D.C. National Center for Health Housing.
• A neighborhood tour and talk about the health of the Watts community, including a briefing by Maxine Liggins, M.D., the local public health officer (on topics ranging from health disparities to the challenges of combating community mistrust of prevention efforts), and a seminar about reporting on HIV/Aids in Black America with documentary film maker Renata Simone, who has been chronicling the course of HIV/AIDS for more than a decade, and the Rev. Clyde W. Oden, Jr.,Senior Pastor of Bryant Temple African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles, a champion for reducing the stigma of AIDS in the Black church, and author of a pastor's guide for HIV/AIDS ministry.  
• Two panels on children's health: Blake Morrison, deputy editor of USA Today and winner of the Grantham Prize, shares investigative reporting tips about his multimedia project, The Smokestack Effect: Toxic Air and America's Schools with Manuel Pastor,  an expert on the impacts of airborne toxins on learning. And the reporting team of Dave Davis and Joan Mazzolini of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, share ideas on reporting on growing up in an unhealthy neighbohood: poverty, pollution and disease, based on their seminal reporting examining the health and well-being of Ohio's children.