About Myself

I've been a reporter, editor and journalism educator for close to two decades -- working 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.

In 2004, I became the founding director of The California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships, a program of USC's Annenberg School for Communication. We have educated more than 350 journalists through our short intensive seminars. Our fellows have gone on to win prizes and promotions, and, even more importantly, they've produced hundreds of excellent health stories as Fellowships projects, on often unexplored topics. In 2009, we launched ReportingonHealth, a Web 2.0 community for journalists and new media content providers (and colleagues in academia and health. It's been an exciting project to build and foster this community, which provides a place for journalists to learn from and inspire each other -- sometimes under difficult circumstances in the industry.