About Myself

I oversee communications and media grantmaking at The California Endowment, the state’s largest health-focused foundation. The Endowment created and is proud to support the Health Journalism Fellowships program.

I moved to the foundation world in 2009 after 20 years in print journalism and digital media. I started out in the newsroom, working as a reporter for the Associated Press and then as a reporter and editor at The Los Angeles Times. While in Los Angeles, I served as the founding editor of City Times, the community news section created to improve coverage of central Los Angeles after the 1992 riots. I moved to the online world in 1995, joining The Washington Post where I helped to launch washingtontonpost.com and served as the site’s managing editor.

After that, I held senior management positions at a number of online companies including AOL, GeoCities and HomePage.com before returning to the newspaper world in 2003 at The Bakersfield Californian. In Bakersfield, I created a new product development team that was nationally recognized for its participatory media initiatives, including the first “citizen journalism” publication to be started by a U.S. newspaper.

I'm a native of Yuma, Arizona, and a second-generation Mexican-American. I earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Arizona State University and a Master of Public Administration degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

You can keep up with me via my blog at http://mediaoptimist.wordpress.com and on Twitter as @mlfulton