Career Development : Calendar

AHCJ Media Fellowships on Health Performance

01/31/11 - 02/01/11     New York, NY

About the fellowships:

• The 2010-2011 fellows and their projects
• Press release announcing program
• Understanding and applying for the fellowship

This 10-month program allows mid-career journalists to pursue a significant reporting project examining health care systems. Guidance is provided through customized seminars on health performance, conference calls and e-mail consultations with AHCJ fellowship leaders.

Seminar 2 agenda

Speaker bios

JACQUI BANASZYNSKI is Knight Chair at the Missouri School of Journalism and editing fellow at The Poynter Institute. Her series about a gay farm couple facing AIDS won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. She was a 1986 Pulitzer finalist in international reporting, and won the nation's top deadline sports award for coverage of the 1988 Olympics. She has edited dozens of award-winning projects, from features to investigations, and coaches journalists around the world.

LEN BRUZZESE is the executive director of the Association of Health Care Journalists and its Center for Excellence in Health Care Journalism. He also is an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism and serves on the executive committee of the Council of National Journalism Organizations. Bruzzese, a founding staff member of USA Today, spent 20 years in daily journalism before entering the nonprofit and academic worlds. He is co-author of "The Investigative Reporter's Handbook," (fourth edition), and has edited 12 reporter beat books focused on reporting topics of use to daily journalists.

TRUDY LIEBERMAN, immediate past-president of AHCJ's board of directors, is a fellow at the Center for Advancing Health, a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review, where she blogs about health care and income security issues and she is a contributor to The Nation. She was recently director of the health and medical reporting program at the Graduate School of Journalism, City University of New York and had a long career at Consumer Reports specializing in insurance, health care and health care financing. She was the director of the Center for Consumer Health Choices at Consumers Union. She has written a column about health and the marketplace for the Los Angeles Times and began her career as a consumer writer for the Detroit Free Press.

CHARLES ORNSTEIN, president of AHCJ's board of directors, is a senior reporter with ProPublica in New York. As a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, he co-authored a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative series on the troubled Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center. In 2006, Ornstein chronicled lapses in the nation's organ transplant system, triggering a congressional investigation and changes in federal regulations. The coverage also garnered several awards. Ornstein previously reported on health, domestic policy and the health care business for The Dallas Morning News. In 1999-2000, he was a Media Fellow with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, examining the future of the employer-sponsored health insurance system.

JILL ROSENTHAL, M.P.H., is a program director at the National Academy for State Health Policy. She provides policy analysis and technical assistance to states on issues related to health systems performance, quality and patient safety, and child health and development. She joined NASHP in 2000, having previously focused on rural health and health promotion issues in West Virginia.  She is a graduate of Colgate University and the University of North Carolina's School of Public Health.

CATHY SCHOEN, M.S., is senior vice president for policy, research and evaluation at The Commonwealth Fund. She is a member of the Fund's executive management team and research director of the Fund's Commission on a High Performance Health System. Her work includes strategic oversight and management of surveys, research and policy initiatives to track health system performance. Prior to joining the Fund in 1995, Schoen taught health economics at the University of Massachusetts' School of Public Health and directed special projects at the UMASS Labor Relations and Research Center. She has authored numerous publications on health policy issues, insurance, and national/international health system performance and co-authored the book "Health and the War on Poverty."