A recording of this webcast is now available.
Speakers’ PowerPoints:
• Jeanne Erdmann
• Michelle Levander
• Rebecca Palpant Shimkets
Here is AHCJ’s list of available fellowships.
Freelancers often walk a fine line between doing work that pays the bills and doing work that helps them reach their creative and career goals. Reporting fellowships are a way to do both. There are a number of reporting fellowships out there, and most are open to freelancers. But how do you make yourself stand out? How do you line up the clients, the story ideas and the plans for doing a fellowship, all while maintaining your other freelance work? In this webinar, directors of two prominent health journalism fellowships – the Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism and the California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships – and a freelancer who is completing her first reporting fellowship with the Association of Health Care Journalists address:
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How to find the right fellowship for you.
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The basics of applying as a freelancer.
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How to make yourself stand out.
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How fellowships can move you in the direction of the career of your dreams.
Panelists
Jeanne Erdmann is a former bone researcher turned freelance health and science writer. Her work has appeared in Cure, Nature, Nature Medicine, Arthritis Today, Science News, Health, the website for Scientific American, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She has upcoming features in Women’s Health and Discover. The 2013 AHCJ Reporting Fellowship on Health Care Performance is her first fellowship and she’s enjoying every minute of it. For her project, she’s writing about disparities in access to genetic counseling, genetic testing, and to follow up care. One of her stories will run in the November issue of Nature Medicine, and two will go in Slate in November and December. In addition to freelancing, Erdmann and colleague co-produce The Open Notebook, a craft focused site for science journalists.
Rebecca Palpant Shimkets is assistant director for The Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism of the Carter Center Mental Health Program, which awards stipends to 10 professional journalists in the United States, South Africa, and Romania each year to produce a significant work on mental health or mental illnesses. The fellowship program has been sustained in New Zealand as the New Zealand Mental Health Media Grants Program through a partnership between Like Minds, Like Mine and the Mental Health Foundation of New Zealand. Palpant Shimkets is an active participant on advisory boards and within national work groups related to stigma and accurate portrayals of mental illnesses in the media.
Michelle Levander is founding director of The California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships and editor-in-chief of its website, ReportingonHealth.org. Levander has reported in Asia, Latin America and the United States for Time Magazine Asia, The Asian Wall Street Journal and The San Jose Mercury News. During her journalism career in California, Levander wrote about education, business health policy, worker health and safety, and the culture of Silicon Valley. In Asia, she reported from China, India, South Korea, and Vietnam on the region’s fast-changing technology scene. She was founding editor of The Technology Journal at The Asian Wall Street Journal and Technology Editor at Time Asia. She has received journalism awards from the Overseas Press Club of America, the Inter American Press Association, and the Society of Professional Journalists. A former Inter American Press Association fellow, she spent a year in Mexico, studying at Mexico City’s El Colegio de Mexico and researching migrant culture from rural Mexico.
Moderator
Heather Boerner is a San Francisco-based health and medical writer and editor with more than a dozen years of experience at newspapers, websites and as a freelance health journalist, with newspapers, magazines, custom publications and websites. She was the recipient of a Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism and winner of a 2011 Award for Excellence in Health Care Journalism.
Jeanne Erdmann
Rebecca Palpant
Shimkets
Michelle Levander
Heather Boerner