Center for Excellence in Health Care Journalism

As the nation’s media outlets face shrinking budgets and shoestring staffing, resources for journalists’ continuing education and professional development are limited. Increasingly, reporters are assigned to multiple beats rather than to one specific issue area, so their knowledge of any one area may be relatively superficial.

The Center for Excellence in Health Care Journalism, the supporting nonprofit organization for the Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ), aimed to fill that knowledge gap through an annual four-day national conference that attracted approximately 600–800 reporters, editors, and producers, as well as health care luminaries. The conference covered a wide range of issues, both content-focused (e.g., covering the progress under the Affordable Care Act, health care disparities, aging and long-term care) and skills-focused (e.g., understanding how to read medical studies or interpret hospital quality data). In 2016, NYHealth awarded the Center for Excellence in Health Care Journalism a grant to support AHCJ’s 2017 cohort of New York State Health Journalism Fellowships.

Under this grant, AHCJ provided fellowships to 12 journalists in New York State to cover registration, lodging, and a travel stipend for AHCJ’s April 2017 national conference in Orlando, as well as a one-year AHCJ membership. AHCJ worked with NYHealth to establish criteria for the cohort of participating journalists. AHCJ then recruited the applicants and selected fellows based on an application form, résumé, work samples, and employer support or a client recommendation. At the conference, the New York State fellows attended workshops and sessions meant to deepen journalists’ understanding of the health topics they are called upon to cover most: health policy; consumer health; social determinants and disparities; medical research and education; and the business of health care.