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 health care disparities or aging and long-term care) and skills-focused (e.g., understanding how to read medical studies or interpret hospital quality data). In 2017, NYHealth awarded the Center for Excellence in Health Care Journalism a grant to support AHCJ’s 2018 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 2018 national conference in Phoenix, as well as a one-year AHCJ membership. NYHealth worked with AHCJ to establish criteria for the cohort of participating journalists, with an emphasis placed on first-time fellows. AHCJ then recruited the applicants and select the fellows based on an application form, résumé, work samples, and employer support. Freelance journalists with a client recommendation were also eligible for the fellowship. Additionally, the Health Foundation for Western & Central New York sponsored 6 fellowships for candidates from Western and Central New York. NYHealth’s support extended the geographic reach to candidates from the rest of the State—further leveraging the impact of this grant.