Welcome to our new site, and Year No. 2

The California HealthCare Foundation Center for Health Reporting exemplifies two emerging trends in the fast-changing world of journalism.  We produce in-depth news from inside a university journalism school, and our work is financed by a philanthropic foundation.

Today, as we begin our second year of operation at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, one more thing can be said:  This new journalism model has legs.

The six journalists who make up our center, all veteran professionals with decades of collective experience, are producing powerful and in-depth reporting on California health by partnering with local news organizations across the state.  Since our inception, we have delivered 17 projects appearing in 31 California newspapers, on topics ranging from the health hazards of wood-burning stoves to a growing shortage of Medicare doctors.

Although we’re just getting started, we've demonstrated one point clearly: that a news organization supported by a foundation (the California HealthCare Foundation) and affiliated with a university journalism school (USC Annenberg) can partner with local news organizations to produce difference-making journalism.  Every editor or news director we’ve spoken with has welcomed the idea of collaboration.  We think this is a model that will grow, and may well have applications in other locales and other sectors.

Our early success has occurred in large measure because of the work of our news partners.  Rumors about the demise of mainstream newsrooms are overbaked.  From Chico to Ventura to Sacramento, we have seen how news staffs of all sizes are able to mobilize with us to produce powerful journalism, despite repeated waves of workforce downsizing.

To state the obvious, this is a remarkable time to be reporting on health.  The topic is never far from a list of issues most important to Americans.  But now the stakes have been raised, by Congress' passage of health reform and by fast-escalating health costs that threaten to bankrupt governments and health consumers alike.

At a conference on health and the economy last week at USC, speaker after speaker spoke darkly about the United States' seeming inability to stop a ruining cycle of health-cost escalation.  This is one arena where we will particularly focus our journalism.

We report on these matters by looking at a most interesting geography -- the state of California, with all its impact and diversity and history of innovation.  And we go deep into this geography, our reporters and editors often camping out in communities for weeks at a time.

Now, we add a new element to our work: a Website that chronicles all of this work – roughly 175 stories written by reporters working for the center or our newspaper partners; and scores of photographs and multimedia elements. The site will also allow us to update with developments from these projects.

We hope this ever-expanding archive of California-based reporting on health will become a valuable repository that will better inform citizens and, ultimately, improve life in our communities.

We invite you to take the site out for a spin.  Click on our Projects tab and you'll find summaries of all 17 of our projects.  Hit the Impact tab and you'll see examples of our work's reverberations in California communities.

Here is what we aim to achieve at the Center for Health Reporting:

• To bring a deeper level of understanding about critical health issues to California consumers and policymakers alike.
• To strengthen, through partnerships, the work of California news organizations of all stripes, many of which have sharply reduced reporting staffs.  We work with small outlets that couldn't undertake a big project without our help, as well as large ones that benefit from the extra reporting firepower we can deliver.
• To report on health from the ground up, speaking directly to hometown communities, institutions and citizens through our local news partnerships.
• To focus on solutions to health problems as well as the problems themselves.  Information is our game, but the betterment of our communities is our aim.

Although our work to date has been entirely with newspapers, we now are expanding into other news areas – broadcast in particular but also online community news sites. 

We invite you to participate in our work.  You can do so by commenting on our stories, clicking the story idea link, or signing up for our newsletter.  Also, we encourage you to contact any of us to discuss California health – myself or managing editor Richard Kipling, or members of our reporting staff: senior writers Deborah Schoch, Emily Bazar and John Gonzales, and multimedia reporter Lauren Whaley.

We'll be back early next week with another new project – this one with the Riverside Press-Enterprise.