Staff

Michael Parks

Michael Parks, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and longtime reporter, editor and educator, is founder and director of the center.  Parks was editor of the Los Angeles Times from 1997 to 2000, a period during which the Times won four additional Pulitzer Prizes.  Parks joined the USC Annenberg faculty in Fall 2000. In Fall 2001, he became interim director of the School of Journalism. He was named director of the school in March 2002 and finished his term June 30, 2008.  From his first overseas assignment covering the war in Vietnam as the Baltimore Sun's Saigon correspondent, Parks reported on major international news events from a variety of international capitals, including Beijing, Moscow, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, and Jerusalem. He joined the Los Angeles Times in 1980 and in 1995 was promoted to deputy foreign editor and later managing editor, before taking the helm as editor in 1997. At USC Annenberg, Parks guided the creation and adoption of an innovative core curriculum that trains students to report stories for print, broadcast, and new media. Contact Parks at mparks@usc.edu

David Westphal

David Westphal joined the center in 2010 as editor-in-chief following a nearly four-decade career as a newspaper reporter and editor.  He came to USC after serving as deputy bureau chief and then bureau chief of McClatchy Newspapers’ Washington Bureau from 1995 to 2008.  With McClatchy’s purchase of Knight Ridder in 2006, he merged the two companies’ news staffs in Washington, and also oversaw the McClatchy Tribune News Service. Prior to that he worked as a reporter and editor at The Des Moines Register for 17 years – the last seven as managing editor. He has won the National Press Club's Washington Correspondence award and is two-time winner of the John Hancock Award for Business and Financial Reporting.  While he was managing editor of The Des Moines Register, the newspaper won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.  He joined USC Annenberg in 2008 as executive in residence, where he wrote about new media, government funding for the news, and foundation-funded journalism. He is a senior fellow at Annenberg’s Center for Communication Leadership and Policy. Contact Westphal at dwestpha@usc.edu

Richard Kipling

Richard Kipling is managing editor of the Center. During a 30-year journalism career, he has held various newsroom management positions at the San Diego Union and at the Los Angeles Times, where he was city editor of the San Diego County Edition and editor of the Times Orange County Edition. For several years, Kipling was director of the Tribune Company’s Minority Editorial Training Program (METPro), where he recruited, trained and placed at daily newspapers almost 200 minority journalists. He has taught journalism at USC, Occidental College and Caltech. Kipling holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Political Science from UC Santa Barbara and pursued a PhD degree in Government at the Claremont Graduate School.  Contact Kipling at rkipling@usc.edu

Emily Bazar

 Senior writer Emily Bazar is based in our Sacramento office, where she covers stories about health reform, coverage for Californians with pre-existing medical conditions and limitations in mental health care.  Prior to joining the Center for Health Reporting, Bazar was a national reporter for USA Today, where she covered immigration, the effects of the current economic recession and other topics. Her first journalism job was at The Sacramento Bee. Over nine years, her beats included transportation, higher education, California politics, the energy crisis and immigration. She has appeared on Democracy Now! and other radio shows. Her stories and video have been picked up by national print and broadcast outlets, including Good Morning America.  Bazar graduated from Stanford University. Contact Bazar at ebazar@usc.edu

John Gonzales

Senior writer John Gonzales specializes in the demographics of health policy. He was most recently based in New Orleans as Southern Regional Correspondent for the Associated Press. He covered efforts to rebuild from Hurricane Katrina, as well as immigration and the shifting demographics of The South. Gonzales previously was Hispanic Affairs reporter at Newsday -- a beat that took him from New York's emerging Mexican neighborhoods, to the U.S. border region, to rural Mexican towns. His "Texas Smuggling" articles won the National Association of Hispanic Journalists best breaking news award in 2004. He was also awarded The Freedom Forum’s North American Journalist Exchange fellowship in 2001. Gonzales spent the early part of his 15-year journalism career on the staffs of The Daily Breeze and the Gardena Valley News. He is a USC Annenberg graduate, with honors, and a dual major in political science. He is also a Spanish speaker and graduate of the Los Angeles Times Minority Editorial Training Program, or METPro.  Contact Gonzales at j.gonzales@usc.edu

Deborah Schoch

Senior writer Deborah Schoch specializes in topics tied to hospitals and health care delivery, aging, mental health and environmental health.  She was a founding writer with the center’s pilot project.  Schoch spent 18 years as a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, reporting on the environment and public health. She wrote about E. coli food contamination in the Salinas Valley, asthma in Los Angeles, drought and mental health in Oregon and the loss of dark skies above Utah’s national parks. She earlier worked at the Rochester Times-Union, the Burlington (Vt.) Free Press and the Ithaca (N.Y.) Journal.  Schoch graduated from Cornell University and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1999-2000, studying environmental science, law and policy. She was a 2009 fellow at the MIT Knight Science boot camp on medical evidence.  Contact Schoch at mdschoch@usc.edu

Lauren M. Whaley

Multimedia reporter Lauren M. Whaley produces radio stories, photographs and audio slideshows for the center and its partner organizations. She is working to expand the center's online and broadcast presence. Before joining the center, Whaley worked as a freelance radio reporter, writer and photographer. She produced stories for Southern California Public Radio and KQED Public Radio as well as the Jackson Hole, Wyoming website TheSnaz.com. While living in Wyoming, she worked as a newspaper reporter, blog editor and freelance magazine writer. She earned her master's degree in specialized science journalism from the University of Southern California, her bachelor's from Bowdoin College and spent summers in her early 20s taking high school girls on Arctic canoe expeditions. She hails from Baltimore. Contact Whaley at whaley@usc.edu

Kelley Weiss

Broadcast reporter Kelley Weiss is based in our Sacramento office where she’s helping lead the center’s expansion into public broadcasting. Her stories have appeared on NPR, Marketplace, The World and KQED Public Radio. She’s produced series about illegal sales of prescription drugs at swap meets and preventable patient deaths and money mismanagement in Missouri’s mental health system. She won a 2009 national Edward R. Murrow award for investigative reporting and has received several honors in the Association of Health Care Journalists awards competition. Weiss previously worked as a health care reporter at Capital Public Radio in Sacramento and KCUR in Kansas City. She also has worked as a freelancer writer for Reuters and California Watch. She’s completed a health reporting fellowship from the Association of Health Care Journalists and has a journalism degree from the University of Kansas. Contact Weiss at kelley.weiss@usc.edu

Bobby Kirkwood

Bobby Kirkwood is program coordinator at the center, handling all of the logistical duties that make the operation work – budgeting, bill payment, travel coordinator and financial liaison with USC and the California HealthCare Foundation. She serves a similar role with the Alhambra Project, another USC Annenberg initiative aimed at providing news and information in the city of Alhambra. She was previously program coordinator for USC Annenberg's Institute for Justice and Journalism.