Eight Reporters named as JAWS 2025 Health Journalism Fellows
The Journalism and Women Symposium (JAWS), the premier not-for-profit organization dedicated to professional growth and empowerment of women journalists, has awarded the 2025 JAWS Health Journalism Fellowship to eight new and emerging health reporters who will examine disparities and inequities in U.S. health care.
With critical support from the Commonwealth Fund, the fellowship is in its third year. The goal of the fellowship is to train more journalists in health reporting and help diversify the journalist pool for better and more inclusive reporting on health issues across the nation.
Each fellow will spend the next seven months working on a substantive reporting project, assisted by a reporting grant of $4,000. Additionally, fellows receive a one-year membership to JAWS and registration and travel expenses to the JAWS annual conference.
Under a separate grant from The Commonwealth Fund, the fellows will attend the Association of Health Care Journalists annual conference in Los Angeles in May. They will have an opportunity to participate in educational sessions, network with veteran health journalists and conduct some on the ground reporting.
“I’m excited to have such a promising group of fellows for the third year of our health reporting fellowship program. The training and guidance our fellows receive through the program provide an important base for filling a key need to have more women covering the health beat. I am thrilled that JAWS can help fill such a need at a critical time," said JAWS president Angela Greiling Keane.
“Covering health issues through an evidence-based, scientific lens is more important than ever. Training journalists to do so effectively can make a real impact in their communities, especially on topics that may not get much attention,” said veteran health journalist Liz Seegert, who will direct the program.
The eight fellows and their projects are:
Nik Altenberg, Santa Cruz Local
Project: Investigating health harms of pesticides in Watsonville, CA, community, particularly farmworkers and children.
Taylor Blatchford, The Seattle Times
Project: Exploring the complex question of mental health crisis response through the lens of two key groups of people: dispatchers for 911 and 988, and teams of mental health professionals that respond to people in crisis.
Emily Brindley, Dallas Morning News
Project: Looking at communities that do not have access to maternity services, focusing on hospitals that have closed their labor and delivery departments.
Julia Métraux, Mother Jones
Project: Shedding light on how biases about disability and pregnancy shape the treatment of disabled pregnant patients.
Jazmin Orozco Rodriguez, KFF Health News
Project: Investigating whether Native Americans were disproportionately affected during the Medicaid unwinding in California, Arizona, Alaska, Oklahoma, and Montana.
Kena Shah, The Fuller Project (freelance)
Project: Reporting on how Canadian health care is unexpectedly lagging behind its American counterpart when it comes to providing care for female genital mutilation survivors.
Natalie Skowlund, Latino USA (freelance)
Project: Producing a pocast series on health disparities in Colorado’s Latino community.
Shernay Williams, Ivanhoe Broadcast News (freelance)
Project: Exploring breast cancer trends in Black women, in particular the mortality gap and genetic predisposition to the disease.
About the JAWS Health Journalism Fellowship
The fellowship includes a reporting grant to cover project-related time and expenses along with ongoing mentoring from two experienced health journalists: Naseem Miller, senior health reporter with The Journalists Resource, and Margarita Birnbaum, an independent health journalist based in Dallas, Texas.
Fellows were selected from a pool of diverse applicants, based on their knowledge and depth of understanding of their proposal issue, the proposed project’s contribution to public discussion and debate, its potential impact on the intended audience, challenges to conventions or stereotypes, and ability to meet high journalistic standards.
About the Commonwealth Fund
The Commonwealth Fund — among the first private foundations started by a woman philanthropist, Anna M. Harkness — was established in 1918 with the broad charge to enhance the common good. Today, the Fund supports independent research on health care issues and makes grants to promote an equitable high-performing health care system that achieves better access, improved quality, and greater efficiency, particularly for people of color, people with low income and the uninsured.