The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, with support from The SCAN Foundation, is proud to offer a 10-month residential journalism fellowship focused on long-term care and healthy aging in the United States. During the fellowship period, the selected journalist will develop the analytical research skills needed to create a series of news reports that will be published by AP covering long-term care issues in the United States, including long-term care financing, policy, impact on caregivers, and healthy aging.
The fellow will be selected through a national competition open to journalists with at least five years of experience. Journalists working in text, radio, television, and online are eligible to apply.
The Opportunity
As part of the fellowship, you will participate in the Center’s ongoing Long-Term Care Poll survey research project and have the opportunity to produce reporting projects for the AP.
Approximately 40 percent of your time will be devoted to education and skill development activities, including formal and informal training in health policy, health services research, and social science research methods to facilitate data-driven journalism.
The other 60 percent of your time will be spent developing in-depth reporting projects where you will obtain hands-on experience with the assistance of AP, NORC, and University of Chicago senior staff. In collaboration with AP-NORC senior staff, you will develop a set of working goals for the term of the fellowship. Successful achievement of these mutually agreed upon goals will be awarded with a performance bonus.
You will work with an AP editor to develop innovative reporting projects around long-term care issues in the United States. The AP’s editor will expect you to produce a regular flow of journalistic activity, but at a level appropriate for someone devoted to working mostly on enterprise activities rather than someone assigned to produce spot news on a daily basis. Thoughtful news coverage requires more time than the more superficial stories that dominate most coverage of this issue; this fellowship is designed to give you the time, resources, and training to support more in-depth and harder-hitting news coverage.
