Students at the Mosaic Journalism Workshop in Sane Jose, California.

PRINCETON, N.J. — With significant support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Dow Jones News Fund will award $71,000 in grants to summer high school journalism workshops that concentrate on inequities in healthcare, education and other public services.

The Fund chose 12 programs that primarily reach underserved communities and students who do not have access to journalism training in their schools.

The 2021 grantees:

  • The Andy Harvey Broadcast Workshop at Northern Arizona University teaches students to report on the physical and mental well-being of the indigenous population in Arizona, as they produce multimedia content for a live-to-tape broadcast, website and social media.
  • At the Digital Journalism Academy at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, students learn to report on and to write stories about inequities in healthcare highlighted at the Meharry Health Summit. The students’ work will be incorporated into the event.
  • At the Detroit Writing Room’s 2021 Summer Journalism Camp, students spend two weeks reporting and writing their own stories, with coaching from award-winning journalists.
  • The Donald W. Carson Journalism Diversity Workshop at the University of Arizona teaches teens a variety of multimedia journalism skills as they cover the Campus Health Service and report on stories that impact their peers, such as access to health care, vaccinations and nutrition.
  • The Howard University Multicultural Media Academy teaches Washington, D.C.-based students how to report, write and broadcast stories about the causes of poor health outcomes in their communities using solution-oriented storytelling.
  • Journalism Jumpstart at Florida International University develops and sharpens beginner journalists’ skills as they report on issues impacting Miami’s Haitian community.
  • The Mosaic Journalism Workshop empowers young journalists from San Jose, California, to report and write stories important to them – from housing costs to poverty to immigration status and impacts on the health and welfare of children and adults in Silicon Valley.
  • Students attending the United High School Media Summer Workshop at Marshall University report on the effect of the opioid crisis on local communities in Huntington, West Virginia, while embedding themselves in The Herald-Dispatch newsroom.
  • The Poynter High School Journalism Program teaches students from Tampa Bay and beyond to develop their own multimedia stories, including where to find good story ideas, how to turn a broad idea into engaging content, and covering COVID-19 and its impact on certain communities.
  • The Scholastic Journalism Summer Workshop: Kids and COVID-19 at Kent State University takes a Solutions Journalism approach to covering the impact of COVID-19 on families and youth in rural and diverse areas in Northern Ohio.
  • The Summer Journalism Camp in Seattle hosted by the Washington Journalism Education Association breaks students into teams to cover health and wellness topics. Speakers cover the evolving field of journalism, how journalists are responding to ongoing issues of racial reckoning, the coronavirus pandemic and the push for equity and social justice on all community fronts.
  • The ThreeSixty News Reporter Academy at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, is uniquely positioned at the epicenter of the racial justice reckoning in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and the pandemic. Students report on health equity, with a special focus on mental health.

The Fund will also award $7,500 in college scholarships in a competition for students who attend Fund-supported workshops and are nominated by their workshop directors.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation awarded DJNF a $50,000 grant to encourage health reporting in its 2021 summer workshops.

About The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
For more than 40 years the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has worked to improve health and health care. We are working with others to build a national Culture of Health enabling everyone in America to live longer, healthier lives.