Mike Tharp: We're hiring a health care reporter

Good news.

Thanks to the California Endowment, the Sun-Star will hire a full-time health care reporter for the next 18 months.

That means our county, one of the worst in the state for health care services, will become the focus of a lot more of our news coverage.

The only string attached by the endowment's offer was that the reporter speak both English and Spanish. Since some 55 percent of our population is Latino and many are underserved in health services, that makes sense.

Our reporter will be part of a larger strategy the endowment has deployed in California. Merced County was chosen as one of the 14 places in the state to work with the endowment in a 10-year plan to help transform communities and neighborhoods into places where everybody can be healthy, safe and ready to learn, according to Building Healthy Communities.

That project has been under way since last year, reaching out to South Merced, Beachwood/Franklin, Planada and Le Grand. The endowment started with 10 goals to accomplish over the next decade. After polling folks in those communities, it set three priorities over the next three years: create healthier youngsters to grow, learn, play and lead, which organizers call "Healthy Youth Development;" prevent and reduce violence; and link economic development to community health.

Our health care reporter will cover those activities as well as a heckuva lot of other health care issues. And we'll start a health care blog on our website, www.mercedsunstar.com. Carol Reiter, our reporter who's written hundreds of stories about health care over the years, will become a valued mentor for our newcomer. Carol will continue to bird-dog her other beat, agriculture and will add environmental coverage to her portfolio.

The Sun-Star's path has been smoothed in this venture because the endowment already has funded a health care reporter for McClatchy's Spanish-language weekly, Vida En El Valle. Debbie Kuykendall, our publisher, HR's Peggy Nielsen and our corporate legal team in Sacramento, could work from a template already in place for Vida. That helped a lot.

Mary Lou Fulton, a former newspaper reporter herself, has spearheaded the endowment's effort to strengthen coverage of health care issues. The endowment's grant to us "is one of many we are making across the state to support more high-quality health journalism," she says. "We are proud and pleased to have the Sun-Star as part of this effort."

You can check out the endowment at its website, http://www.calendow.org/.

Our readers will understand this isn't the first time the Sun-Star has rolled the dice on an untested effort to make us better and give you the highest-quality information.

We've done two series with the USC Annenberg School's California HealthCare Foundation Center for Health Reporting: a three-part series in late 2008 on UC Merced's proposed med school -- the first newspaper to partner with the center; and in February, another three-part series, "Houses of Blues: the Extreme Stress of Merced's Foreclosure Epidemic.

We think we were the first newspaper in the country to survey the emotional and mental toll the foreclosure crisis has taken on our residents.

Both involved taking a risk, trying something new for the first time. Both paid off in valuable long-form narratives that explained and analyzed important issues for you, our audience, along with some suggested solutions and prescriptions. The Sun-Star kept total editorial control of both projects, just as we will with our new health care reporter.

Mary Lou knows full well the need for such independence. Our coverage of health care issues will mirror all our other news coverage: a thorough, accurate and impartial presentation of information to you, so you can make judgments, cast votes and be well informed about our communities.

We've been interviewing candidates, and we think we've found a good one. We hope our new reporter can start next month.

We're too small to fail.

You've read that here before. It's the Sun-Star newsroom's mantra. We all do more with less to get you the news you need the best ways we can. That's our mission as well as our job.

Thanks for your support. And we look forward to your company as we continue to march on this exciting journalistic journey.

Executive Editor Mike Tharp can be reached at (209) 385-2456 or mtharp@mercedsun-star.com.