Charles Ornstein is an American journalist. He is currently a senior editor for ProPublica specializing in

health care Health care or healthcare is the improvement of health via the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, amelioration or cure of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in people. Health care is delivered by health profe ...

issues, including medical quality, the

United States Department of Veterans Affairs The United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is a Cabinet-level executive branch department of the federal government charged with providing life-long healthcare services to eligible military veterans at the 170 VA medical centers a ...

and Big Pharma. He is also an adjunct associate professor of journalism at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

. Born in

Detroit Detroit ( , ; , ) is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is also the largest U.S. city on the United States–Canada border, and the seat of government of Wayne County. The City of Detroit had a population of 639,111 at th ...

Michigan Michigan () is a state in the Great Lakes region of the upper Midwestern United States. With a population of nearly 10.12 million and an area of nearly , Michigan is the 10th-largest state by population, the 11th-largest by area, and the ...

, Ornstein attended

Hillel Day School Hillel Day School, named after the Jewish religious leader, sage and scholar Hillel, is an independent Pre-K – 8 Jewish day school in Farmington Hills, Michigan, a city in the Detroit metropolitan area. Founded in 1958, it was the first no ...

. He is a graduate of the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

, where he majored in history and psychology and was editor of the college newspaper, the ''

Daily Pennsylvanian ''The Daily Pennsylvanian, Inc.'' is the independent student media organization of the University of Pennsylvania. The DP, Inc. publishes The Daily Pennsylvanian newspaper, 34th Street Magazine, and Under the Button, as well as five newslette ...

.'' In 1999-2000, he was a Media Fellow with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. He is a past president and vice president of the Association of Health Care Journalists. He was a reporter for ''

The Dallas Morning News ''The Dallas Morning News'' is a daily newspaper serving the Dallas–Fort Worth area of Texas, with an average print circulation of 65,369. It was founded on October 1, 1885 by Alfred Horatio Belo as a satellite publication of the ''Galvesto ...

'' (where he covered health care on the business desk and worked in the Washington bureau) before joining the metro investigative projects team at the ''

Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the Un ...

''. In 2004, Ornstein and Tracy Weber reported "The Trouble at

King/Drew Hospital The Martin Luther King Jr. Outpatient Center, formerly known as Martin Luther King Jr. Multi-Service Ambulatory Care Center, Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center (King/Drew), and later Martin Luther King Jr.–Harbor Hospital (MLK–Harbor ...

" in a series of articles for the ''Los Angeles Times''. The newspaper received the

2005 File:2005 Events Collage V2.png, From top left, clockwise: Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf of Mexico; the Funeral of Pope John Paul II is held in Vatican City; "Me at the zoo", the first video ever to be uploaded to YouTube; Eris was discovered in ...

Pulitzer Prize for Public Service The Pulitzer Prize for Public Service is one of the fourteen American Pulitzer Prizes annually awarded for journalism. It recognizes a distinguished example of meritorious public service by a newspaper or news site through the use of its journalis ...

"for its courageous, exhaustively researched series exposing deadly medical problems and racial injustice at a major public hospital"."The 2005 Pulitzer Prize Winners: Public Service"
The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 2013-11-04. With reprints of 20 works (''L.A. Times'' articles, 18 published during December 2004). The series was also recognized by other journalism awards. Another series by Ornstein and Weber, "When Caregivers Harm: California's Unwatched Nurses" in 2009, was a finalist for the Public Service Pulitzer. The citation recognized ''LA Times'' and ''ProPublica'' for "their exposure of gaps in California’s oversight of dangerous and incompetent nurses, blending investigative scrutiny and multimedia storytelling to produce corrective changes." Previously based in

Burbank, California Burbank is a city in the southeastern end of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles County, California, United States. Located northwest of downtown Los Angeles, Burbank has a population of 107,337. The city was named after David Burbank, w ...

, he lives in Glen Ridge, New Jersey with his wife and three sons. Miles, Jude, and Holden.

Awards

* 2005

Pulitzer Prize The Pulitzer Prize () is an award for achievements in newspaper, magazine, online journalism, literature, and musical composition within the United States. It was established in 1917 by provisions in the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made h ...

for Public Service (awarded to the ''Los Angeles Times'') * 2006

Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award The Robert F. Kennedy Awards for Excellence in Journalism is a journalism award named after Robert F. Kennedy and awarded by the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. The annual awards are issued in several categories and were est ...

* 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service finalist"Public Service"
The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 2013-11-04. * 2014 Health Policy Hero Award from

National Center for Health Research The National Center for Health Research (formerly known as the National Research Center for Women & Families) is a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit organization founded in 1999, providing health-related services such as providing free informatio ...

References

External links

Ornstein at Twitter
*
C-SPAN ''Q&A'' interview with Ornstein and Tracy Weber about "The Troubles at King/Drew", July 17, 2005
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ornstein, Charles American male journalists The Daily Pennsylvanian people University of Pennsylvania alumni Living people Los Angeles Times people Year of birth missing (living people) Place of birth missing (living people)