Victor Merina

Victor Merina is a Senior Fellow at the University of Southern California Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism.  A former Los Angeles Times reporter, he was a member of the paper's investigative projects team that was a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for its series “And Justice for Some:  Homicides in Los Angeles County.”  He also shared in the paper’s 1993 Pulitzer for spot news coverage of the L.A. riots following the Rodney King verdict.

A former fellow at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies and the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center, Merina has led writing workshops in South Africa and taught at the American Indian Journalism Institute in South Dakota, as well as the Freedom Forum Diversity Institute in Nashville.  Merina organized and ran a “Covering Indian Country” traveling seminar for the Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism and a “Covering Race & Class” conference at Harvard.  He is currently a newsroom trainer for the Committee of Concerned Journalists, which is based in Washington, D.C.

Merina has spoken at the Harvard Nieman Narrative Writing Conference and at various National Writers Workshops and journalism conventions including those organized by the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), Society for Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the UNITY consortium of minority journalists organizations.  He also was a teaching fellow at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and a University of California Regents Lecturer.  He has presented at the University of Hawaii, University of Alaska at Anchorage, the University of Missouri, Columbia University and other colleges.  He has served on workplace and diversity committees for the Newspaper Association of America and was a writer and weekend editor at KNX/CBS all-news radio in Los Angeles.

Merina has written personal essays for the Los Angeles Times Magazine and Sunday Opinion section and the San Francisco Chronicle.  He is a member of the Asian American Journalists Association and is presently an editor for the reznetnews.org web site that features news about Native Americans.  He also teaches a distance-learning course on “Reporting Across Cultures and Writing about Differences” for News University, the Poynter Institute online program.  Merina has a B.A. in political science from UCLA and a M.S. in journalism from Columbia University.