Healthy Journalism

Newsers and geeks: come together

2011-07-30T11:49:00.010-04:00

Shouldn’t the developers of cool new media tools and journalists be going to the same parties?

Of course they should.

But if this were happening, I would have swapped a lot more hugs and high-fives during the 2011 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference back in June. Close to 400 people showed up to cheer the Knight News Challenge Winners for 2011, who together took home $4.7 million. You can read all about the winners here.

The three-day conference wrapped around the awards had about 200 invited participants. I knew only about a dozen of them, mostly people like me whose programs are funded by the Knight Foundation and those who work for the foundation.

This was a shock because at my core professional conferences, National Association of Science Writers and Association of Health Care Journalists, the majority of participants looks familiar to me– whether or not I can summon their names at a moment’s notice.

At the MIT meeting, young people who embrace geek culture ruled the conference sessions and parties. They’re devising cool new tools for visualizing what’s important in huge and messy databases, identifying credible sources when an international crisis unleashes a tsunami of tweets, or mapping oil spills by dangling cheap cameras from balloons or kites. And much, much more.

This is exactly the stuff that activates the “gee whiz” gene in the geeky science reporters who’ve been my mentors, peers and students. But my peeps were not at MIT and they didn’t have the chance to hear about new tools for gathering information, engaging citizens, and spreading news every which way.

At this meeting, the civic media people were talking mostly to themselves and the people who fund their work.

One prominent speaker came close to saying that the goal of the civic media movement is to make journalists obsolete. Another said that when major broadcast news organizations pick up a trending topic on Twitter or a viral YouTube video, they’ve been “hacked.” People laughed.

I found this disturbing and annoying. It sets my teeth on edge just like hearing accomplished journalists dismiss Twitter or scoff at the idea that members of a community can talk among themselves, without a reporters and editors to mediate.

Journalists and civic media activists have a lot to learn from one another. Even brilliant data analysis is no good unless it can be told as a compelling story that fires up the populace, one of the award winners admitted. Reporters and editors know something about this.

And the fact is that civic media folks and journalists all want to change the world. We all love the rush of discovering what others have overlooked, connecting the dots, figuring out what it all means, and – if we can – fighting injustice and moving people to act.

So it doesn’t make sense to disrespect one another or talk about putting anybody out of business. It does make sense to bring our knowledge, skills and passion together. An organization called Hacks/Hackers, whose tagline is “join the media revolution/rebooting journalism” has begun doing this, with journalists and techies launching local chapters in the United States, Canada, and a few Latin American and European cities.

Here’s another idea: integrate civic media tool developers into the programs of all the major journalism conferences. Personally I’d like to start with AHCJ 2012, the Association of Health Care Journalists conference set for next April in Atlanta.

Which brings me to the robot (pictured above) created by Dutch designer Joris Laarman. She’s part of the “Modern by Design” show at the High Museum in Atlanta, where visitors watch her pluck tiny steel cubes from a tray, dab on glue, and deftly slot them into position. The startling result of this high-tech effort is a high-style, Baroque side table constructed of metal instead of lustrous wood.

At first the juxtaposition is startling, but then it makes perfect sense. If a Dutch robot can win friends in an Atlanta art museum, surely it’s not a stretch for professional journalists and civic media activists to come together.

Coming soon: Savannah youth journalism

2011-06-07T14:41:00.009-04:00

The best way to find out what people want is to ask.

And when Savannah economic development researchers asked middle- and high-school students what they wanted from a new community center, the answer was clear.

Teenagers in West Savannah and adjacent neighborhoods did not want a gym or a weight room. Instead, they yearned for better job skills, information about managing money, and evidence that their futures could be brighter than Outkast’s “West Savannah.”

Two years later, the Moses Jackson Advancement Center (MJAC) has a computer center and print shop, a culinary program that teaches accounting and financial management skills, a community garden, and a sandwich shop and retail store in the works. I visited for the first time in late May and was struck by the vibrancy and energy of the place.

Youth programs are housed alongside the Lady Bamford Early Childhood Center and a day program for seniors. When I was there, the seniors left the building laughing loudly, but teens working in the computer lab and the kitchen ignored the ruckus.

The West Savannah portrayed by Big Boi is a world with too many teen mothers, too few jobs, too much drug dealing and not enough hope. These problems have not disappeared since he moved to Atlanta some 20 years ago but things are looking up.

No one can miss dramatic improvements such as the $50 million makeover of the old Fellwood housing projects into a handsome, mixed-use development with 300 energy-efficient new residential units. This was mostly underwritten by HUD, the federal Housing and Urban Development agency.

Less obvious are educational and community engagement programs at MJAC, paid for by a special HUD/HBCU Project at Savannah State University led by Project Director Anne Roise. The principal investigator on this project, whose invitation brought me to West Savannah, is Dr. Ronald Bailey, Interim Chair of Political Science and Public Affairs at SSU.

Two years ago, some Grady colleagues and I collaborated with the Greene County Public Schools on an experiment in youth citizen journalism. You can read all about it here. We learned that middle-school students can research, report and produce a documentary portrait of health in their community, focusing not just on what happens when people are sick but on social and structural factors that influence the health of families and communities.

The lead teacher in Greene County was Marona Graham-Bailey, who was a UGA graduate student in 2009 and who is also Dr. Bailey’s daughter. The young reporters in Greene County learned to research and report video stories, set up and conduct interviews, and organize their material into narratives by working with UGA grad students and faculty.

Marona and I met with an interdisciplinary team of educators, youth development specialists, and college students who’ll teach the same skills to West Savannah teens this summer during Summer Camp at MJAC. Students who sign up for this intense, two-week health journalism camp will spend their mornings working with faculty and students at SSU and their afternoons reporting stories in their own neighborhoods.
The camp begins on July 5.

Move over, Big Boi: there are new stories to be told in West Savannah.

Photo, from left: Knight Chair Patricia Thomas (that's me), Marona Graham-Bailey, Anne Roise, Dr. Ronald Bailey. Photo by Arsenio Key.

Pizza and a movie

2011-05-06T07:47:00.006-04:00

It was the classic Friday night date: pizza, movie and hilarity with friends.

Except that it happened at noon on a Wednesday, when The Med School Project thanked MCG-UGA Medical Partnership students, faculty and staff who have been interviewed (some several times) and who have allowed HMJ videographers to document study sessions, soccer games, community service activities and even lunch preparation in their homes.

The April 27 pizza date, organized by HMJ administrator Anettra Mapp with help from Toni Phelabaum, featured screenings of five new Med School Project videos and one collaboration and a video about Nuci’s Space produced jointly by HMJ’s Katie Smith and a team of medical students. Dr. Leslie Lee and Professor Patricia Thomas (that’s me) emceed the event.

The full set of 21 Med School Project videos are available at www.YouTube.com/HMJatUGA Warning: some provoke the unseemly laughter and teasing shown in the above photo shot by our friend Dot Paul from UGA Photography Services.

The videos document the new school’s first year, examining the challenges faced by students, explaining the teaching philosophy and integrated curriculum, and showing how the arrival of a new medical schools is already affecting local hospitals, clinics and neighborhoods.

These videos were reported, written and produced by 9 graduate students. Sonya Collins and Maegan Rudd were part of the fall semester team before graduating in December. Seven other students signed up for independent study and kept the project going for spring semester: Yanli Liu, Kirk McAlpin, Lori Pindar, Michael Posey, Kathleen Raven and Stephanie Schupska along with ace videographer and editor Katie Smith. Katie was the magic ingredient.

The pizza lunch introduced the new reporting team, Robyn Abree, Jessika Boedeker, Felicia Harris, Marcie McClellan, Laura Smith and Chelsea Toledo. They’ll take over the project in the fall, just as the second entering class of medical students arrives and renovations get underway at the former Navy Supply School.

The launch of the new medical campus is an amazing learning opportunity for Grady College grad students in health and medical journalism. Medical schools play some part in every major story that can be told about health, health policy, biomedical research or advances in clinical care.

The new campus has also sparked new collaborations with the Franklin College of Arts & Sciences, College of Education, College of Public Health, College of Veterinary Medicine and the Department of Theatre and Film Studies.

What is most astonishing is that we’re only one year into this adventure. So stay tuned.

Deep in the heart of Tweetsas

2011-04-11T14:59:00.010-04:00

Vivian Schiller was in awfully good spirits for someone who had just lost her job as CEO and president of NPR.

Sure, she’d been deposed by a James O’Keefe sting operation, but now she was in Austin and hundreds of journalists, J-school professors and grad students, researchers and social network mavens shook off the Lone Star and tequila cobwebs and showed up at 8:45 a.m. to find out why Schiller is optimistic about journalism.

It was April 1st but Schiller wasn’t fooling around at the 12th International Symposium on Online Journalism (#ISOJ). In her keynote address she laid out 7 reasons for being cheerful about the future:
• The time may finally be right for news paywalls; after all, people are accustomed to buying at least some of their music from iTunes and, in addition, “brand is back.” Scale still matters, but tablet users in particular may be willing to pay for the good stuff.
• Speaking of quality, if legacy media are willing to invest in local content, they can win the battle for local users.
• Twitter is coming into its own as a legitimate tool for gathering news. Curated feeds from Egypt illustrate the point.
• Apps are “the holy grail of engagement.” People with NRP apps on their smartphones and tablets listen to and read more news.
• The web is not dead when it comes to attracting new users – in fact web browsers are still the best way for new users to discover a news organization.
• That said, the top news organizations are thriving by becoming “their own disruptors.” Smart ones realize that different platforms serve different audiences in different ways, and content must be shaped accordingly.
• Digital natives have come of age, they still care about the values of real journalism, and J-school enrollments are up. These are the people who will reinvent business models for journalism. Schiller said that members of her generation won’t be able to do this.

There’s ample evidence that wonderful, talented young journalists are climbing the salmon ladder in J-schools and on the job. Pushing the reinvention of the media economy off on them, along with the responsibility for establishing world peace, seems a lot to ask.

Fortunately, digital natives won’t be starting from scratch. Knight Chair Rosental Alves and Amy Schmitz Weiss lined up speakers from nearly every continent and they reminded us that the U.S. isn’t the world leader in everything.

Paywalls are a fact of life at 9 newspapers owned by Grupo Reforma in Mexico, for example. In Norway, online ads, apps and premium content sales have boosted online revenue to 30 percent of total earnings for Schibsted.

Closer to home, The Bay Citizen is balanced on what Editor Lisa Frazier called the “three-legged stool” business model. They’ve landed some major foundation grants, they’re hawking NPR-style memberships in the streets of San Francisco, and they’re licensing content to the New York Times.

“If one leg collapses, we’re in trouble,” she said.

She doesn’t pretend to know whether this or other models for so-called nonprofit journalism are sustainable. If the Bay Citizen’s approach is going to fail, Frazier said she hopes it will fail fast. I’ve heard drug company executives say this dozens of times about experimental treatments, but never before an editor.

The ISOJ program mixed research reports from young scholars with presentations by practicing journalists. No matter what was happening in the front of the room, whether the topic was community engagement or the Christian Science Monitor's transition to the web, there was one constant: the tweeting never stopped. By one count, there were 5,187 Twitter posts during this two-day conference.

If we’d been grackles the din would have deafened us all.

We weren’t all using Twitter in the same way, of course. On Twitter we may be lurkers, linkers, predators, spammers, scammers, trawlers, thought leaders, advisors, fixers, or provocateurs, according to peripatetic new media interpreter Madan Rao, who writes about social media for nearly everyone.

No matter where you fit in the taxonomy of Twitter, you may want to make plans to head to Austin next spring for the 13th edition of ISOJ or an even bigger spectacular, http://sxsw.com/interactive

For brisket and blogging, tequila and Twitter, there is truly no place like Texas.

Why I kissed Paul Steiger

2010-11-03T11:31:00.010-04:00

It wasn't meant to happen.

But when the chance came, I couldn't resist planting a damp one on the founding editor-and-chief of ProPublica, the non-profit investigative journalism shop that has become a Pulitzer-winning powerhouse in three short years.

Steiger, who spent the first 41 years of his career as a reporter and editor for what he called "profit-making or at least profit-seeking newspapers," the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal, came to Athens two weeks ago to deliver the prestigious McGill Lecture.

We met earlier in the day, when he and Hank Klibanoff were featured in a McGill Symposium panel called "Non-profit investigative reporting to the rescue?" Klibanoff was managing editor for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize as co-author of The Race Beat. This past year he left the newsroom for Emory University, where he's now a journalism professor.

These legendary editors spent an hour discussing business and editorial upheavals in journalism, and how these might affect the dozen journalism students seated at the table.

No matter how the news is paid for, Steiger said, reporters are still a news organization's most valuable resource.

The ProPublica team includes a 23-year-old reporter and a 62-year-old Pulitzer winner "and they learn in both directions." Summer internships in his shop pay $700/week, "which in New York is not a lot of money," Steiger said, "but we wanted to pay enough to get kids who aren't rich."

I could hear the synapses firing in those student brains; more than a few were running the math on those intern gigs. Finally a student asked whether if was better for aspiring journalists to train as generalists, or to develop a specialty.

Of course a journalist should be liberally educated, said Steiger, who holds a bachelor's degree in economics from Yale University. But specialization is good and reporters who know how to cover science are especially prized by editors, he declared.

Klibanoff concurred.

At this point Steiger became my very own American Idol. He had voiced two of my own cherished beliefs: journalism interns should be paid for their skills and time and covering science -- which for me includes rigorous reporting on medicine and health -- is a smart career choice.

I hung back when a swirl of well-wishers engulfed the speakers at the session's end. As soon as Steiger stood alone, I rushed over and was surprised to hear myself exclaim: "I could have kissed you when you said that specializing in science is a really good choice for young reporters."

"You can kiss me now," he said, offering his cheek without taking a beat.

And so I did.

(Thanks to Kathleen Raven for the phone of Paul Steiger.)

Present at the creation

2010-09-07T15:48:00.006-04:00

Most graduate programs in journalism can’t offer their students a bedside perspective on the birth of a new medical school. But HMJ at UGA is doing just that – and it’s an unprecedented opportunity for reporters training to spend their careers on the health and medicine beat.

Graduate students in the advanced health and medical journalism course are shooting high-definition digital video for a documentary about what happens when a medical school campus opens in a complex, established ecosystem. UGA itself, local hospitals and clinics, and people in need of medical care – all will be affected.

New grad students will pick up the story every year and eventually maybe we’ll have our own version of Nova’s documentaries about Harvard Medical School.

Eight reporters are working three beats: medical students, faculty (at UGA and beyond), and local medical and patient communities. Students in JRMC 7356 will be doing their own stories this semester and storing their interviews in a digital archive. These files will be used by future HMJ graduate students and will be a resource for other scholars who want to look back on the early years of medical education at UGA.

There are only 133 accredited, degree-granting medical schools in the United States, and it’s a big deal when a new school opens or an established one expands. The Medical College of Georgia, based in Augusta, and the University of Georgia launched a new medical partnership in Athens on August 9, adding 40 new slots to MCG’s entering class. The day was sweltering and people never stopped flapping church-style fans printed with the day’s speakers.

The partnership’s mission is to grow more of our own primary care physicians – men and women who will put down roots and flourish in communities that struggle to attract good doctors.

That’s the long-term goal. But already the new medical partnership is enriching scholarship and professional training across the UGA campus. College of Education faculty and med school faculty are combining “current learning science and current medical science” to craft an innovative curriculum that takes advantage of the small class size, Associate Dean Scott Richardson told HMJ students recently.

“Lecture is not a good drug,” Richardson said. “Active engagement is a more effective drug.”

UGA acting students are learning play patients with various complaints, so med students can practice interviewing and basic clinical skills. Partnership students do much of their learning and problem-solving in 8-member teams, although lectures and dissections are required. Athens students cover the same ground as those in Augusta and sit for the same national examinations.

College of Public Health faculty are helping teach classes, some new medical school faculty have joint appointments in basic science departments, and having a medical school on campus will make the university more competitive for more types of research support.

However the story unfolds, HMJ graduate students will be on the scene, toting tripods and compact videocams, gingerly attaching wireless lavalieres to doctors and hospital CEOs, capturing reactions from young people doing their first cadaver dissection.

(Photo by Dot Paul: journalism students meet med students on August 9, 2010, tour with Dr. Scott Richardson.)

A night at the movies

2010-05-20T12:25:00.019-04:00

Last summer, they were just rising eighth graders with Flip Cams. But on May 18, students who participated in the University of Georgia/Greene County Schools "Picture of Health" project were celebrities.

Youth citizen journalists who were part of the project dressed up, walked the red carpet while cameras flashed, and picked up certificates and medals during Greene Movie Academy Awards Night. Fifteen other teams won awards in system-wide categories including creativity, use of technology, communication, best overall and "people's choice." Some competed within their own school, others across grade levels. All brought cheering fans to the high school auditorium.

Marona Graham-Bailey, Grady grad student in journalism and lead teacher for the project, handed out the certificates. Also on hand were researchers Ruthann Lariscy and Brian Reber and this reporter, Patricia Thomas. We put on our party duds -- or an academic approximation -- and drove to Greensboro on a lovely late-Spring evening.

Our night at the movies was a revelation. We knew that Greene County Schools were using movies as a hands-on approach to learning, but we had no idea what the students were accomplishing with help from their coaches -- teachers, media specialists, and technical experts who volunteer to help.

"One Voice, One World" was the program's theme, and students raised their voices -- some in original songs and poems -- to assert themselves as citizens of the world. The earthquake in Haiti, famine in Africa, environmental pollution and other global issues were dramatized by the young filmmakers.

The complexity of the films was guided by the language arts objectives for different grade levels. A charming first-grade video about the life of Benjamin Franklin pulled facts from a short list of sources and used hand-drawn illustrations; one high-school team staged a newscast complete with a "field report" from Haiti.

Middle school students, including those who worked on "Greene County: a Picture of Health from Our Youth," were finding credible information online, shooting original footage, and editing for story.

If we're lucky, some of these young people will bring their storytelling talents to Grady College a few years from now.

Remembering the immortal book tour

2010-04-18T18:17:00.011-04:00

About two weeks before Publisher’s Weekly predicted that Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks had the makings of a national bestseller, I had the same thought. My hunches are not usually as good as this one turned out to be, but as Jimmy Carter used to say, “even a blind hog finds an acorn now and then.”

Skloot was organizing her own book tour and was neither rich nor famous yet. HMJ at UGA often helps bring speakers to campus, and this time we had no trouble finding others who wanted to hear the human story behind HeLa cells. Grady’s “professional in residence” program, departments of cellular biology, genetics, biochemistry and molecular biology, and microbiology, as well as the complex carbohydrate center chipped in. And the Willson Center for Arts and Humanities did campus-wide publicity.

On February 2, Skloot was on NPR’s Fresh Air for the whole hour, great reviews piled up, and then there was The Colbert Report. By mid-March, she was the “it” girl of serious nonfiction. Pretty soon she had publicists and event coordinators and a speakers bureau.

Fortunately, Skloot remembered the folks who signed on early and kept her promise to visit UGA on March 25.

Skloot gave a compelling talk to a large audience at Miller Learning Center and fielded questions deftly.

The UGA Bookstore was on hand to sell The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and fans crowded around to continue the discussion and have their books signed.

HMJ graduate students made the short trip to my home, traveling by car and bicycle for the after party. It was one of those rare spring evenings in Georgia, when the rain clears off and leaves perfect temperatures and no flying insects.

We shared a delicious meal featuring eggplant parmesan, salad, and lime-glazed poundcake prepared by chef Meriwether Rhodes. Conversation centered on reporting and storytelling and the kind of passion and patience required to work on a project for a decade – especially when key sources are mistrustful and elusive in the beginning. Stick with it, Rebecca said. Be clear about what you’re doing and earn trust. Do meticulous research, dig up documents, and get the story right.

Shortly before Rebecca rode off into the night, bound for more book tour events in Atlanta the following day, there was the obligatory group portrait on the sofa. It was a memorable evening for HMJ at UGA.

[Photography by Jackie Reedy.]

Eat right, keep fit, die anyway

2010-04-05T15:49:00.005-04:00

At my house, we refer to them collectively as "the fish." As in, have you fed the fish, checked the water temperature, or dipped leaves out of the pond.

Our stewardship of the 13 koi who came with the house is at the public health level: they're all fed at once and we tailor the type of food to the water temperature. Their water is clean and they have room and leisure time to exercise.

But last month one of them died with no warning. No swellings or lesions that popped up and worsened with time, no unbalanced swimming or gasping to signal trouble. All 13 looked fine when I fed them that morning and they broke the surface and competed for their share of the color-enhancing floating koi kibble. That evening, one was still.

A friend had dubbed this fish "Braniff" because he was solid white with a bright orange tail, reminding her of a Swedish airline that added brightly-colored tails to its planes as a kind of pop-art lark back in the 1970s. He was one of six fish born and raised in the pond, not one of the seven who came there as small fry.

When I called the pond guy, worried that an undetected infection might be about to kill them all, he said no, the fish had simply reached a certain age. Brace yourself for more deaths, he said. These fish are over 20, and that's old.

Twelve of them are still swimming around today, thanks to the sound hygiene, diet and exercise measures they enjoy.

Back when I was editing the Harvard Health Letter, whose loyal subscribers sometimes seemed to believe they could keep the inevitable at bay, someone gave me a button that said "Eat right, keep fit, die anyway."

Braniff's death sent the same message: Memento mori, fish style.

Greetings from the Press Room

2010-03-15T13:36:00.000-04:00

This week, 27 aspiring reporters will receive calls and letters inviting them to join the Grady College family this coming Fall semester as graduate students in journalism. I'll be making some of those calls myself, mostly to students who've expressed an interest in HMJ at UGA.

If you were in the HMJ program now, you'd be here: in the crowded press room at ACC10, the annual Scientific Sessions of the American College of Cardiology. You'd be rubbing shoulders with reporters who write in dozens of languages for newspapers, magazines, websites and more niche publications for doctors and business people than you can imagine.

You'd be trying to figure out which stories you want to tell from all those listed in a program as thick as the Athens phone book. Cardiologist Jonathan Murrow, who'll be teaching med students in the MCG-UGA Medical Partnership, gave us a list of hot stories (and a bootcamp on the heart and heart disease) just before Spring break. And now you can pick up tips over lunch from Steve Sternberg of USA Today, Larry Husten from cardiobriefs.com or Ron Winslow of the Wall Street Journal.

It's a great gig. And anyone who says press rooms are dead has clearly not been to this one.

Major thanks to Amy Murphy and the fine media relations staff at ACC, who graciously invited us to particpate.

Gathering News Nearby

2010-02-01T11:21:00.000-05:00

Reporters know that somewhere on the UGA campus there’s an expert on nearly every subject, and Grady students are lucky to have these resources at hand.

But when you’re hunting for off-campus sources for stories involving advocacy or politics, you sometimes think that Atlanta is the place to get them.

Think again: this month there are fascinating reporting opportunities right here in the ATH.

First up: the “Seeing is Believing” tour of the Clarke County Schools, set for 8-11 a.m. on February 9. Hop a school bus with other inquisitive folks and visit elementary, middle and high school campuses. Looking for community folks to interview about child health, nutrition, physical activity or the like? Just imagine who you’ll meet on the bus. To sign up, send your contact information to seeingisbelievingtour@gmail.com

“Reclaiming Agriculture,” the 13th Annual Georgia Organics Conference & Expo, comes to the Classic Center on February 19 and 20th. The keynote speaker is Carlo Petrini, founder of the international Slow Food movement, and the conference offers educational sessions, tours of farms and research centers, gourmet meals and exhibits. Workshops cover topics as diverse as beekeeping, soil fertility, equipment repair, cheese making and using social media to market what farms produce. Contact Communications director Michael Wall at michael@georgiaorganics.org for information about press registration.

The following weekend, February 26-28, the Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials convenes at Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church, 1931 Old West Broad Street in West Athens. This 40-year-old organization has 700 members elected to municipal, county, state and national office. GABEO members make decisions about land use, education, jobs, public safety and a host of other government programs that influence the health of children and adults. This will be a great place to identify hot topics and make contacts with lasting value.

There’s no schedule posted on the GABEO website at present, but you can contact tyrone.brooks@house.ga.gov or madge.owens@house.ga.gov or call 404-372-1894 for information about attending as press. State Representative Tyrone Brooks is the current president, and local hosts include Michael Thurmond, Georgia’s Commissioner of Labor.

A million stories

2010-01-19T16:49:00.000-05:00

Read, listen and watch coverage coming out of the catastrophe in Haiti and you quickly realize there are as many different stories as there are reporters.

At least two journalists who’ve been writing and reporting on Haiti will be talking with Grady health and medical journalism students this semester.

NPR health policy reporter Joanne Silberner was supposed to be with us tomorrow, but late last week she boarded a plane with an Atlanta-based medical relief team. Narrowly avoiding a mid-air collision over Port-au-Prince, the team was sidelined in Turks and Caicos before they finally set foot in Haiti.

Joanne promises to stay safe and reschedule for later in the semester.
An entirely different view comes from Deborah Blum, a Grady College graduate and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who teaches science journalism at the University of Wisconsin. On the January 15 op-ed page of the New York Times, she wrote a powerful and poetic essay about the dangerous inner life of our planet and the possibility of predicting earthquakes.

Deborah will visit JRMC 7355 in late March to talk about her newest book, The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensics in Jazz Age New York, which comes out February 18.

Watching television coverage of Haiti today, I’m reminded of reports of rapes and murders in the Super Dome. While people died there, of injury and neglect, the savagery proved largely fictitious. Someday we may look back on Haitians labeled as “looters” and see only desperate people, out of options and desperate to feed their families.

If journalists don’t get it right the first time, at least we have another chance tomorrow.

Making news

2009-10-31T12:12:00.000-04:00

Although it's officially Fall Break at UGA, and the Dawg faithful are in Jacksonville doing God-knows-what, the Harvesting Health team spent Friday reporting a news feature for WNEG-TV.

Shown (from left) are ace videographer Katie Smith and writer-reporters Jordan Sarver and James Hataway.

If you've been watching Ray Metoyer and the gang at 6:00 p.m. on Thursdays, you've seen their work. You may also have read their stories on the station's website about the benefits of schoolyard gardens, how community gardens fight crime, and what it takes to be designated an organic farmer. Broadcast segments are linked to these stories.

Next up: why farmers and teachers should collaborate, how sustainable agriculture affects our regional economy, where you can dine out on delicious, locally grown foods, and why healthier eating matters so much to 21st century children. The series continues through Thanksgiving.

Harvesting Health is made possible by advice and assistance from anchorman Metoyer, news director Jeff Dantre, webmaster Jim Alexander and Grady's telecomm's Steve Smith and Michael Castengera.

And now, a teaser for 2010: it looks like HMJ grad students are going to be covering previously untold or undertold public health stories for a new, statewide news bureau that the Hayslett Group (an Atlanta strategic communication firm) is launching with support from the Healthcare Georgia Foundation. The full extent of Grady College's role in this ambitious new undertaking is yet to be determined, but we expect to know more soon.

Racing past

2009-09-22T17:22:00.001-04:00

This semester has gotten off to such a fast start that I was shocked to realize that fall is upon us: football season is well underway, the health care debate is shrill, and Atlanta is temporarily shut down by flooding.

Here at Grady College, our first official entering class in health and medical journalism arrived six weeks ago. Christy Fricks was the first student to complete the new MA concentration back in spring, two grad students are in their second year and now we have seven new ones. You can meet most of the HMJ grad students by clicking here.

Incoming students in Graduate Newsroom are working on their first “outside” news story. They’re reporting on AAA baseball and the impact of hard times on local Latino communities and on military enlistment rates among recent college graduates. Also on unsung zoos, historic neighborhoods, school policy, Chinese community celebrations and what floods reveal about our local infrastructure.

The advanced HMJ students, meanwhile, are producing a nice-part series of news segments for WNEG-TV, UGA’s television station serving Northeast Georgia. The series begins on October 1 and finishes at Thanksgiving.

We’re searching for the right catchy title, but in-house we think of this as the “kids, foods and farms” project. The series will capture stories how school and community gardens and sustainable agriculture relate to childhood nutrition in the region. The photo above shows Katie Smith, an HMJ student who is earning her master’s in conservation ecology and sustainable development, filming a schoolyard garden with local parent activist Stacy Smith.

The lead reporter for the opening segment is second-year MA student Jordan Sarver, James Hataway reports the second and Smith helms the third. Each segment will be accompanied by student-produced stories and multimedia resources available on WNEG’s website.

Stay tuned!

Excited in Seattle

2009-04-25T08:45:00.000-04:00

Last week at this time, I was at the Association of Health Care Journalists annual conference in Seattle. Professional meetings like this always generate great moments – provocative workshops, reunions with old friends, and the chance to rub shoulders with brilliant actors (Sarah Jones) and members of the U.S. Senate (Ron Wyden).

But one of my favorite moments happened around seven p.m. on Friday evening, in the elevator at the Grand Hyatt. A woman I didn’t recognize peered at my nametag, lit up, and said “Wow. You’re from the University of Georgia. I met some of your students and they had great ideas!”

She turned out to be Meredith Matthews, senior editor of Current Health 1 and Current Health 2, teen magazines that are part of the Weekly Reader empire. Meredith had just spent three hours at Freelance PitchFest, a form of journalistic speed dating that’s very popular at AHCJ’s national meeting. Panels of hopefuls sign up to meet national editors for for short, one-on-one discussions of stories they hope to write. When editors hear a good one,they snap it up.

Grady graduate students Christy Fricks, Marona Graham-Bailey and Jordan Sarver all placed stories at PitchFest.

Except for maybe the University of Washington, which had the home-field advantage, UGA had more students registered for the conference than any other school. Judging by the number of comments I received from friends and strangers, this really helped put our new MA Concentration in Health and Medical Journalism on the map.

Christy, Marona and Jordan, along with Brian Creech and James Hataway, seemed to be everywhere. UGA students networked, pitched and tweeted along with 400 health and medical journalists from the U.S. and other countries. They participated in workshops covering dozens of topics including investigative reporting, health care reform, vaccine safety, health literacy, biology of aging, veterans’ health and more. The students are writing about all this on www.gradyjournal.com and http://deepsouthhealth.blogspot.com

At the lavish opening reception, Brian and James picked up resume writing tips from Peggy Girshman, who has reviewed thousands of resumes since November, when she became executive editor of Kaiser Health News. This Washington-based, online start up is expected to dominate health policy coverage once it’s fully staffed. (Note: if you want Peggy’s do’s and don’ts, I have them).

Crossing to the other side of the room, past the sashimi and slider bars, UGA students renewed their acquaintance with SciAm Online editor Ivan Oransky. They had met on April Fool’s Day, when Ivan was a guest speaker in our health and medical journalism class. The idea of going to a Mariner’s game was probably hatched during the opening soiree – I’m not sure. (But I do know the Mariner’s defeated the Detroit Tigers the next night at Safeco Field.)

We had talked with AHCJ online editor Pia Christensen months ago, and signed up for the Twitter team at #AHCJ09. Nearly 1,000 tweets were posted during the conference, including some of mine. This adds a whole new dimension to a meeting with concurrent sessions, where you wish you could be in two rooms at once. On Saturday morning I was tweeting a session on social and environmental determinants of health AND tapping into Christy’s notes from a session about covering medical studies.

The conference is still making waves in the Twittersphere. Enter #AHCJ09 at http://search.twitter.com and you’ll find participants still talking among themselves about the Gordian knot of politics, money, health and healthcare. Thanks to the AHCJ program planners and to Len Bruzzese and the excellent staff for kicking off these conversations.

Foot-in-mouth disease

2009-03-30T08:04:00.000-04:00

Most journalists know better than to use racist or sexist terms, thanks to decades of consciousness raising and education.

But we may offend other groups of readers or viewers because we don’t know any better, or because we suffer a momentary lapse in empathy. Consider the beneficiaries of what some call “the longevity revolution.” Average life expectancy in the United States increased by 30 years during the Twentieth Century, meaning that the thoughtless use of ageist terms by a reporter can alienate unprecedented numbers of people.

Now there’s a style guide to help journalists, script writers and advertisers. Media Takes: On Aging was prepared by the International Longevity Center-USA and Aging Services of California, and it’s available at www.tinyurl.com/cbe3mw

Our oldest citizens are the largest consumers of health and medical services, and often the closest followers of stories about health care reform and about clinical advances. Writing for and about them is a big part of being on the health beat these days, and it makes sense to purge our work of ageist language.

Most of us know not to use obviously insulting terms such as “codger” or “sweet old lady,” but we may not realize that “baby boomers” is viewed by some of the 76 million Americans in this birth cohort as condescending, while “boomer” or “boomer generation” is not.

And how about “elderly?” Perfectly acceptable in a phrase like “services for the elderly,” but verboten as an adjective applied to an individual: “The elderly Mr. Ripley.” Better to say “Tom Ripley, 87, opened the door to his palazzo.“

Although the monograph’s advice about ageist terminology is welcome, the glossary is its real strength. People lost in the alphabet soup of federal and state programs serving people over 65, or those who befuddled by all the different flavors of congregate living arrangements, will find welcome assistance here.

If you’re like me, you give inadvertent offense more often than you’d like. But this style guide can help you stay on good terms with of the oldest and wisest among us.

Voices Carry

2009-03-06T14:49:00.000-05:00

Let's hear it for Dr. Jim Yong Kim, who earlier this week was named the next president of Dartmouth College. Just one year ago, he came to Athens to speak in the Global Diseases: Voices from the Vanguard lecture series.

Dan Colley, who heads UGA's Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases, and I have been organizing this series together since 2006. And although we can't establish that being featured in it turbo-charges careers that are already in high gear, we can't help but notice that good things happen to Voices from the Vanguard speakers.

Victoria Hale, founder and CEO of the world's first nonprofit drug company, inaugurated the series in January 2006. One month later, she was named a MacArthur "Genius" Fellow.

UC Irvine biologist Tony James, whose lab engineered mosquitoes that can't be infected with the malaria parasite, gave the Voices lecture in March 2006. In April, he was elected to the National Academies of Sciences.

Jim Kim was already a MacArthur "genius" winner when he delivered the February 2008 Voices lecture at the UGA Chapel. He was famous for co-founding Partners in Health with his friend Paul Farmer, and he was chairman of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Kim delivered one of the most compelling Voices lectures ever, he was mobbed by students during the post-talk reception, and dozens of cell phone cameras captured grinning students pressed close to a true public health hero.

And now this Korean-born, Iowa-raised physician and anthropologist is going to be president of an Ivy League institution.

It couldn't happen to a nicer guy, and we're proud to have heard his voice here at UGA.

Tweet South Health

2009-02-17T12:31:00.000-05:00

Okay, the health and medical journalism grad students were right to veto the silly name I proposed for a flocks of Twitters to accompany DeepSouthHealth.

After all, their weekly posts deal with health disparities in Northeast Georgia counties, lung disease, gang violence and the perils of being pregnant, mentally ill, elderly or a newcomer in areas where services aren’t universally available.

Chastened, I nabbed the name” UGAhealthjourn” for our initial venture into Twitter, the social networking/mini-blog that is as ubiquitous as “Put a ring on it.” In the weeks to come, we’ll figure out how this tool can boost coverage (and discovery) of more timely and penetrating stories about health and medical issues in our part of the state.

We’ll incorporate tweeting into our reporting on the American College of Sports Medicine national meeting in Atlanta (in late March). An announcement for this “Fitness Summit” is prominent at the Omni Club’s personal trainer desk; maybe these folks would follow tweets about new research presented at the meeting.

Maybe student reporters would ask tighter, more immediate questions of experts in the hallways and exhibit areas if those queries were inspired by digital dialogs with local fitness experts, high school athletic trainers, or health department diabetes educators. There might even be some Facebook paths to these folks. Or some connections that use Twitter.

Or maybe not – I’m just beginning to figure out how to tweet, much less do anything complicated with Twitter. So I’m still agnostic about its place in the world.

When I read on-the-scene reports from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS)conference in Chicago on www.Twitter.com/sciam , I understand why Ivan Oransky is such a big fan of the mini-blog. Quick hits with excellent links almost (but not quite) approximate what it feels like to be at this platypus of a meeting, which you know is twisted because it’s in Chicago in February.

Other times I’ve been dumfounded by the banality of 99.9 percent of all tweets. A recent blog by Alfred Hermida told how one of his journalism students alerted potential employers to her latest and greatest clip by tweeting her own horn. We journalism professors should encourage other students to do the same, he said.

But when I visited the student’s Twitter account, the tweet about her breakthrough story in a metro daily – describing her audition for the for the family-friendly vampire love-fest, “Twilight,” was lost in a sea of gossip and in-jokes.

Even my super-smart friend Adam Rogers, an editor at Wired magazine, loses me when he Twitters as jetjocko. We have more common interests than most pairs of two-legged land mammals, but he loses me with all those tweets about action figures and comics. Sorry, Adam. Graphic novels.

I’m hoping that the collective intelligence of UGA’s student health/medical reporters will move our Twittering toward the SciAm end of the scale – or into some other realm that, as a total newbie, I have yet to stumble across.

Your first laureate

2009-01-28T14:06:00.000-05:00

For science reporters, the first encounter with a Nobel laureate is intimidating -- no matter how warm and friendly he or she is as a person. As soon as you've interviewed one, or simply shaken hands and exchanged pleasantries during a noisy reception, you relax a bit.

So you might as well bag your first Nobelist tomorrow.

Sir Paul Nurse is speaking at 5:00 p.m. in room 237 at the College of Veterinary Medicine, followed by a reception across the street at the Coverdell Building. Sir Paul won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2001 for discovering key steps in regulation of the cell cycle. His findings are important for understanding not only how a tiny cluster of cells expands to become Brad Pitt, but also how regulation goes awry in malignant tumors.

Hear his talk, exchange a few words, and you'll be ready for your first reporting assignment involving one of these rare birds. I've hitched a ride home with a Nobelist in chemistry during a snowstorm and interviewed two of them on the morning of the 1989 San Francisco earthquake.

It gets easier with practice so you might as well start tomorrow.

Waste on Wheels

2009-01-19T14:53:00.000-05:00

You probably wouldn’t purchase tires or textbooks without comparing prices, figuring out how to spend as little as possible for what you need. You’re motivated to shop around because you know you have only so much to spend, despite those seductive credit cards, and that paying too much for tires could mean missing out on Spring break – or even cutting back on groceries.

When it comes to health care, however, “There is no major constituency for controlling spending. Because most patients don’t pay their medical bill directly, they have little interest in using less care or shopping for lower-priced services. Providers (doctors, hospitals, drug companies, equipment manufacturers) have no interest in limiting care. What others call “health costs” are their incomes – wages, salaries, profits.” That’s how economics columnist Robert J. Samuelson summed it up in a January 19 article in Newsweek.

This wasn’t news to me. I’d written much the same thing in dozens of articles over the years, but I read his words while brooding about a recent experience.

It was early December, and Achilles’ tendon surgery had left me unable to put any weight on my right foot for six weeks. That’s a near-eternity for a hyperactive person like me. After the frustrations of dealing with crutches, a folding metal walker and a wheelchair, I was delighted to discover a scooter-like device called a knee walker: it’s fast, nimble and inspires envy in small children. Plus I was able to rent it from a local medical supply company for $30 each week.

A good friend with a knee-level amputation was intrigued, so I found the identical scooter on Amazon and sent him the link. A new one could be had for $460, and on other sites I found used scooters for less.

When I wheeled into the surgeon’s office to have the staples removed, he thought the scooter was cool and wrote a prescription for its rental. “Maybe your insurance will cover it,” he said.

I phoned the medical supply company to find out, and was astonished to hear that my high-end policy would not pay $30/week to rent the knee-walker – but it would buy me a new one for $720.

“That’s nuts,” I told the lady on the phone, “I could buy the same scooter online for about $250 less.”

“Well,” she said, “if you want to buy it privately, instead of using insurance, we’ll sell it to you for $680.”

Instead, I decided to pay $150 out of pocket to rent the scooter for five weeks. That made more sense than adding another $570 of clinically unnecessary spending to our country’s bloated health care tab – which we would all pay for in the end.

I’m writing this on Inauguration Eve, when there’s a nip of hope in the cold air. Whenever a new president takes office, particularly a Democrat, there’s talk of reforming the system so that all of us, rich and poor, young and old, are ensured preventive services and medical treatments to help us live as long and as well as we can.

Maybe this time we’ll remake the system in ways that matter. In the meantime, we have choices. And it’s possible to just say “no” when we’re offered tests, treatments, or gadgets that we don’t really need.

Community journalism and pond water

2008-12-16T12:45:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time, my generous parents gave me a microscope for Christmas. With a single eyepiece, a lighted and adjustable stage, and a solid wooden case it was just what I wanted.

Even aspiring scientists under age 10 knew that pond water was one of the absolute best things to examine. Scooped in a recycled mayonnaise jar, my specimen looked dull and cloudy. But under the scope the water came to exuberant life: wiggling larvae, nymphs that zipped in and out of view, pulsing gelatinous eggs, algae with hooks that snared unsuspecting bits of life. Creatures eating and avoiding being eaten, births, deaths – what Zorba the Greek called “the whole catastrophe.”

I discovered a world in that drop of water.

In a few weeks, each JRMC 7355 student will begin digging into the life of a single Georgia county, seeking stories about human nature, economic and social conditions, and how institutions large and small affect how long (and how well) people live.

Being assigned to one county might seem too tight across the shoulders for ambitious young journalists who want to write big stories for national audiences.

Like a drop of pond water, however, every Georgia county teems with more life than most writers can capture in a career. In Praying for Sheetrock, Melissa Fay Greene uses the stories of two men in McIntosh County, GA, to bring the whole history of the Civil Rights struggle to vivid, sweaty, suspenseful, tear-inducing life.

Without leaving the county, Greene shows us more about race and politics in the U.S. than a shelf full of history books. This is nonfiction narrative at its best, fueled by superb community reporting, and it's an excellent read for winter break.