Making news

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.