Here’s what we’re checking out today:
HuffPo Health: Orac of the Respectful Insolence blog opines on the new Huffington Post health section, and it’s not pretty: “A soon-to-be one-stop shop for quackery.”
Elizabeth Forer is the chief executive officer and executive director of the Venice Family Clinic, the largest free clinic in the nation, which provides services to 23,000 patients a year at seven locations. Before joining the Venice Family Clinic in 1994, she served for five years as executive director of Settlement Health and Medical Services, a nonprofit community health center in East Harlem, New York. She also directed a department at Metropolitan Hospital in New York City. Ms. Forer is a California HealthCare Foundation Health Leadership Fellow.
The annual convention of the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) early in August was filled from top to bottom with practical and career-oriented sessions. For me, one of the most useful was off the official books. By Twitter and email, AAJA Texas chapter president Iris Kuo organized a lunchtime get-together for freelancers in the hotel lobby.
As always, you can find job, internship, awards and fellowship opportunities at the end of this post.
Tom Linden seemed to be on a fast track to a successful career in journalism.
He was the editor-in-chief of his high school newspaper in Southern California. As a college student at Yale University, Linden got his reporter's legs at the Yale Daily News and covered the New Haven Black Panther trials for the Los Angeles Times. When he graduated in 1970, he won a fellowship and secured a book deal to write about army deserters in exile who were protesting or escaping the Vietnam War.
Melvin Baron has spent his career educating the public about health and medicine, first as a pharmacist and then as a USC Associate Professor of Clinical Pharmacy. He’s 77 now, and he confesses to some frustration with the handouts that pharmacists and doctors use to inform patients about health and medicine.
“Much of what we give you is lousy,” he told me. “It’s a lot of words. Most of it is way above the audience. It doesn’t resonate and it’s boring.”
There are several ways to secure one’s genetic line for at least another generation.
One can court another person, marry (or not), mate and bask in the many joys of parenthood.
Folks born without the proper equipment or in relationships that don’t allow for simple reproduction can arrange for an egg donor, sperm donor or surrogate mother to help carry one’s genes to a daughter or a son. Parenthood is just as fun.
And then there is what someday may be dubbed the Ramaley method.
If the ProPublica experiment with nonprofit investigative journalism is teaching us anything, it is the importance of follow-through.
Health care reform, and the ideological, political and public health battles that surrounded it, reached a fever pitch in the media by the time the legislation reached the House of Representatives in March. Many members of ReportingonHealth were watching and chronicling these events closely. Here, a cross-section of reporters discusses their experience working on these complex stories.