This is one in a series of articles examining the relationship between housing loss and death in San Francisco. Check out the previous articles in the series, Looking for death, and Gunpowder on the streets....
When Linda Marsa received a copy of the December issue of Discover magazine in the mail, she was thrilled. Her story about climate change and its effect on long forgotten diseases in America made the cover. Never mind that she has been a journalist for 30 years, Marsa finds health journalism as riveting now as when she first began. And she is still learning ways to be a better freelancer.
Depending on whom you ask, AOL's Patch is either an innovative and well-intentioned new venture to infuse local news back into American communities, or it's "the Walmart of news," a $50 million behemoth set on invading communities and running local sites from corporate headquarters. But they are hiring, and hiring en masse.
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.”
