Insights

<p>Sorry, <a href="../../../../../../../../users/jranck">Jody Ranck</a>. I’m giving up on <a href="http://www.netvibes.com/">NetVibes</a&gt; for right now and will stick to my Google and Yahoo readers.</p>

<p><em>This weekend was the second session of the California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowship conferences in Los Angeles, and the <a href="http://www.reportingonhealth.org/fellowships">event</a&gt; provided some fascinating and newsy morsels. Here's a round-up of what some of the speakers had to say (Check out more detailed blog items <a href="http://www.reportingonhealth.org/blogs">here</a&gt; as well.).</em></p>

<p>Inspired by the lecture on web tools, I made a <a href="http://delicious.com/rdornhelm/uschealthj">collection of many of the websites that were mentioned over the weekend</a> on Delicious (link written out below).&nbsp; It includes the resources mentioned by Barbara Feder Ostrov and Jody Ranck, a

<p>Cash-only clinics in immigrant communities can be revolving doors. One shady provider gets shoved out, and another steps right in.</p> <p>When Dr. Andrew Rutland was allowed to return to medicine in 2007 after serving five years of probation for Medical Board of California charges related to the deaths of two babies, he was prevented from practicing alone. The Oct. 25, 2007 order by the medical board is clear: "Petitioner is prohibited from engaging in the solo practice of medicine."</p>

<p>As the <a href="http://www.2010.census.gov/">2010 Census</a> gets underway, journalists need a more sophisticated understanding of people over 65 to report on them accurately, says <a href="../../../../../../../../users/stevenpwallace">Steven Wallace</a>, a University of California-Los Angeles public health researcher.</p><p>"There is no 'The Elderly,'" he told California Endowment Health Journalism Fellows at a Los Angeles seminar on Sunday. "The elderly are a complex mixture of individuals. It's important to realize there are different groups and profile the diversity within them."</p>

<div class="articleparagraph">SACRAMENTO — ViewFinder: A Crisis in Caring: California's School Nursing Shortage focuses on the critical shortage of school nurses in Northern California. This documentary airs on KVIE channel 6, Wednesday, March 17, 7 p.m. The program offers insight on how this issue impacts students, teachers, parents, and communities. California lawmakers, health professionals, educators, school nurses, and students with chronic illnesses weigh in on the problem. <br />

<p>Depending on who you ask, an "informavore" is either really smart and well-connected or overly wired and confused.<br /><br />Jody Ranck is an informavore of the first kind. An independent consultant and pricipal investigator at the Public Health Institute in Oakland, he is working now to create the Public Health Innovation Center, which seeks to reign in the power of social media and mobile tools to "<a href="http://nomadologies.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/re-mixing-public-health-pl…; practices in public health.<br />

<p>On a Saturday morning, four people wait outside the front door of a converted mini-mall in Rosemead, CA. Ten minutes later -- the doors open exactly at 9 a.m. -- the two women and two men file into the lobby to sign in for their appointments at the Asian Pacific Family Center. The front desk is covered with pamphlets in the many languages of the significant Asian immigrant populations of the San Gabriel Valley. The clinic operates in Vietnamese, Mandarin, Cantonese. Cambodian Chiu Chow, Japanese and Korean, serving over 1,700 immigrant Asian Pacific outpatient families per year.<br />

<p>Shorter is better. Seven seconds on the Internet is an eternity. Human voices can add an emotional component to a story in a way that text never does.</p> <p>From top-10 lists to video clips to narrated slideshows, journalists are adding multimedia components to their print and broadcast stories to add depth to their storytelling, get more “bank for the buck” out in the field and create new audiences and distribution channels for their content.</p>

<p>Conventional wisdom has led the majority of us to believe that our health revolves around the choices we make as an individual. However, <a href="http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/">research from public health</a> demonstrates that it is the social, economic and cultural conditions we live in that really matter. While this is old news for many health researchers, most people outside public health are still unfamiliar with these ideas, especially in the US. Journalists concerned with promoting health must strive to move beyond reproducing such individualistic explanations for health.</p>