GBO NEWS: Summer of Luv Hype; Legacy Film Fest; Robots; Reporting Awards, Fellowships; & More
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations — Our 24th Year.
August 16, 2017 — Volume 17, Number 8
Editor’s Note: GBO News, e-news of the Journalists Network on Generation publishes alerts for journalists, producers and authors covering generational issues. Send your news of important stories or books (by you and others), fellowships, awards or pertinent kvetches to GBO News Editor Paul Kleyman. You can subscribe to GBONews.org at no charge simply by sending a request to Paul with your name, address, phone number and editorial affiliation or note that you freelance. You’ll receive the table of contents as e-mail, just click through to the full issue at www.gbonews.org.
In This Issue: A total eclipse of the bigots.
1. EYES ON THE PRIZE: ***Reporting on Aging Issues, National Press Foundation Fellowship Deadline, Sept. 6; *** Awards to PBS Next Avenue’s Rich Eisenberg and WUNC Public Radio’s Leoneda Inge; *** USC Center for Health Journalism’s California Data Fellowship Deadline, Aug. 25;
2. ON THE SILVER SILVER SCREEN: *** 7th Annual Legacy Film Festival on Aging in San Francisco, Sept. 15-17.
*** “Let’s End Ageism,” TED Talk by Ashton Applewhite;
*** “LBJ Launches Medicare: ‘You Can’t Treat Grandma This Way’” by Bill Moyers;
*** “Stop Treating 70- and 90-Year-Olds the Same,” by Louise Aronson, New York Times “Sunday Review”;
*** “Research Details How Racial Disparities, Stress and Poverty Can Affect Alzheimer’s Risk,” AHCJ blog on Aging, by Liz Seegert;
*** “GOP Health Bill—How We Got Into This Mess,” by Paul Kleyman, New America Media, also on Salon;
*** “Black, Gray and Gay: The Perils of Aging LGBTQ People of Color,” NBCBLK/New America Media, by Chandra Thomas Whitfield;
*** “Why Robots Are the Way of Our Aging Future,” Ottawa Citizen/New America Media, Elizabeth Payne.
4. SUMMER OF LU-U-U-V GENERATION IN GENERATIONS: *** “The Summer of Love, the Baby Boomers, and their Arc of Aging,” is the theme of the latest issue of Generations (journal of the American Society on Aging).
1. EYES ON THE PRIZE
*** Reporting on Aging Issues, National Press Foundation (NPF) Fellowship: The deadline to apply for this all-expenses-paid fellowship is Sept. 6. The program will be held Oct. 15-18, in Washington, D.C. GBONews is pleased to see that NPF has found a new sponsor in AARP to continue this program, held over the last several years. Available to U.S.-based journalists only, the fellowship covers airfare, ground transportation, hotel costs and most meals. According to the website, ”Journalists will learn about financial literacy and security; fraud and scams; health care and healthy living; the desire or need to work longer; public policy; generational impacts; innovation and reinvention; and living beyond 100. You’ll also learn the latest data and research on aging topics.”
The application is fairly simple, although it does require a one-page support letter from an editor familiar with your work, who can be either a supervisor at your news organization or, for freelancers, a recommendation from someone you’ve worked with. So don’t wait until the last minute to get started.
*** Kudos to PBS Next Avenue’s Rich Eisenberg and WUNC Public Radio’s Leoneda Inge, 2017 winners of Personal Finance Reporting Awards (for online and radio) from the Radio Television Digital News Association and the National Endowment for Financial Education. The two RTDNA/NEFE awardees will each receive $1000 prize and will co-present a training seminar entitled “Money Matters: Excellence in Financial Reporting” at Excellence in Journalism 2017, the joint national convention of RTDNA, the Society of Professional Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, Sept. 7-9 in Anaheim, Calif. The pair will dissect their winning submissions and share the key reporting tools and tips.
At Next Avenue, the PBS news and information website for those age 50-plus, Eisenberg is the managing editor of the website, based at Twin Cities Public Television in St. Paul, Minn. He’s also the senior web editor of the site’s “Money & Security” and “Work & Purpose” channels. He won for his story, “Sorry, Nobody Wants Your Parents’ Stuff.” The story package, with the subhead, “Advice for boomers desperate to unload family heirlooms,” includes “8 Tips for Home Unfurnishing” to help “avoid finding yourself forlorn in your late parents’ home.”
Inge, the race and southern culture reporter at WUNC in Chapel Hill, N.C., won for her story, “Black Bank Movement, Fad or Here to Stay” The first public radio journalist to hold such a position, her newsbeat, according to the awards announcement, “explores modern and historical constructs to tell stories of poverty and wealth, health and food culture, education and racial identity.” Her winning entry looked at the phenomenon of black-owned financial institutions and their recent growth. She’s also a past recipient of an Age Boom fellowship from Columbia University and Journalists in Aging Fellowship from New America Media and the Gerontological Society of America.
*** 2017 California Data Fellowship Deadline, Aug. 25: The Center for Health Journalism at USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism is accepting applications for its program aimed at training reporters “to mine health data to reveal key insights essential to high-impact journalism,” says the website. The 10 chosen journalists “will receive grants of $2,000, as well as one-on-one mentoring on engagement strategies” over the fellowships six months. The program also covers all expenses for attending the training in Los Angeles, October 25-28. Fellows will gain “four of intensive skills-based training in data acquisition, cleansing, analysis and visualization techniques.” The reporting grants are to support each journalist’s “ambitious health-related reporting project.” The Center will also cover the cost of bringing each fellow’s editor to L.A. to take part in an Editor-Fellow Workshop.
The fellowship is open to journalists from print, broadcast and online media “who are either based in California or who work for a national outlet that has a California footprint. The projects need to be primarily reported in California on topics of concern for Californians. Applicants do not need to be full-time health reporters, but should have a demonstrated interest in health issues, broadly defined to include the health of communities,” USC says. The program is supported by grants from the California Health Care Foundation and The California Endowment. Non-California journalists should keep an eye on this website about its national reporting fellowship.
The program requires applicants to have a conversation in advance of applying with one of their Senior Fellows. Email Martha Shirk at CAHealth@usc.edu well in advance to arrange. To learn more, contact Shirk at CAHealth@usc.edu or check the Center’s website.
2. ON THE SILVER SILVER SCREEN
*** 7th Annual Legacy Film Festival on Aging in San Francisco, Sept. 15-17: This festival’s more than 25 films will offer the long and short of it where aging is concerned on screen with both documentaries and feature films, as well as selections reflecting cultural experiences from Japan, Vietnam, Australia, Spain and Wales, not to mention New York, Alabama, Oregon and our dystopian sci-fi future.
Full disclosure, this editor likes this event so much I joined the board. Fuller disclosure: I’ve had loads of fun playing film critic with others in our volunteer review crew. This year’s program will include some recent releases you may have seen, such as “Mavis!” the documentary shown on PBS about gospel/blues/folk legend and civic rights icon Mavis Staples, who Bob Dylan once proposed to, and the wonderful Spanish drama, “Truman” (the dog, not the president),” about which Los Angeles Times/NRP critic Kenneth Turan wrote, “It sounds paradoxical but, if done right, films about a life ending can be the most life-affirming films you’ll see.”
Also, at this time when Medicaid is under threat in Washington, viewers will be moved and, I hope, deeply unsettled about U.S. health care after watching the documentary, “Wilhemina’s War,” about an Alabama grandmother fighting to secure treatment her daughter and granddaughter, who are caught up in the epidemic of AIDS among Southern African Americans.
There will also be lots of shorts—on longevity, death, art and a Jewish woman’s religious revelation at age 90 when she becomes determined for the first time to taste bacon.
The festival will be held in San Francisco’s Japantown at the New People’s Theater. For more information and to request press tickets or interviews (several filmmakers will be on hand), contact the festival’s irrepressible director, Sheila Malkind, at info@legacyfilmfestivalonaging.org; 415-861-2159.
3. THE STORYBOARD
*** “Let’s End Ageism,” TED Talk by Ashton Applewhite, author of This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism [http://tinyurl.com/y9fc9hna] (Networked Books, 2016): In this 11:37 minute video, says the TED Talk blurb, “It’s not the passage of time that makes it so hard to get older. It’s ageism, a prejudice that pits us against our future selves — and each other. Ashton Applewhite urges us to dismantle the dread and mobilize against the last socially acceptable prejudice. ‘Aging is not a problem to be fixed or a disease to be cured,’ she says. ‘It is a natural, powerful, lifelong process that unites us all.’ This talk was presented at an official TED conference and was featured by our editors on the home page.”
*** “LBJ Launches Medicare: ‘You Can’t Treat Grandma This Way’” by Bill Moyers (July 30): Don’t miss Moyers’ first-hand account of President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s successful drive to pass Medicare as part of his War on Poverty 52 years ago this summer. Moyers, then a special White House assistant, who would also serve as press secretary, begins, “Yes, our health system is broken, but broken systems can be fixed — not easily, but they can be fixed.”
He recalled, “As it had been for decades, it was a tough fight down to the wire. A look back is instructive, not only to show how long it can take to move a legislative dream to reality but also to illustrate how a president with a grasp of history and knowledge of how government works is crucial to making success possible.”
*** “Stop Treating 70- and 90-Year-Olds the Same,” by Louise Aronson, New York Times “Sunday Review,” (Aug. 13): Aronson, a University of California, San Francisco, professor of geriatrics, reminds us that bracketing everyone ages 65 to 100-plus fails as a one-age-fits-all category in medical research and practice. She observes, “The sad fact is that we frequently don’t know how to best care for the old. Treatments rarely target older adults’ particular physiology, and the old are typically excluded from clinical studies.”
She continues, “Equally troublesome is the failure of studies to measure outcomes that reflect older people’s priorities. Most would rather live comfortably and independently for a shorter time than live for a slightly longer time confined to a bed or nursing home . . . Some may believe that focusing more research and treatment on the old will take resources away from younger populations. But we can do both. Insurance companies continue to pay top dollar for questionable, useless and even harmful care for older people, money that could be spent on more effective care.”
Aronson proposes “two easy steps” to help the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention to correct a deficiency in its vaccine recommendations and increase equality in the U.S. health care system: “First, whenever we apply something to people by age and are tempted to divide the life span into just childhood and adulthood, we should add oldhood to the list as well. Second, the National Institutes of Health should require that older adults be included in clinical studies, just as it already does for women and minorities.” Oldhood, says NYT, is the theme of the book she’s writing.
*** “Research Details How Racial Disparities, Stress and Poverty Can Affect Alzheimer’s Risk,” by Liz Seegert, (August 3): Seegert, the topic editor on Aging at the Association of Health Care Journalists, covered the 2017 Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC) in July. She reports that new research presented there “add to the growing body of evidence of the role that social determinants of health can have on Alzheimer’s disease.” She wrote, for example, “Stressful life events, poverty and racial inequities contribute to dementia risk in late life, according to new research unveiled at a recent global gathering of Alzheimer’s experts in London. One major stressful early life event may equate to as much as four years of cognitive aging, with African Americans are most at risk, one study said.”
*** “GOP Health Bill—How We Got Into This Mess,” by Paul Kleyman, New America Media (June 21), also Salon (June 30): Amid the scoreboard coverage of the GOP health bill, historians remind us of how the unique U.S. system became such an insurance-based mess.
*** “Black, Gray and Gay: The Perils of Aging LGBTQ People of Color,” NBCBLK/New America Media, by Chandra Thomas Whitfield (July 7) delves into economic, social and health disparities challenging black and Latino LGBTQ elders and examines what advocates around the U.S. are doing to create solutions. Whitfield writes for NBC’s news site (NBCBLK) for African Americans.
*** “Why Robots Are the Way of Our Aging Future,” Ottawa Citizen/New America Media , Elizabeth Payne (Aug. 4). It’s cuddly, makes eye contact and responds when you pet it. This baby seal–a robot that calms dementia patients—is only one example of new tech in our aging future.
4. SUMMER OF LU-U-U-V GENERATION IN GENERATIONS
“The Summer of Love, the Baby Boomers, and their Arc of Aging,” is the theme of the latest issue of Generations (journal of the American Society on Aging). GBO’s editor is pleased to be among the contributors with my piece, “The Age of Anti-Aging: Media Hype and the Myth of the Ageless Baby Boomer.” (I arrived in San Francisco 50 years ago this fall.) The issue, say the editors, is “an experiment,” departing from the usual scholarly assemblage of essays on a gerontological topic. One of the volume’s guest editors, W. Andrew Achenbaum, PhD, of the University of Houston, commented, “Baby boomers are more diverse in attitudes and experiences than pundits usually portray—our writers . . . had ample opportunity to illustrate points of divergence and converging moments as this generation matured and aged.”
Although only five of the 15 articles are available online, journalists interested in other can contact co-editor Alison Hood to request articles or a PDF of the full issues.
My take on that time is to try popping the media bubble depicting boomers as a generation that failed to live up to its lofty ideals—a myth that has fed into ageist political efforts to cut social insurance programs (and dip into their coffers). The media’s mythologizing of the boomers as a “Me Generation” of Peter Pans is belied by so many who continued for decades devoting their careers to human-service endeavors.
Among the others posted online are:
Amanda Smith Barusch, PhD, reflects in her peak at “Love in Retrospect,” on how the ‘60s expanded romantic possibilities. She traces the ripple effects of the diverse romantic practices and sexual identities of Boomers and examines sexual philosophies, as they evolved toward the notion of “possible selves.”
Stephen Golant, PhD, author of Aging in the Right Place (Health Professions Press, 2015), wrote “Self-Reliant Older Baby Boomers Are Now Better Connected to Goods, Services, and Care,” He assert that older boomers are more self-reliant today than their grandparents were back in the 1970s. Golant believes that today’s more independent and empowered elder boomers will be more capable of accessing the goods, services, and care they need to age more independently than their antecedents—partly due to the Internet and gerontechnology.
Harry “Rick” Moody, PhD’s article “Baby Boomers: From Great Expectations to a Crisis of Meaning” proposes that gerontologists need to look more closely at today’s disillusionment in government and lower confidence in the future, especially given recent political developments here and abroad. He asks how the boomer generation might rewrite meaning into the narrative of a meaner world than its active members would have hoped for at this historical juncture.
Lots to ruminate on. Meanwhile, in the words of Mr. Natural, “Keep on Truckin’.” (“Hey, is that muffin gluten free? Pass the soy milk, will ya? Did you remember to grind the free-trade java? We outta Pepto? I need to put out this fire and fury in my gut.”)
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The Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), founded in 1993, publishes Generations Beat Online. JNG provides information and networking opportunities for journalists covering generational issues, but not those representing services, products or lobbying agendas. Copyright 2017, JNG. For more information contact GBONews Editor Paul Kleyman.
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