GBO NEWS: Stria’s Susan Donley & Her Purple Pen; Ageism in Health, Media, Movies & Bankruptcy; Journalists Fellowship Program Wrongly Hit; Legacy Film Festival
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations– Celebrating 25 Years.
August 10, 2018 — Volume 18, Number 9
EDITOR’S NOTE: GBONews, e-news of the Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), 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 GBONews Editor Paul Kleyman. To subscribe to GBONews.org at no charge, simply sending a request to Paul with your name, address, phone number and editorial affiliation or note that you freelance. For each issue, you’ll receive the table of contents in an email, so just click through to the full issue at www.gbonews.org. GBONews does not provide its list to other entities.
In This Issue: Summertime, and the trollin’ is easy.
1. GEN-BEAT PROFILE–STRIA’S SUSAN DONLEY: Past PBS Next Avenue Publisher Launches Online Media Start-Up for Market ‘Influencers’ in Aging
2. AGEISM IN HEALTH CARE & MEDIA:
*** “When My Mother Wanted to Die,”by Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Tikkun Magazine;
*** “The Migrating, Evolving Age Beat: From Offset to Online,”by Jay Newton-Small, and *** “The Impacts of On-Screen Portrayals of Aging: A Detriment to Older Audiences’ Health?”by Katherine Pieper and Stacy L. Smith, both in the July-August issue of Aging Today;
*** “‘Too Little Too Late’: Bankruptcy Booms Among Older Americans,”byTara Siegel Bernard,New York Times.
3. JOURNALISM FELLOWSHIPS WRONGLY CRITICIZED: Journalists in Aging Fellows Program falsely hit as mere “PR” project; program directors never interviewed.
4. LEGACY FILM FESTIVAL: *** The 8thLegacy Film Festival on Agingset for San Francisco, Sept. 14-16.
1. GEN-BEAT PROFILE: STRIA’S SUSAN DONLEY
Past PBS Next Avenue Publisher Launches Online Media Start-Up for Market ‘Influencers’ in Aging
Susan Donely has purple ink in her veins. That’s the color her late mother chose for marking up copy as an editor for the Maryland State Department of Education. “She used purple because she thought red looked too mean,” said Donely, whose dad is a retired magazine editor. Although she “always thought I’d be a journalist,” her keen business and marketing instincts put her on the publishing side.
Today, after spending four years as publisher of Next Avenue, the PBS 50+ website, she’s embarked on a new online media endeavor as founding publisher and CEO of Stria News, a market-oriented outlet for business professionals and thought leaders in aging.
GBONews.org interviewed her recently about the content focus of Stria and its potential as a source on key trends in aging and as a freelance market for reporters on the generations beat.
Donley’s concept for Stria first glimmered as she kept meeting one brilliant gerontologist or enterprising business leader after another–often finding they were unaware of what they could learn from others in the field. While at Next Avenue’sshe launched the annual “50 Influencers in Aging” list to spark their awareness of one another as much as to the website’s readers.
Thought Leaders Siloed From Each Other
She observed, “They said similar things, yet they didn’t know all of their colleagues who were on the Influencers list.” Donley went on, “Aging is really siloed. There didn’t seem to be a lot of recognition or coming together of people in disparate parts of the field.” It dawned on her that a new medium was needed “to fill a gap I saw among thought leaders in the media marketplace for thinking and talking about higher-level aging and longevity markets.”
Why Stria? (It rhymes with Hi-ya!): “I wanted a short nonsense word, but the derivation is from the geological striations in rocks over time. I liked the connection to longevity and the lines of business that we’re trying to bring together.”
Unlike commercial business media, such as Forbes, she went on, articles for Striaare “too in the weeds for a consumer-based publication, and we are not for consumers.” Additionally, she said, “What Stria attempts to do and will do more and more is to curate all of that data.”
Donley stressed, “We’re a straight-up trade,” so writers for the website can report concisely without much framing. Because subscribers are already well-versed in the field, she said, every story doesn’t have to begin with, “There’s a demographic shift happening in the country,” more common to consumer stories.
Over her years at Next Avenue, Donley observed an increasing demand for market-based solutions. “I saw so many wonderfully well-meaning and, I’m sure, brilliant entrepreneurs, who were bringing products to market without a real understanding of the legacy of study and service that had gone into the traditional field of aging. What all of those thought leaders had been doing was completely obscured from these entrepreneurs.” Except, she added, for those attending two or three annual conferences, such as Aging 2.0 and the What’s Next and Silicon Valley Boomer Business summits.
No Categories for Old News
Donley considered how a distinct editorial approach could synergize the flow of ideas in aging’s virtual brain to discern the latest trends and developments. Rather than cover a category, such as housing, which would place the new websitein competition with establish senior-housing outlets, she determined that Stria should be curating data from those and other sources to “help define what matters in summary form.”
Currently, Stria is publishing 2-3 times a week, on its way, Donley hopes, to daily postings. A recent issue (Aug. 7) led with a concise feature on, “TheFive Aging Taboos Stria Readers Want to Talk About.” For instance, writer Christa Fletcher found, “Ageism surfaced as the root cause of many taboos. Aging itself is often ‘shamed, denied, or punished,’ said one Striareader.” She quotes Charlie Visconage, digital content manager of LeadingAge.org. To address age-bias in long-term care, he started the podcast, Aging Unmasked.
Other stories included the “Tweets of the Week” round-up (none from you know who), “Meet Gen C: The Group Longevity Marketers Can’t Ignore,” by communications researcher, Sherri Snelling, and “The Crisis in Rural Aging,” by Leigh Ann Hubbard.
Donley continued, “The value proposition of Stria is that we’ll help you be smart within the construct of your work life, and that doesn’t necessarily mean reading an anecdote about personal connection and easing into the data point before wrapping up with a wonderful quote. I mean, that structure of story is obviously effective, but I kind of encourage our writers to get in, make the point, and get out. Just to make it fun.” (Stria is currently paying about $250-$400 for starters, depending on assignments.)
But for whom? And against what competition? One might well wince at the seeming naivety of her assertion, “I think the vision I have is that we don’t have competition, because nobody is doing the kind of journalism we’re doing.”
PBS’s 50+ Initiative
Then, again, Donley recalled how she shrugged off suggestions that the struggling Next Avenuewas going up against AARP when she took over their business side of the website in autumn 2012. “For one thing, we were itsy bitsy. But also we were out to do something different. Ours was complementary to what’s out there.” In three months her new marketing campaign drove up the website’s slim traffic level by ten-fold, to 350,000.
Donley had returned to PBS that season after spending several years in New York. During her initial stint in public television in the mid-2000s, she first handled national marketing for the prime-time likes of Masterpiece Theaterand Ken Burns specials. Eventually, she was asked to develop the marketing plan for the precursor for what became Next Avenue.
She did much of the research for the system’s internal 2007 report, “Public Television 50+ Life Stage Initiative.” It showed, for instance, that “85% of public television’s retained member base is 50+.” PBS planned to launcha sponsored broadcast and multimedia platform with content generated by new funding and program-producing stations around the country, such as Boston’s WGBH, and LA’s KCET.
GBO’s editor, then at the American Society on Aging’s Aging Today, attended an impressive meeting in 2007, which Donley helped organized in Washington, D.C. On hand were 50 key network movers and shakers, who heard keynotes by the heads of PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. With that kind of clout behind the initiative, it seemed that PBS was setting out on a 10-year plan practically to corner the lucrative aging market being dismissed by pretty much the rest of youth-obsessed American TV.
Then the Great Boomer Initiative (and the rest of the country) hit the Great Recession. Donley said, the original sponsorship model “was smart; it just didn’t work.” She moved on to New York for five years, becoming disillusioned with commercial media and deciding to refocus on marketing for nonprofits, until she heard from 50-plus project co-founder, Judy Diaz. The project had stumbled along, mainly with a couple of permutations of a magazine-style show. Diaz and her project co-founder, Jim Pagliarini, longtime GM of Twin Cities Public Television, decided to recalibrate.
They launched theNext Avenue news and features site in May 2012, and after arriving as the new publisher and managing director that September, Donley said she slashed the high operating budget in half, focused on broadening the audience, and restructured towards a model relying on a combination of foundation grants, along with advertising, sponsorships and licensed content. PBS/CPB chimed in for the first time with system funding.
When she left after four years, Next Avenue’s monthly traffic was at 2 million. “We fully funded our own operating budget,” she noted.
Mapping the Age-Pro Market
For Stria, Donley has been self-financing the for-profit start-up and is banking on a combination of sponsorships and paid subscriptions at $98 per year for the website’s target audience of professionals. She recently signed up AARP as her first sponsor.
The Stria site includes a market map of the audiences with older people at the middle surrounded by factors their lives impacted by aging, she said. “Wrapped around are all of the services, businesses, products that address those needs. And then there’s the ring with nonprofits, academia and research.”
So far, Stria’s traffic is about 2,000 unique visitors a month, she said, with her marketing effort first plucking “low-hanging fruit” of thought leaders, executive directors, association heads and professionals in the traditional field of aging, that is, “the people who have been setting the agenda for a while now.”
Second, she said, “are the business leaders and entrepreneurs, who are trying to set their own agenda to figure out what does this longevity marketplace mean.” Next are vendors at agencies and services hoping to engage with those two groups, followed by emerging leaders.
Teaching, Caregiving and a Passion for Words
GBONews asked the 43-year-old cartographer of Stria’s marketing map, why aging? “I was an elementary-education major in college for four years. I’m a teacher, and I really thought I wanted to help people grow in the first 10 years. But as it happened, it is about growing in the last 10-20-30-40 years of life that really get me going.”
Precipitating that shift, the Generation Xer recalled, was her becoming a caregiver for her mother, who “was sick for most of my life and passed when I was 32.”
But it was also her parents’ passion for words that kept bringing Donley back to media. Both were editor’s. Her dad, who recently moved into seniors housing, had edited the national magazine of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
The bemused Donley reminisced, “I remember my parents fighting. I was getting ready for school and my mom was putting rollers in her hair, and they were screaming at one another about a serial comma. These are my people,” she exclaimed, “these are my people!”
Visitors to Stria get free access to five stories. For journalists, Donley offered to provide a trial subscription to reporters getting GBONews. If you’re interested, send her a request along with your contact information and media affiliation, if staff, or a brief note on your freelance work at sdonley@strianews.com. Put “GBONews-Stria Subscription Request” in the subject line.
–Paul Kleyman
2. AGEISM IN HEALTH CARE, MEDIA
*** “When My Mother Wanted to Die,” by Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Tikkun Magazine(July 20): Gullette, most recently author of Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People (Rutgers, 2017), describes what happened some years ago when her mother, 91, damaged three vertebrae from a fall in her Florida apartment. Arriving four days later, Gullette found her mother in pain, but no doctor was willing to make a house-call.
She continues, “Consider any medical training that does not insist on listening well, particularly to older patients. Defective pain management can arise from doctors’ heightened avoidance of opioids for chronic pain, but also from not accepting the self-report from certain patients about acute pain. Not listening in clinical settings may occur more frequently when an old person, likely to be a woman (and/or a person of color or LGBTQ), is telling their story.”
A resident scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center, Gullette exposes a range of ageist biases in American medical care, such as an “Alzheimer’s” diagnosis made too readily from an unwarranted assumption. Doctors “may overlook causes of hesitant or slow speech that are treatable, like dehydration, urinary tract infection, hearing loss, or simple shyness,” she explains.
Of particular interest, Gullette writes, “Medical ageism ought to be a moral issue that medical schools confront. Training in communication and diversity would help, if ‘diversity’ includes age, illness, and disability. The new oath that doctors take when they graduate from New York Medical College, Tulane, and UC-San Francisco includes a vow not to discriminate on the basis of gender, race, religion, or sexual orientation. This is just. But why are ageism and ableism omitted?”
She adds, “Doctors conscious of other biases seem less aware of these. Women, people of color, Muslims, trans people, and other adults whom they may have learned to protect also grow old; and once enrolled in this new stigmatized category, may receive negligent care. (I call ageism in such cases the replacement bias.) Shouldn’t a concerned public demand a vow of anti-ageism and anti-ableism from all medical schools?”
*** “The Migrating, Evolving Age Beat: From Offset to Online,” by Jay Newton-Small, Aging Today (July-August 2018): Written for a special issue of the American Society on Aging newspaper devoted to media and culture, the essay begins, “I was winding down the marathon of covering a presidential election in 2016, when I met with my editors at Time Magazineto discuss what I would cover after the election. ‘How about aging?’ I suggested. My editors hesitated: How about the White House? Or, at least, politics?’”
A veteran political reporter for Time, Newton-Small emerged a few years ago from caregiving for her father, who had Alzheimer’s, to found MemoryWell.com., a multimedia web-based platform for telling the life stories of people with dementia. She’s also author of the 2016 bestseller, Broad Influence: How Women Are Changing the Way America Works. But like so many journalists who experience the issues of aging firsthand, she took on the under-covered topic as a quest.
In her piece for Aging Today, Newton-Small adds, “For many legacy news outlets like Time, diminished profits and shrinking staffs have forced hard decisions and marginalized topics like aging.But hunger for news about aging is growing, as more people experience firsthand the challenge of caring for a loved one or making tough decisions for themselves about when and how to retire or move into long-term care.”
Although fewer reporters than ever are covering generational issue in shrinking newsrooms, she notes, “large outlets, such as The Washington Post and The New York Times, have continued to devote resources to the beat.
Hard-hit smaller and mid-sized newspapers increasingly rely on national wire services, leaving an educational void in local communities about policies affecting elders or introducing them to resources that could help, according to Liz Seegert, the Association of Health Care Journalists section editor on aging. (Full disclosure: the article also quotes GBO’s editor.)
Newton-Small goes on, “While many newspapers have made strides to innovate and invest in growing younger audiences, few have gone out of their way to tailor coverage to the older adults who already comprise a loyal part of their readership.”
Although many traditional news outlets are struggling, she found, “new outlets are coming online, adding new energy and nuance to the beat.” In particular, the story highlights Next Avenue, STATNews, the health site set sail in 2015 by The Boston Globe,and other signs of rising coverage. (The Globe also started reporter Robert Weismanon his boomer newsbeat last December. See the interview with him in the June GBONews.org.)
Further, she quotes Seegert’s advice to reporters covering the age-beat on avoiding common pitfalls. A major one, Newton-Small writes, is “lumping elders together as a group—conflating the lifestyle and abilities of someone who is age 65 and getting up for work every day with someone who is 30 years older and far more frail.” Seegert, she writes, goes on to say that even in stories about aging, reporters may minimize older people’s opinions and participation: “Even people with chronic disease and dementia still are people.”
On a personal note, Newton-Small writes that she started MemoryWell two years ago to help professional caregivers connect to them to people with dementia in a deeper way, and with a level of empathy she wanted for her father when he was in long-term care. Recently she announced that the website will soon launch a news platform of stories on aging.
***ALSO IN AGING TODAY: “The Impacts of On-Screen Portrayals of Aging: A Detriment to Older Audiences’ Health?” by Katherine Pieper and Stacy L. Smith: “Individuals ages 60 and older represent roughly 20 percent of the U.S. population. In 2017, elders represented 16 percent of movie-ticket buyers in the United States and Canada, and spent more than 50 hours per week watching television, according to Nielsen.”
The article cites stats from the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, their partnership with the health insurance company Humana: “Across the 100 highest-grossing movies in 2016, only 11 percent of speaking characters were ages 60 or older. Not only are older adult characters rare, but also when they appear on screen, older characters are predominantly white and male. Only 26.4 percent of older speaking characters in film are women and roughly a quarter of elders are from under-represented racial or ethnic groups. Older females from under-represented racial or ethnic groups often are invisible.”
*** “‘Too Little Too Late’: Bankruptcy Booms Among Older Americans,” by Tara Siegel Bernard, New York Times (Aug. 5): Here’s one for the annals of collateral ageism: “For a rapidly growing share of older Americans, traditional ideas about life in retirement are being upended by a dismal reality: bankruptcy. The signs of potential trouble — vanishing pensions, soaring medical expenses, inadequate savings — have been building for years. Now, new research sheds light on the scope of the problem: The rate of people 65 and older filing for bankruptcy is three times what it was in 1991, the study found, and the same group accounts for a far greater share of all filers.” Bernard reports on the new study, from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, which explains, “When the costs of aging are off-loaded onto a population that simply does not have access to adequate resources, something has to give and older Americans turn to what little is left of the social safety net — bankruptcy court.”
3. JOURNALISM FELLOWSHIPS WRONGLY CRITICIZED
GBONews readers may have recently readthat the Journalists in Aging Fellows Program, in which our Journalists Network on Generations (JNG) partners with The Gerontological Society of America (GSA), has been accused of paying reporters to publish “vetted advertorials” benefiting GSA. This allegation is not true. It was made by the respected Gary Schwitzerof the website HealthNewsReview.org in a July 11 blog titled, “A Troubling Trade: Gerontological Society Offering Journalism Fellowships, with an Ethical Catch.” Those visiting this blog can see the program’s defense in the comments section, including by fellows who have been in the program.
The program’s co-directors were not interviewed for the piece — neither GSA’s Todd Kluss, whose e-mail auto-reply said he was returning from leave, nor this editor. My contact information was given and I was readily available. The assertion that we require fellows to write about the GSA conference is based on an incomplete reading of the program’s online application page, which has now been made even clearer to prevent further mischaracterizations.
Both that description and the agreement reporters sign invite fellows to draw not only on the conference, but also any other research sources. This is demonstrated by the abundance of fellowship stories produced since the program started in 2010 that make no reference to GSA or the conference. (As with most fellowships, reporters include a separate acknowledgement of their support from the program at the bottom.)
The program has always been a journalistic collaboration, not a “PR” effort for GSA. From the start, they partnered with JNG and New America Media, until the latter ceased operations last year. GSA is not a “health care organization,” as the blog stated, but a multidisciplinary academic research nonprofit with no commercial or lobbying agenda. They are, I believe, the kind of model journalistic partner for bridging reporters to the expertise they need to even begin covering a complex issue area like aging.
In objecting to the fellowship’s payment of any stipend and travel to the conference, Schwitzer wrote, “News that concerns an aging population should stand on its own merits. The importance of such news should be clear to news organizations. It shouldn’t require a kind of bribe to get journalists to attend a meeting. . . .” But many generations-beat journalists counter-argue that more support for aging coverage is vital, such as Time’s Jay Newton-Small in her Aging Today article on media ageism mentioned elsewhere in this issue.
This program provides a tremendous value toward filling the coverage gap on aging and addressing the underlying ageism in American media. We have received the highest feedback from participants, whose meaningful stories have reached millions of readers. Generational coverage is one of American journalism’s “orphan” newsbeats, chronically ignored areas of diversity in our rapidly aging country that needs more information on how to cope and adjust on multiple fronts.
Meanwhile, we will continue our purpose of supporting positive change on the age beat through our an entirely legitimate and eminently ethical collaboration.
Fellowship Story Sample
For the record, in the past year alone, journalists in our program have published or broadcast stories on vital subjects from caregiver depression, to gentrification’s strain on older adults, to heritage arts, to exploitation of older undocumented laborers, most with no reference to GSA. Among the short-term project stories, some included GSA conference coverage and some did not.
“$36 Billion May Be Low Estimate for Growing Elder Fraud,” by Kelli B. Grant, CNBC, (Sept. 6, 2017): One in 18 older “cognitively intact” adults falls prey to financial fraud or abuse each year, says a new study. Many state securities regulators report an uptick in elder fraud.
“Study: Race Bias Doubles Suicide Consideration by Chinese Elders in U.S.,” by Zhihong Li, Sing Tao Daily (Aug 27, 2017): New research shows Chinese elders in the U.S. who experience racial bias consider suicide at twice the level of those who did not experience discrimination. English posted on New America Media. Or see it in Chinese.
Among long-term projects were:
* How Undocumented Hispanic Laborers are Exploited in Boston (English and Spanish) and Los Angeles (English and Spanish).
* How Aging Arab immigrants in the Dearborn/Detroit experience depression from isolation aggravated by poor public transportation.
* How African-American Seniors in the Bay Area struggle to find therapists who understand them.
* A one-hour public radio documentary on palliative care in America by JoAnn Mar, KALW San Francisco, culminating her two-year End of Life Radio Project.
* An investigation of how home care agencies often wrongly deny Medicare help to the chronically ill” for Kaiser Health News.
* How growing numbers of American seniors are going to Mexico for affordable dental and eye care.
* Why Paiute tribal elders struggle to navigate a faltering health care system.
* Retirement challenges aging farmworkers face in rural Arizona.
4. LEGACY FILM FESTIVAL IN SAN FRANCISCO
*** The 8thLegacy Film Festival on Aging, in San Francisco’s Japantown, Sept. 14-16, will take audiences from a 70-something couple’s rekindled sex and devotion in impoverished Cuba, to a remarkable Czech feature documentary following a 35-year marriage, to one San Franciscan’s choice of physician-assisted suicide to end his suffering as he is surrounded by his tribe of artist friends and family. GBO’s editor had a blast helping to pick these flicks as a member of the Festival’s board.
In one dramatic feature, “Nothing To Do,” middle-aged siblings, who can’t stand each other, go toe-to-toe during their father’s last days—and discover how family bonds never quite die. In another, “Ice Mother (Bába z ledu),” from the Czech Republic, Hana, a widow of 67, rescues an elderly ice swimmer while walking with her difficult young grandson. The encounter results in an unexpected hobby and new love. The film, in Czech, with English subtitles, is one of the most charming and emotionally layered films we’ve seen in any language about a woman’s transition from habitual family bonds to a new sense of independence in late life.
Among this year’s shorts are“Three Boys Manzanar,” on the reunion of three septuagenarians, who were photographed together in the WWII Japanese internment at Camp Manzanar, and the delectable “Forever Chinatown,” a 40-year tour to the hidden corners of San Francisco’s most famous neighborhood by artist and retired Hollywood designer, Frank Wong, 81. “The Other Side” introduces viewers to deported musician, Jose Marquez, and his daughter Susanna, who have been separated for almost 15 years. They meet every month on either side of the very real U.S.-Mexico border wall.
Interested journalists can request press tickets from Festival Director Sheila Malkind. The full schedule is posted on the event’s website.
The Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), founded in 1993, publishes Generations Beat Online News (GBONews.org). JNG provides information and networking opportunities for journalists covering generational issues, but not those representing services, products or lobbying agendas. Copyright 2018 JNG. For more information contact GBO Editor Paul Kleyman.
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