GBO NEWS: NYT’s Leland Ends 7-Year Saga on Elders 85-Plus; GettingDotOlder, Public TV’s Mighty 13-Part Series Underway; Scripps Howard Awards Deadline; Helen Dennis Logs 1000th Syndicated Successful Aging Column, & MORE
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations – Beginning Our 29th Year.
January 13, 2022 — Volume 29, Number 1
EDITOR’S NOTE: GBONews, e-news of the Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), publishes alerts for journalists, producers and authors covering generational issues. If you have difficulty getting to the full issue of GBONews with the links provided below, simply go to www.gbonews.org to read the latest or past editions. Send your news of important stories or books (by you and others), fellowships, awards or pertinent kvetches to GBO News Editor Paul Kleyman. [pfkleyman@gmail.com]. 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 e-mail, so just click through to the full issue at www.gbonews.org. GBONews does not provide its list to other entities.
In This Issue: News Cycle? Hell, We’ve Got the Life Cycle!
1. GEN BEATLES NEWS: *** John Leland’s Final Lesson in 7-Year NYT Project on 85-Plus Elders; *** Helen Dennis Posts 1000th Syndicated LA Daily News Column; *** Memory Well’s Jay Newton-Small’s Hits Forbes 1000 List; *** Kate Ferguson Moving on from Real Health; *** Retirement Finance Journalist Kerry Hannon Starts at Yahoo Finance.
2. EYES ON THE PRIZE: Scripps Foundation Reporting Awards Deadline, Feb. 4.
3. PUBLIC TV’S MIGHTY NEW GETTINGdotOLDER SERIES (Producer’s Public TV Trifecta, also with his World’s Greatest Cemeteries Series, and doc on MLK and Coretta Scott King’s love story).
As 2022 careens into multiple new fronts — from the Omicron surge (is the “Deltacron” hybrid variant burgeoning below the fold?), Jan. 6 subpoenas and indictments, the filibuster follies, the 2022 election looming over the future of democracy – reporters on cross-cutting beats like aging are scrambling to separate the breaking news from the merely barking angles. GBONews begins our 29th year with a forward look back to basics of aging. Public television and online producer Roberto Mighty has inaugurated his GettingDotOlder series on the diversity of what we share in growing older. And we start below with the New York Times’ John Leland, as he reckons with his seven-year-old editorial master class in living into old-old age. Both return us to what really matters, even as we hunt for generational news hooks to ride the 24/7 news cycle, that is — the life cycle itself.
1. GEN BEATLES NEWS
*** “Notes From the End of a Very Long Life,” by John Leland, New York Times (Jan. 7, 2022), marks the end of a very long series (21 articles he wrote over seven years, plus a bestselling book) chronicling the lives of six diverse and deeply engaging New Yorkers, ages 85-plus. Rarely is a beat reporter able to plunge so far into the experience of living—and, one-by-one–dying. This final feature ostensibly reports on the last days of Ruth Willig, 98, “retired microbiologist, mother of four, self-described ‘feisty old lady.’” More, though, the essay sums up the richest lessons that a journalist might hope to glean in reporting across the lifespan.
Willig was the last survivor “among six older adults I started writing about in 2015.” His resulting 2018 book, Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons From a Year Among the Oldest Old (Sarah Crichton Books/FSG), added a seventh elder to the mix, his own mother. The book accomplished something few even NYT reporter-authors attain—the book reached the paper’s bestseller list. At number 11, it was just behind a slew of tell-all tomes by fired Trump officials.
Leland’s new article touched the Times editors closely enough to home for them to ask him to record the story. The link includes his 17-minute audio that’s well worth the listening. Leland, who says he managed to mike it “without crying,” begins with a thoughtful introduction about the series.
Writing of Ruth Willig, the piece notes, “Since the start of the Times series, she had become a great-grandmother, made a new best friend, saw two of her children retire and declared an end to summer vacations at the Jersey Shore with her daughters. Her life after 85, like the others, had its share of setbacks, but she was not defined by them.”
In the story, Leland reflects, “Journalism tends to look away from people at the end of life, especially at the undramatic end of a long life. Very old people are rarely winning pro sports titles or running governments or businesses, setting consumer trends or even following them. Aging may be an ordinary bodily process, but like other bodily processes, it can elicit shame or embarrassment in others, maybe also fear or disgust. It’s an affront. . . . Rare is the leader like Jimmy Carter, who has let the public see him through the various changes of late old age. He’s 97, born a year later than Ruth.”
He continues, “For those who make it to old-old age, there remains the challenge: How do you make a full and meaningful life when you can’t do so many of the things you once did? At the end of life, what turns out to really matter, and what is just noise?”
Not Just about the Ravages of Old Age
“In 2015, when I started the series,” he writes, “I expected it to be about the ravages of old age, about the things that old age took away. What else was there to say about getting old? Ruth and the others certainly experienced those ravages. They fell in their apartments, alone, unable to get up. They forgot words that once came easily, or repeated things they’d said moments before. They became homebound or unsafe even in their own homes. . . All had lost people close to them, and most experienced periods of loneliness, when they struggled to find reasons to continue.”
In time, Leland found, “Each of the six found a different balance between enjoying the satisfactions that were still accessible to them and lamenting those they had lost. Until dementia forced Ping Wong to move from her apartment, she organized her days around playing mahjong with the same four women in her building. She said, ‘I never think about the things I can’t reach’. . . None expected to live forever, nor wanted to. . . One of time’s virtues is that it is finite. It’s what gives days their value.”
He dubs the six elders as “correspondents from a country that most of us have not traveled in, though many will. Their dispatches have been generous, surprising, predictable, enlightening, contradictory and occasionally full of beans, befitting what the novelist Penelope Lively, born a decade after Ruth, called ‘this place at which we arrive with a certain surprise — ambushed, or so it can seem.’”
Leland concludes, “At the end of each year, I asked the elders if they were glad to have lived it. Did the year have value to them? Always the answer was the same, even from those, including Ruth, who had said during the year that they were ready to go, that they wished for an end sooner rather than later. Yes, they said, yes, it was worth living.” And for any reporter on aging, this article is well worth reading or hearing.
*** Helen Dennis Posted Her 1000th Syndicated LA Daily News Column, “Successful Aging.” Her piece, “Looking back at 20 years of Successful Aging,” ran in the Jan. 9, 2022, of the Daily News and its sibling Southern California New Group papers. A widely regarded expert on the non-financial aspects of retirement, she co-authored the Los Angeles Times bestseller, Project Renewment: The First Retirement Model for Career Women, as well as co-founding Project Renewment for midlife and older career women.
*** Jay Newton-Small Hits 1000 at Forbes: Time Magazine contributor and bestselling author Jay Newton-Small made the Forbes “Next 1000” list of small and mid-sized emerging business for creating MemoryWell. The 2016 startup contracts with journalists to work with families to develop concise stories with images, often for iPads, telling about the lives of long-term care residents with dementia, so that healthcare providers can get a better sense of who they’re caring for. She left fulltime reporting duties covering politics – often appearing on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews – to establish the service.
According to Forbes, “When her father moved into a care home for those with Alzheimer’s, Newton-Small, then a reporter for Time Magazine, wrote a story [for the home’s staff] about his life so that his caregivers would know something about him beyond the answers to his admissions questionnaire. This transformed her father’s care.” She built up a list of several hundred working and retired reporters, whom MemoryWell matches with family members whose loved ones are residents of Newton-Small’s client continuing-care companies, such as the home healthcare provider Prospero Health and healthcare staffing firm Vituity Health.
Forbes’ Next 1000 showcases “sole proprietors, self-funded shops and pre-revenue startups in every region of the country—all with under $10 million in revenue or funding and infinite drive and hustle.”
*** Kate Ferguson started 2022 by moving on from Real Health Magazine, where she was editor-in-chief for a national African-American audience for e several years. A former Journalists in Aging Fellow, she the new associate editor for the News & Views newsletter of the Perlmutter Cancer Center magazine, at New York University’s Langone Health System.
*** Retirement Economics Journalist Kerry Hannon Announced that she’s joined Yahoo Finance as Senior Columnist at Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Finance Live On-Air! I will be covering work and jobs, retirement and entrepreneurship with a dash of travel reporting along the way. The best-selling author of more than a dozen books has previously also written for the New York Times, MarketWatch, Forbes, and PBS Next Avenue.
2. EYES ON THE PRIZE
*** Application Deadline for the Scripps Howard Awards, Feb. 4, 2022: Among the most prestigious American journalism competitions, awards prizes of $10,000 or $20,000 in 15 categories for “high-impact reporting,” says their website. The competition is open to staff and independent journalists in all media. Entries must be for work originally broadcast, published or presented online during 2021 by a media outlet based in the United States or its territories. International media outlets are eligible if they meet this requirement. The entry fee in most categories is $75 per category. Read about the 2020 winners. (Thanks to the NYT’s Paula Span for alerting us to this awards deadline.)
3. PUBLIC TV’S MIGHTY NEW GETTINGdotOLDER SERIES
*** In the Premier Episode of the 13-part documentary TV series, “GettingDotOlder,” a hale and hardy retiree answers the videographer’s question about his most profound life transition. White-haired Ken speaks standing by a river dock where he’s an avid member of a rowing team and reveals calmly, but with a sorrowful arch wrinkling his brow, that his son died at age 18 in the wake of a four-year struggle with cancer. In their final moments together, “I tried to ease his mind from not feeling he disappointed anybody by succumbing to the disease. And he died in my arms, and I have deep wounds from missing him.”
Independent producer Roberto Mighty, who spent seven years developing (and self-funding) the public television series, admitted in a GBONews.org interview, “I’ve got to tell you, this takes a lot out of me emotionally.” He explained, “ Some tell you a story that is absolutely heartbreaking. And you have to listen and ask clarifying questions, when what you want to do is put your arm around that person and cry.”
A veteran multimedia producer, Mighty, through his Boston-based production company, Celestial Media, currently has two series and a documentary special running on public TV stations nationwide. Mighty’s 2020 doc on how Martin Luther King, Jr., met Coretta, Legacy of Love, will be airing widely for the upcoming MLK holiday. (Click herefor stations and broadcast times.) And his new six-part series, World’s Greatest Cemeteries, explores the very lively historical diversity revealed at grave sites from Los Angeles to Cincinnati to Paris.
The 13-part weekly series, GettingDotOlder, is an especially ambitious video and internet project on the lived experience of aging in America. Not only has Mighty succeeded in propelling the first season over 190 American Public Television (APT) affiliates, but he’s establishing a companion website designed to field thousands of written surveys and viewer videos recording individuals’ personal experiences of growing older. (Northern California Public Media is the “presenting station,” working with the producer on complicated formatting and lining up local stations.)
Mighty said his elevator pitch to APT for GettingDotOlder was: “I’m interviewing people and getting their stories about aging. On paper the series is for people 50+, but my sweet spot is Baby Boomers. I’m 67. I’ve grown up with everything from Leave It to Beaver to Star Trek. Baby Boomers have all sorts of cultural attributes that, gosh, many of us share regardless of our outward appearance, regardless of where we live in the country and whether or not we Asian, Hispanic, White, Black, Jewish, Catholic, Moslem.” (Yes, he really said, “gosh,” like the Beav, maybe, but not Eddie Haskell.)
He added, “It’s fascinating: Everyone watched The Ed Sullivan Show – everyone!. Everyone knew about the moon landing . . . and the Beatles, Motown. I think our generations may have been one of the last ones that was united by media.”
His goal for the half-hour programs, being broadcast over the next three years, “was to discuss aging people’s aging from their perspective. I do have experts on the show . . . from Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Howard University, but everything I ask the experts come out of some experience that one of my interviewees reported.”
Mighty, who has taught cinematography, editing and video production at Boston University and Emerson College, stressed that there’s already plenty of well-researched journalism available. “My contribution is finding someone who is concerned about getting dementia or who is caring for someone with dementia, getting them to describe in their own personal emotional terms their experience of it,” he said.
When he began the interviews in 2014, Mighty asked seven questions that both expanded to the current questionnaire of 27, and delved more deeply into the richness of the experience of aging. The strongest interviews, most from 1-1.5 hours, and some up to three hours, yielded 3-7 minute segments that are “deeply personal to them, but that everyone in our age group can relate to.” Mighty intertwined those stories with others revealing sometimes powerful emotional parallels and contrasts. Some people appearing in later episodes.
For instance, when asked what aging means to her, Diane, an actress and dancer, forcefully asserts, “Becoming invisible.” People started calling her “Miss D.” In Black culture, she explained, that’s what people call an old woman, “like Miss Jane Pitman,” referring to the Earnest J. Gaines novel and film about a 110-year-old former slave. The segment shows Diane, an ardent archer, powerfully pulling back on her bow and firing her arrows into a target’s bullseye.
“I Thought I Was Going Blind”
Mighty’s own experience with aging started in a panic. At age 50 he awoke one day to see insect-like shapes floating in his eyes: “I thought I was going blind.” On frantically calling his doctor’s office, a nurse asked him a swarm of questions. Then his physician said, “Don’t worry. You’re not going blind, you’re just getting older.”
He recounted, “That was the moment. I recall thinking, ‘I can’t be getting older; I feel fine.’ So I realized that I associated aging with sickness, infirmity, a lack of immortality.” Laughing, he stated, “I thought I was immortal!” Mighty started asking friends, ”Hey, how do you feel about getting older?” Eventually he record interviews with them and decided to produce a traveling multimedia, interactive museum exhibition, “which was specialty of mine.”
Then success intervened with multiple professional opportunities that not only paid well, but enabled him to travel widely and, on the side, gather a broader spectrum of interviews on aging. The cemeteries series and other projects enabled him to self-fund the first season and initial development of the associated website.
After conducting many interviews, he said, “It wasn’t long before I realized that all my friends are well educated and middle-class; I was taken aback by that, because I think of myself as someone who is friends with everyone.” Mighty remembered thinking, “Wow, have you become bourgeoise or what!” He was determined to include people, “as our generation would say, ‘from all walks of life’” and all places.
Hardly new to multiculturalism, he said, “I’m the son of immigrants and grew up speaking two languages.” His father, a member of Jamaica’s mighty large clan of Mighty’s, spent his much of his childhood in Panama. He and Roberto’s mother, a native of Cincinnati, met at the historically Black Wilberforce College in Wilberforce, Ohio.
He added, “Dad was in the Air Force, so I grew up in Anchorage, Alaska — and Queens, NY. In New York, you have ethnic enclaves. . . . if you wanted Greek food, go to this neighborhood, for Puerto Rican food, go to that neighborhood. But I’m aware that not every city in America has this kind of diversity.” Through travel, Mighty has expanded the series culturally and geographically to a “larger group of America writ large that is generally not represented well enough.”
For better geographic diversity, he began adding internet interviews, such as with Carolyn, a former legal professional and current yoga teacher in Kansas City, Mo.: “I can do yoga until they throw dirt on my face.”
Pretty much a one-producer band now, Mighty hopes to secure grants and underwriting commitments to hire a staff of five to continue “building out” the GettingDotOlder project for public TV and the “online experience.” He went on, “It’s just too much work for one person.”
Noting that he’s expecting “thousands of people to be interested with the show,” he said the website tucked in more than 70 of the written surveys with answers to all 27 questions. Participants grant his Celestial Media permission to use this material for the show. He plans to set up a data-base collector to help gather and sort submissions, which assistants will screen for Mighty’s possible video follow-up.
Rather than hire the usual “army of recent college graduates,” he said, Mighty intends to bring on Baby Boomers, retirees, who have loads of experience in related areas to help curate the stories. In particular, he wants to hire older and retired journalists, especially feature writers. “Number one, they understand all the Baby Boom cultural stuff, and number two, they’d have a grasp of storytelling.” (He clarified, “I’m not against young people. I have a daughter who’s in her 20s.”)
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 2022 JNG. For more information contact GBO Editor Paul Kleyman.
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