GBONEWS: Age-Reporting Fellowship Extended Deadline; Layoffs at PBS’s Next Avenue; WHO Almost Made Aging a Disease; SF Chronicle Calls Aging a Doom Loop; Can You Trust AI on Social Security; & MORE
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations.
July 24, 2025 — Volume 32, Number 11
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 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 send a request to Paul with your name, address, phone number and editorial affiliation or note that you freelance. For each issue, we’ll email the table of contents and links to the full issue at www.gbonews.org. GBONews does not provide its list to other entities.
In This Issue: Moving Epstein Headlines off Page One of Titanic News.
1. EYES ON THE PRIZE: *** Journalists in Aging Fellowship Extended Deadline, July 28—But More time Possible.
2. HEART-BREAKING NEWS: *** Major Layoffs at PBS’s Next Avenue website.
3. THESE OLD SERIES:
*** “Aging on the Ballot” and “Old Age Is Not a Disease,” by Paul Kleyman in Aging in America News;
*** Marketplace’s “Age of Work” Series Goes to London;
*** San Francisco Chronicle Reduces Aging to a “Doom Loop.”
4. GEN BEATLES NEWS: *** Moira Welch joins Toronto Star’s Coveted Queen’s Park Bureau; *** Sarah Boden Honored as Pennsylvania’s Freelance Journalist of the Year.
5. THE STORYBOARD: *** “Should you trust AI for Medicare, Social Security or long-term-care advice?”by Richard Eisenberg, MarketWatch; *** “Coliving as a Housing Solution for Aging New Yorkers,” by Taayoo Murray, Amsterdam News.
1. EYES ON THE PRIZE
Last Call for Applications
*** Next Monday, July 28, is the Extended Deadline to apply for the 16th Journalists in Aging Fellowship for the reporting on issues in aging.
BUT, GBONews.org readers–or colleagues you call–may request a few days more. But first they need to contact this editor at pfkleyman@gmail.com — before 12 noon Pacific Time this coming Monday. Don’t delay!
Journalists from mainstream and ethnic/community media receive $1,500. Plus, chosen fellows will attend GSA’s 2025 Annual Scientific Meeting, to take place November 12-15, 2025, in Boston, with all expenses paid. GBONews’ publisher, the Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), and our academic partner, The Gerontological Society of America (GSA), have collaborated on this program since 2010, with nonprofit foundation funding.
Applications must include a one-to-two-page story pitch for an in-depth project about any aspect of aging, to be completed next year. New Fellows will join the roster of 245 alumni journalists from mainstream, ethnic, senior press or community media. Since the program’s start, Fellows have produced more than 850 stories in all types of media. Many have originated in non-English outlets serving U.S. audiences, from El Tiempo Latino to Sing Tao Daily, as well as in general-media outlets, such as the Washington Post, Science Magazine, NPR News, and numerous local new media.
Currently supporting the program are grants from Silver Century Foundation, The Commonwealth Fund, The John A. Hartford Foundation, and National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation (NIHCM).
2. HEART-BREAKING NEWS
*** GBONews has learned that at PBS’s Next Avenue website all but one staff member were laid off on July 22. Managing Editor Julie Pfitzinger said in an email the following day, “I am the only staff member remaining. The four other members of my team were let go. Yesterday was brutal. We will continue but will slowly take a different form, all of which is to be determined.”
The informative website not only presents 50-plus audiences extensive coverage of such concerns as caregiving, employment, the retirement finance, but it has become an important market for freelance writers.
Meanwhile, journalist Rich Eisenberg, the Next Avenue’s first managing editor and on-going contributor, confirmed to GBONews in an e-mail, “The Marketing Dept will take over. This is a PBS budget cut victim due to Trump.”
3. THESE OLD SERIES
Three Exploring the Impacts of Mass Longevity and the Drag of Age Bias:
*** “Aging on the Ballot: How Age Blaming Lost 2024’s Longevity Moment,” (July 1, 2025) and “Old Age Is Not a Disease,” (July 21, 2025) is a series by GBONews.org Editor Paul Kleyman, published by Aging in America News:
The Aim: These stories describe how the underlying negativity about of old age in America poorly serves the American national narrative. Along with exposing the problems presented by population aging, journalists need to look beyond the framing of decline to inform the public of the potentially enormous gains that may accrue from the longevity revolution.
* “Aging on the Ballot”: The Lede: “Six months into Trump’s second term and a year since the Biden-Trump debate, . . I’m still thinking about the role that ageism played in the election.
While the GOP backed its elder nominee regardless of his cavernous flaws (and felonies), the Democrats sank into derogating their incumbent as being ‘too old.’ Even after Vice President Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, age remained on the ballot.”
Just the Facts: “To disentangle factional presumptions from actual election trends, New York Times political reporter, Shane Goldmacher spent months poring over voting trends in every one of the 3,100 counties in the United States. . . . Goldmacher’s chart-heavy article was headlined, ‘The Democrats’ problems run deep, nearly everywhere’. . . He determined that Trump’s support improved since 2016, in nearly half of American counties (1,433), only three of which had incomes exceeding $100,000 a year. In the meantime, the Democratic vote increased in only 57 counties, 18 of which were ‘wealthy enclaves.’”
The Quote: “During a June 3 Times podcast about his investigation, Goldmacher stated, ‘I think that a lot of people have looked at the 2024 election and said the Democratic Party lost because Joe Biden was too old, that he stayed in the race too long, that Kamala Harris was a weaker candidate, that she didn’t have enough time to prosecute the case, and on and on. But the 2024 election results were not a one-off. They weren’t a one-off at all.’”
* “Old Age Is Not a Disease,” (July 21, 2025): The Lede: “A fascinating podcast by The Atlantic (May 5, 2025) explains how a team of Canadian experts dissuaded the World Health Organization (WHO) from listing aging as a clinical disorder.
Who: In “How to Define Old Age,” Atlantic staff writer Yasmin Tayag recounts her interview with Kiran Rabheru, MD, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Ottawa and a geriatric psychiatrist. . . . In 2021 a division at WHO, according to the podcast transcript, “wanted to officially designate old age as a disease, but with more than 40 years of work with aging populations, Rabheru saw this as another example of ageism that needed to be challenged.”
Say, What!: Rabheru said, “It came to our attention that the WHO was updating the International Classification of Diseases, the ICD. And part of the changes that they were proposing was to include ‘old age’ as a disease. . . Now, in March of 2021, the same organization put out the global report on ageism. To combat ageism.”
Rabheru stressed, “Aging is a privilege; that’s not the disease. . . . Having a diagnosis of ‘old age’ would automatically just lead people to put them into that category, that ‘This person’s just old’—and they move on to something that’s easier to deal with.” His team met with WHO officials and “remarkably” rescinded their decision by dropping the “disease” designation.
What’s More: In the podcast, Tayag smartly explains to her editor the concept of expanding our healthspan as the populations ages, that is, adding more life to our years, not only years to our life.
*** For his ongoing Age of Work series on NPR’s Marketplace.org, program host Kai Ryssdal skipped over the “Pond” during the third week of July to report seven segments on the economic status of older workers, including small business owners, in the demographically shifting London Town.
Accompanied by Nela Richardson, chief economist of the U.S. HR, tax and payroll service ADP, the pair set out to scrutinize Charles III’s fast-aging Kingdom, which, says their website, “has a higher percentage of people over 65 than the United States and holds insights into our economic future.”
Along their way, Ryssdal and Richardson stop at a park bench to meet a 62-year-old IT professional, who was laid off in 2023 and find himself “invisible” in the job market; a honey shop owner in London’s Borough Market, who is hanging on after 10 years, despite worries about Brexit, government bureaucracy, and the effect of increasingly unpredictable climate change on her prime workers—the bees; a British Airways pilot concerned about weathering her employer’s menopause policies; and a health care agency hoping to offset labor shortages with “robot dogs” and drones. Most of these insightful and sometimes delightful segments run about 5 minutes.
One curmudgeonly complaint: Please, Marketplace, get your online act together. Your landing page presents no clue that you have series like this one going and a nicely grouped page for visitors, such as fellow journalists on aging, to peruse. That said, here are the seven lovely links.
* The challenges of navigating the U.K. job market in your 60s (July 15, 2025) After two years of unemployment and feeling invisible, Stuart Morris changed his mindset to get back to work.
* After 10 years in business, running this London honey shop is still a “precarious game” (July 15, 2025): Kai Ryssdal visits Samantha Wallace, co-owner of a honey shop in London’s Borough Market. He’s been talking to her about business in the U.K. for more than six years.
* After starting a skincare business at 50, this Brit is putting everything into his “last role”: Steve Anyiwo started DATSiT, a line of organic body butters four years ago, and is working seven days a week to grow his business.
* How this pilot got British Airways talking about menopause (July 16, 2025): Long-haul British Airways pilot Suzanne Morgan feared how menopause would affect her career. She brought the issue to the company, which now has menopause policies on the books.
* How a “robot dog” could help solve labor shortages in health care (July 16, 2026): Apian, a UK-based healthcare logistics company, hopes to use ground robots and drones to help make hospitals and laboratories more efficient.
* A view of the global economy from one South London neighborhood (July 17, 2025): Peckham, a neighborhood in South London, attracts immigrants from all over the world. On Choumert Road, small business owners are struggling with high costs.
* The story behind England’s first accredited menopause-friendly university (July 18, 2025): One University of Greenwich employee called a Teams meeting to share how menopause was affecting her work — leading to change across the university.
*** “This Doom Loop Will Hit Every Aspect of Our Lives” was the Page One banner headline of a special, San Francisco Chronicle Sunday edition, July 13, 2025: The Dek: “Population, Among Oldest in the nation, could put region’s continued prosperity at risk.”
The package, labeled The Graying Bay, covered nearly eight broadsheet pages (about half of the entire A section of the print edition) with individual stories also serialized earlier in the week).
Sourly, the section reinforces the negative slant on aging in American culture and mainstream media, as a growing “burden” on the nation’s housing, health and economic wellbeing.
The stories on such topics as the San Francisco area’s increasingly unaffordable housing do contain useful and up-to-date data with some accurate background on operative factors. Yet even discussions about the pressures on Bay Area elders, such as housing, are framed as impediments to young families and the region’s “Future.”
For instance, the two-page story, “Fastest-aging Neighborhood could forecast Bay Area’s future,” (fully covering 2 pages with photos) by Connor Letourneau, accurately recalls how California’s 1978 ballot measure, Proposition 13, which led the national “taxpayer’s revolt, froze property taxes for long-time homeowners. That locked in low costs for many in ways that have kept older residents from moving, even when they wanted to, effectively squeezing housing stock for the young.
What Letourneau (10 years at the Chronicle, U of Maryland graduate, in 2013) did not describe is how Proposition 13 and its clones around the nation merely exacerbated a national housing crisis already aggravated by the federal government’s 30-year lid on subsidies for new low-income housing. (It was only lifted in 2024 by the Biden administration, a story covered by the Chronicle only a year ago.)
The Bay Area’s well-documented loss of older homeowners and renters have resulted from a range of intergenerational factors. Topping the list is high regional costs leading to post-pandemic evictions, job losses and so much more.
Further, those 50-plus now constitute the fastest-growing segment of the Bay Area’s homeless population. Pervasive age discrimination has hit older workers everywhere. Prop 13’s statewide clump on education funding plunged California’s public learning—and many family’s future, from among the country’s top-rated to near the bottom in the United States. And multiple other cost-of-living factors affecting people across the age spectrum.
Instead, Letourneau notes, “Due to longer life expectancy, tumbling birth rates and the graying of the baby boomers, the U.S. population has a greater proportion of elderly adults that at any other time since the government began tracking such data 175 years ago.”
He continues, “With experts expecting the nation’s rapid-aging trend to shift into overdrive, no single force could shape America more in the coming decades that its older demographics. The ramifications will rip through every part of society, placing unprecedented demands on housing, health care, education and social services.”
Ramifications of population aging to rip through our social fabric? Yes, that’s surely a fulfillable prophesy. What this and the other “Graying Bay” stories miss is the healthy and productive promise of what gerontologists call “the longevity bonus.” Those vigorous added years may bring—given greater social investment in an aging-friendly, diverse socio-economic order.
For example, as I reported in my recent story, “Longevity’s True Imperative: Live Long and Prosper for All,” Aging in America News (April 1, 2025), “In the United States, according to the report, The Economic Impact of Age Discrimination, AARP and The Economist magazine found that age bias against Americans 50-plus reduced U.S. GDP by $850 billion in 2018 alone.
According to the study, a concerted public-private effort to end age discrimination for 50-plus workers would add $3.9 trillion more to the economy in 2050 (for a total contribution that year of $30.7), than possible have without change.”
The Graying Bay stories quote very few of the leading social gerontologists from the region’s top universities, expert who might have broadened the scope of these lengthy pieces.
4. GEN BEATLES NEWS
*** The Toronto Star’s Moira Welch has been tapped to join the paper’s Queen’s Park bureau “and its amazing team of veteran journalists,” she announced. Welsh explained, “This new opportunity comes after five years spent writing on Canada’s older demographic, part of a project that, by the way, includes my upcoming Third Act podcast, “How to Live to 100 or Die Trying.”
*** Sarah Boden will honored as Freelance Journalist of the Year by the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association (PNA) for her caregiving reporting for the investigative-reporting site, Spotlight PA. To be honored at the association’sKeystone Media Awards Luncheon in Harrisburg, on Oct. 16, 2025, Boden has written on caregiving issues across the age span.
Her stories this year have ranged from “Empathy between the person receiving and giving care helps both. What happens when dementia tears that bond?,” to “Public health officials in Pa. won’t say how they’d handle a $500M cut sought by Trump admin.”
Boden noted that this June marked “my one-year anniversary of leaving my staff job at Pittsburgh’s NPR station and hanging out my shingle. In addition to Spotlight, I’ve filed pieces for NPR, KFF Health News and BBC News. And I’m excited for my first story with Medscape to come out later this summer.” She added, “Year one was a hustle, but I’m excited [about] year two.”
5. THE STORYBOARD
*** “Should you trust AI for Medicare, Social Security or long-term-care advice?” by Richard Eisenberg, MarketWatch (July 17, 2025): The Dek – “The stakes are high. Here’s a guide to using AI for assistance in making complicated financial decisions.”
The Lede: “Based on my tests of seven popular artificial-intelligence bots and new specialized AI services, as well as interviews with experts, the answer is: Possibly, but exercise caution.
In just the past three years, AI has catapulted to a must-use technology that many Americans are deploying frequently for nearly every imaginable purpose. So, it might seem like AI’s vast knowledge and speed could be a terrific way to help grapple with complex financial concerns like claiming Social Security, enrolling in Medicare and buying long-term-care insurance.
But there’s also a potential danger: Mess up, and you could wind up making big mistakes that could endanger your financial security.”
A Quote: “Andrew Lo, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology‘s Laboratory for Financial Engineering, estimates that ‘we’re probably in the second or third inning of effectively dealing with AI hallucinations.’”
Medicare: “‘Understanding Medicare is a perfect application for AI because it can help you navigate that system,’ said Dan Andersen, a guest editor of the recent Generations Journal issue on artificial intelligence and aging, published by the American Society of Aging.
But MIT’s Lo said he would never recommend using only AI to make a final Medicare decision, because it won’t know enough about your circumstances.”
*** “Coliving as a Housing Solution for Aging New Yorkers,” by Taayoo Murray, Amsterdam News (July 17, 2025):
The Lede: “Amit Ahuja was living in Queens and like many others, was looking for an affordable place to rent in May of 2024. ‘I was living somewhere that wasn’t good at all, and desperately wanted to move,” shared Ahuja, 68, who was born in India. He explained that he heard of a coliving facility while at one of the day centers, and reached out.”
Housing Insecurity: “The Office of New York State Comptroller estimates that in 2022, 3 million New York households experienced housing insecurity, which is characterized by issues like burdensome housing costs, inadequate or unsafe living conditions, and the risk of eviction. Minority populations are even more impacted.
“Black and Hispanic New York City residents are disproportionately affected by housing insecurity. The same Comptroller’s report showed that 55 percent of households headed by a Hispanic, and 50 percent of homes with a Black head of household, had at least one housing insecurity problem, in comparison with the 31 percent of households headed by a white person. Coliving can be a viable housing solution for aging New Yorkers.”
The Demographics: A burgeoning issue that complicates the housing crisis in New York is the rapidly aging population. The 65 and older population has increased by 53% since 2000, making the growth of the older population almost 17 times faster than that of the city’s total population. Asian Americans, which includes Indians, are the fastest growing senior population in New York City.”
Affordable Housing for seniors. . . With the average social security check for a 65-year-old being $1611 per month, and the median rent for a two bedroom in New York City at $3397 per month as of early 2025, housing security is a real problem for some of the city’s most vulnerable.”
A Solution: “As the city grapples with this multilayered problem, one facility has presented a promising model for a solution. India Home, a nonprofit organization founded in 2007 and dedicated to addressing the needs of the South Asian senior immigrant community, operates the coliving facility Ahuja moved into, located in Queens, New York City.”
Elders Elsewhere: “Where and how older New Yorkers live has a big impact on their overall health, particularly mental health. According to the San Diego Psychiatric Society, feelings of loneliness are linked to a risk of developing dementia, and other forms of cognitive decline. Some studies show an increased risk of 31% for all-cause dementia, and a 15% increase for cognitive impairment.”
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 2025 Paul Kleyman. For more information contact GBO Editor Paul Kleyman.
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