Graham to lead AHCJ’s resources on aging
Veteran health care journalist Judith Graham will be AHCJ’s topic leader in building new resources for journalists covering aging.
Judith Graham
Graham, who was at the Chicago Tribune for 14 years, will write tip sheets and background briefs, recognize important reporting on the issue, ask other journalists to share their experience on the topic and she will curate lists of resources for journalists.
She will encourage and review suggestions from AHCJ members on what resources they need to cover this increasingly important beat.
We’ve asked Graham to introduce herself:
I’m a long-time journalist who started writing about health care finance and policy in the mid-1980s when this was a new beat, with only a handful of reporters tracking it closely across the country. Over dozens of years, I’ve reported on Medicare, Medicaid, long-term care, chronic care, patient safety, public health, efforts to improve health care quality, end of life care, and the business of health care, among other topics.
Understanding aging is both a personal and professional passion of mine. On the personal front, my mother had multiple sclerosis for 63 years and very early in life, I came to understand how the health care system fails people with long-term chronic illnesses. As a caregiver, I dealt for years with problems that frail, older people experience – finding transportation to medical appointments, uncoordinated medical care, securing reliable home health assistance, debilitating isolation, dealing with insurance hassles, and more.
For the past year, I’ve authored a monthly column on aging for the Tribune Co. newspapers, which was distributed widely across the country. Also, I’ve hosted more than half a dozen hour-long Web chats on aging issues and written extensively about these topics on my blog, Triage (now discontinued), and in the news pages of the Chicago Tribune, where I was a senior health and medicine reporter until recently.
Please feel free to contact me via email (judith@healthjournalism.org) with questions or suggestions about how to improve this site. I’m eager to make it as useful to you as possible.
Boston Globe’s Gil joins AHCJ board of directors
Gideon Gil, the health and science editor at The Boston Globe, joins five incumbents in being seated on the Association of Health Care Journalists’ 2011-12 board of directors.
Gideon Gil
Incumbents starting a new two-year term include Felice Freyer of The Providence (R.I.) Journal, Carla K. Johnson of The Associated Press, independent journalist Maryn McKenna, Charles Ornstein of ProPublica and Karl Stark of The Philadelphia Inquirer. Independent journalist Andrew Holtz, a longtime board member and former interim executive director, chose not to run for re-election.
Gil has served on AHCJ’s membership committee for two years, helping to shape new rules to reflect recent changes in journalism while ensuring AHCJ remains an organization of journalists.
Read more about Gil and the board of directors.
AHCJ lodges protest over handling of embargo
The Association of Health Care Journalists has followed up on concerns about how an embargo was handled earlier this month by several federal agencies and a medical journal.
The organization sent letters this week to several federal agencies and a medical journal objecting to the uneven handling of embargoed news. The letters were addressed to officials at the National Institute of Mental Health, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics to protest the recent handling of embargoes on two autism studies. AHCJ is asking the agencies and academy to clarify embargo policies, saying that once an embargo is broken – once the news is out in any public forum, whether it’s a radio report, a public meeting, a Web site or a newspaper – the embargo must be lifted.
Read the full press release and the letters that were sent:
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