Resource Center

Covering the Health of Local Nursing Homes

With an aging populace in the United States, this reporting guide gives a head start to journalists who want to pursue stories about one of the most vulnerable populations – nursing home residents. Supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, this guide offers advice about Web sites, datasets, research and other resources.

After reading this book, journalists can have more confidence in deciphering nursing home inspection reports, interviewing advocacy groups on all sides of an issue, locating key data, and more. The book includes story examples and ideas.

Navigating the CDC: A Journalist's Guide to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Web Site

The latest guide, supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, walks reporters through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Web site and highlights data resources. It is a starting place for finding national or state data and surveys when writing health stories. A Fast Stats section has clickable links to pages about specific diseases, conditions or datasets for reporters on deadline. For those who want to learn more, there are step-by-step instructions with examples, story ideas and tips from published stories that used CDC statistics.

Covering Obesity: A Guide for Reporters

The prospect of covering such a broad, engaging and important topic as obesity can be overwhelming. This guide, supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is designed to help journalists cover a wide range of stories, whether writing on deadline or researching a multipart series. It offers assistance on calculating body mass index, finding obesity statistics on the state level, gauging the quality of school district wellness policies, finding innovative school nutrition policies and much more. Supplementary material can be found on this page.

Covering Hospitals: Using Tools on the Web

This guide, supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, points reporters to Web tools that interpret government data on health care quality and takes them step by step through the process of using these tools. Drawing on a pool of millions of Medicare patients and treatments at thousands of hospitals, the data offer comparisons that will inspire better reporting and better coverage of your community hospitals.

The slim guides are published with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.