Announcing the 2001 Casey Medal Winners

FALL 2001
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Vol. 8, No. 3
The Children’s Beat is published by the Casey
Journalism Center on Children and Families, a
national resource for professional journalists. The
center is a program of the Philip Merrill College of
Journalism at the University of Maryland. It is funded
by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and The David
and Lucile Packard Foundation.
CJC Staff
Beth Frerking, director
Patrice Pascual, deputy director and editor,
The Children’s Beat
A
Jennifer Moore, research director
Betty Pearce, administrative director
Alice Bishop, administrative assistant
Cathy Trost, senior associate
Carrie Rowell, conference consultant
Stephanie Haines, intern
CJC Advisory Board
Chairwoman: Laura Sessions Stepp
The Washington Post
Paul Duke, PBS
Jon Franklin, Philip Merrill College of Journalism,
University of Maryland
John Freeman, M.D., Johns Hopkins Hospital
Winifred Green, Southern Coalition for
Educational Equity
Albert R. Hunt, Wall Street Journal
Jeffrey Katz, National Public Radio
David Lawrence Jr., The Early Childhood
Initiative Foundation
Alfred Perez, Westat, Inc.
Gene Roberts, Philip Merrill College of Journalism,
University of Maryland
Tonda F. Rush, American Press Works
Celeste Williams, The Indianapolis Star
Judy Woodruff, CNN
Magazine design: Christopher J. Paul and
Maria Sese Paul, Sese-Paul Design
Cover photo: Paul Cuadros
Casey Journalism Center on
4321 Hartwick Road, Suite 320
College Park, MD 20740
Ph: 301-699-5133
E-mail: [email protected]
Web: www.casey.umd.edu
P H O T O : PAU L C UA D RO S
Children and Families (CJC)
JOURNAL
OF
MED
FALL 2001
LDREN’S
BEAT
IA
COVERAGE
5
11
Announcing the 2001
Casey Medal Winners
Parents Covering Parents
By Susan Brenna
15
Life Beyond the Anecdote:
The Aftermath of Sept. 11
By Patrice Pascual
18
New In Town
Covering Change in
Rural Communities
Text and Photographs by Paul Cuadros
21
The Story Beyond the
‘Killer Mommy’
By Pat Etheridge
23
Report from CJC’s June Conference:
Families in Flux
By Robert Hodierne
25
Powerful Pitches, Stronger Stories
Remarks by Amanda Bennett
27
Keeping it Together
By Patty Rhule
29
Conference Keynoter:
HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson
By Joan Hennessy
31
This Just In
When Fear Becomes Routine
JASON MICCOLO JOHNSON
BY BETH FRERKING
F A L L
2 0 0 1
T H E
C H I L D R E N ’ S
B E A T
4
n a glorious November Saturday —
during a week named as a likely
time for another terrorist attack — seven
children bounced around my dining room
table as I served chocolate cake at my son’s
8th birthday party.They ate like greedy
puppies, slurping drinks between bites of
sticky icing.
Halfway through dessert, one little boy
announced that you could not catch anthrax from drinking at a
public water fountain.
“My mom’s a doctor,” he explained, “and she says that if
spores are in water, they’re too heavy to be in the air.” He had
sought her expertise after a friend’s father — fearful of anthrax
contamination — wouldn’t let the boy drink from a water
fountain.
The others nodded matter-of-factly. “Yeah,” said my son,
Evan, “we thought we had anthrax powder at home one day
when Mom was doing her bills, but it was rosin from Matthew’s
cello bow!”
The children smiled, pausing briefly before they proceeded
to another topic. I stood there, awestruck and saddened that
bioterrorism had become routine conversation among 8-yearolds.What resiliency, I thought. And yet I recalled how my
stomach had clutched when I noticed a neat little pyramid of
amber powder beneath my stack of newly opened mail, and
how I had laughed (and almost cried) with relief when I found
the cracked bar of rosin.
We know how the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11th have altered
the obvious: troop deployments, heightened airport security, job
layoffs by the thousands. But its more insidious impact has been
the creeping contagion of a nagging, low-grade fear.
Everyone has a story.
One friend, the mother of a preschooler, dons plastic gloves
to open the mail outside her home, disposing of unknown
pieces in a plastic bag.
A friend from Texas canceled plans to fly her son to
Washington D.C. to visit his father for Thanksgiving.This
former reporter, who once traversed continents for the
Associated Press, considered the American holiday too perfect a
target for would-be hijackers.
Still another friend e-mailed me, asking how I was going to
“handle” Halloween. I answered that I would let my children
trick-or-treat as they always did, at the home of familiar neighbors. But his question unnerved me. Had I missed something?
Might I be putting my sons in danger?
Since Sept. 11th, hijackers, anthrax deaths and FBI warnings
of more terrorist attacks have ripped away our sense of security.
Whatever illusions of control we clung to crumbled along with
those massive, seemingly indestructible towers.
O
We find ourselves waiting for the next blow. A truck bomb?
Another hijacked jetliner? Bioterrorism brought to our door?
We are grappling with feelings of helplessness and fear usually
reserved for those we call “at risk” — children living with
abusive parents, families trapped in high-crime neighborhoods,
the nervous refugees who seek asylum in our country after
escaping war-torn homelands.
During the first week following the terrorist attacks, I was
overseeing the final judging of the 2001 Casey Medals for
Meritorious Journalism contest. Many of the winning stories
chronicled the lives of those at-risk “others.’’
They are children who are physically abused, sometimes
killed — not by foreign evildoers, but by the very people who
are supposed to love and care for them.They are women stalked
by vengeful partners, harassed and killed despite protective
orders meant to guarantee their safety.They are the poor and
the sick, families for whom the most basic health care — even
something so simple as maintaining healthy teeth — is a luxury.
The traumas they experience, sometimes daily, often happen
behind closed doors in places easily forgotten: a trailer park in
Michigan, the rural back roads of Alabama.
These people know all too well the vulnerability that
all of us have felt recently, but in more personalized and
concentrated doses.
They have lived with it their whole lives. Or died.
Consider Ariana Swinson, whose brief life was chronicled by
Detroit Free Press reporter Jack Kresnak, in his Casey Medalwinning series:
The emergency room doctor had never seen a body so badly beaten.
The victim, already dead when she was carried into Port Huron
Hospital on Jan. 31, weighed just 26 pounds. Her skull was cracked.
Her right elbow was broken. Bruises, fresh and old, covered her arms,
legs, feet, back, chest and head.
Her name was Ariana Swinson. She was 2 years old. Her parents,
Ed Swinson, then 27, and Linda Paling, then 28, had beat and
drowned her that night.
Imagine fearing your own parents, day in and day out.
Or fearing that your former spouse will kill you, despite your
hard-won protective order. Or that your young child will sob
through another night, overcome by the pain of gum infections
and rotten teeth that you can’t afford to have treated.
People who have rarely felt dread are learning how it feels.
Slowly, painfully, they are getting a glimpse of the persistent
fear and anxiety that marks the daily lives of many children
and families.
There is a connection, albeit one purchased at horrific cost.
As journalists who tell the stories of disadvantaged children and
families, we ought to remember that — and use it.
They are no longer the “others.”They are us.
Announcing the 2001
Casey Medal Winners
nvestigations of domestic
abuse protection orders in
Pennsylvania and dental care
for poor children in Alabama,
and a profile of families without
health insurance were among the top
stories honored in the 2001 Casey
Medals for Meritorious Journalism.
The awards, first presented by the
Casey Journalism Center on Children
and Families in 1994, recognize distinguished coverage of children and
families in the United States. Top
honors in the print categories went
to: the Detroit Free Press, the
Chicago Tribune, The (Cleveland)
Plain Dealer, the Mobile (Ala.)
Register, the York (Pa.) Daily Record
and The Chicago Reporter. Top broadcast honors were awarded to:
Dateline NBC, PBS Frontline/Oregon
Public Broadcasting, KHOU-TV/
Houston and Radio Diaries/National
Public Radio.
I
continued
2001 Casey Medal Winners and
Judges’ Comments
Runners-up: (Tie)
Mary Hargrove, Cathy Frye and Jeff
Porter, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette,
for “The Children’s Hour: Child
Pornography in Arkansas.” This
series was bravely done, thoroughly
reported and completely unsparing of
the instinct to flinch at what it tells: that
children everywhere are vulnerable to
victimization of the worst sort from
predators on the Internet.
C H I L D R E N ’ S
B E A T
Daily Newspapers,
200,000+
Circulation, News or
Features
Jack Kresnak, Detroit Free Press, for
“Murder by Neglect.” An in-depth
analysis of Michigan’s child welfare
system written with a compelling narrative and facts uncovered from restricted
files. Over six days, Kresnak detailed
dangerous flaws in the state’s welfare
system through the story of Ariana, a
2-year-old child brutally murdered by
her parents. Kresnak’s writing is devastatingly straightforward.Thanks to this
masterwork of detailed reporting, readers
have taken on the cause to change the
lives of children in harm’s way.
T H E
Medal winners’ stories are available
on CJC’s Web site:
www.casey.umd.edu
The emergency room doctor had never seen a body so badly beaten.
The victim, already dead when she was carried into Port Huron Hospital on
Jan. 31, weighed just 26 pounds.
Her skull was cracked. Her right elbow was broken. Bruises, fresh and old,
covered her arms, legs, feet, back, chest and head.
Her name was Ariana Swinson. She was 2 years old.
Her parents, Ed Swinson, then 27, and Linda Paling, then 28, had beat and
drowned her that night.
She never should have been in harm’s way to begin with.
For her first 18 months, Ariana was happy and carefree, nurtured by relatives
who took her in when her parents’ lives fell apart. But her parents persuaded a
court and the state’s child welfare agency to give her back.
Nine months later, she was dead.
2 0 0 1
First-place winners received framed
medals and $1,000. Winners are also
eligible to receive a $2,000 travel/
study grant to enhance future
reporting on child and family issues.
A 2-year-old girl dies at her parents’
hands after the system meant to
protect her fails
By Jack Kresnak, Detroit Free Press
December 4, 2000
F A L L
Twenty-six professional journalists
served as judges, evaluating entries
for depth and originality of subject,
research and documentation, creative
presentation and whether the entry
conveyed the complex issues that
underlie stories of disadvantaged
children and families. (A list of judges
appears on p. 10)
Murder by
Neglect:
Ariana’s Story
5
Murder by Neglect:
Ariana’s Story continued
This is Ariana’s story: the tale of a dysfunctional family and
a system that failed. Like most victims in such cases, her
story was never told. Until now.
Stopping by to drop off some keys in October 1996,
Cindy Paling opened an unlocked back door of her sister’s
blue trailer home in Chesterfield Township. She saw Linda
Paling cowering with her 3-year-old son, Noah, behind a
bed among dirty clothes, dishes and other debris.
“Linda Sue Paling, what are you doing?” Cindy asked.
Linda muttered something about helping Noah pick up
his toys, but Cindy knew she was lying.
Ed Swinson, Linda’s boyfriend, charged out of another
bedroom. He was drunk and spewing obscenities. Ed
lunged past Linda and slammed the door in Cindy’s face.
More angry than scared, Cindy rounded the side of the
trailer and went up Nantucket Street toward her own
home a block away. Ed followed, stomping along in his
worn black cowboy boots, raising his fist and cursing. “You
and the rest of your family aren’t welcome here no more,”
Ed yelled.
During the previous three years, Cindy and other family
members had tried to persuade Linda to leave Ed. She and
her sisters had seen Ed spit in Linda’s face and knock her
down so he could take money from her purse — money
meant to buy new shoes and diapers for their son. Cindy
and the others couldn’t understand why Ed and Linda
could not keep their home clean or even limit Noah’s and
his baby sister Mariah’s exposure to their constant fighting.
A 10th-grade dropout, Ed worked sporadically, preferring to stay home, drink beer and watch television — even
as Linda, a high school graduate who had taken courses to
become a medical assistant, worked two minimum-wage
jobs. Every so often, Linda would get angry and tell Ed to
leave. But she always took him back.
This latest incident — and especially Ed’s rage —
frightened Cindy. She feared for Noah and Mariah. After
years of watching Ed’s and Linda’s volatile relationship,
Cindy decided she needed to seek help.
“We tried to resolve it within the family by talking to
Linda, trying to get her to leave Ed,” Cindy said. “Nothing
seemed to work, and we were fearful for Noah and the baby.
We thought something more drastic would wake her up.”
Read the rest of Jack Kresnak’s series at
http://casey.umd.edu/casey/web/Medals.nsf/docs/2001+
Winners?opendocument
2001 Casey Medal Winners and Judges’ Comments
Curtis Krueger, St. Petersburg (Fla.)
Times, for “Under 12/Under
Arrest.” Where statistical treatments of
prosecutions of minors are numbing, the
faces of these children provoke another
response altogether. High-impact journalism, superbly executed.
F A L L
Honorable Mention:
Barbara White Stack, Pittsburgh PostGazette, for “Is This Justice?”
2 0 0 1
T H E
C H I L D R E N ’ S
B E A T
6
reporting quantified the surprising
extent of the problem, demonstrated the
horrible impact on children’s lives and
pinpointed systemic failures. It also
knocked down stereotypes and suggested
solutions. And it resulted in an increase
in the Medicaid reimbursement rate to
dentists in Alabama.
Daily Newspapers,
75,000–200,000
Circulation, News or
Features
Sam Hodges and William Rabb,
Mobile (Ala.) Register, for “The
Dental Divide.” The concept of this
series was original and the execution
striking.The reporters exposed a littleknown health crisis — the lack of access
to dental care among Alabama’s neediest
children — with admirable vigor.Their
Runner-up:
Peter B. Lord and John Freidah, The
Providence Journal, for “Poisoned.”
A poignant, informative and surprising
tale of how lead poisoning has affected
many Rhode Island families.
Daily Newspapers,
Under 75,000
Circulation
Staff, York (Pa.) Daily Record, for
“Paper Shield.” The series, which
spanned seven months, is a superb
example of in-depth newspaper
reporting. It took more than a year to
research, interview and write this
compelling story of women who seek
protection from domestic violence
through county services.Through
stories, incisive columns and excellent
graphics, the staff covers the bases
extremely well and sheds light on a
subject that affects thousands of women,
men and children in the community.
Runner-up:
Jim Kenyon, Valley News (Lebanon,
N.H.), for “The Other Side of the
Valley.” Striking and beautifully written,
this eight-day series tells of four families
that struggle in a wealthy area, searching
for affordable housing.
K AT E R E A L I
The Dental Divide
By Sam Hodges, Mobile (Ala.) Register
(Series by Sam Hodges and William Rabb)
December 23, 2000
M A RY H A N L O N
Cavities, infected gums and rotted teeth: The mouths of
Alabama’s poorest children are not a pretty sight.Yet those
children often must wait months and travel hundreds of
miles just to see a dentist — if they get to see one at all.
One day this past March, Paul and Leeann Houston put
their year-old daughter Haley into the car for a trip to the
dentist. A rotten tooth was making her miserable and
stunting her appetite.
Unfortunately, the trip took five hours. That’s because
they were driving from Mobile to a dental clinic at the
University of Alabama at Birmingham, their last resort.
Mrs. Houston had tried for two months to find a local
dentist who would accept Medicaid payment and treat a
child Haley’s age.
Kenya Banks of Evergreen, midway between Mobile and
Montgomery, is still seeking care for her 7-year-old son
Marquese. With his mouth closed, he looks perfectly
healthy. But when his mother tells him to open wide, he
reveals teeth that look like bottom-of-the-bag popcorn
kernels, they are so discolored and riddled with cavities.
From the “Chicago Matters” series.
Since April, he has been on the waiting list of the one
local dentist who accepts Medicaid patients. There’s no
telling when he’ll get called.
“I see two or three children a day who need immediate
dental care,” said Dr. Marsha Raulerson, a Brewton pediatrician who treats Marquese and about 2,000 other
children covered by Medicaid, the government health
insurance program for the poor. “My staff spends half its
time trying to find a dentist who’ll see them.”
Across the country, times are good, and more children
than ever grow up cavity-free. But when poor children
Magazines
Andrea Simakis, The (Cleveland)
Plain Dealer, for “Guardian Angel.”
A rich portrait of a court-appointed
guardian for children in protective services. In profiling what one lawyer/
investigator does to help kids, his devotion to his duties and the heartbreaking
abuse that he uncovers, Simakis created
unique and compelling insight into what
family courts face everywhere.
Runners-up: (Tie)
Colleen O’Dea, New Jersey Reporter,
for “The Working Homeless: The
New Casualties of Welfare Reform.”
Editorials/
Commentary
Cornelia Grumman, Chicago Tribune,
for columns on child welfare issues
These columns are everything good
advocacy writing should be: wellresearched, well-reasoned and above all,
well-written.Through varied topics, they
remind readers that public policy problems affect actual human beings, often
those least in a position to defend themselves.
B E A T
Tim Chavez, The Tennessean, for
columns on the education of immigrant children. Journalism needs more
people like Chavez, who will continue
to hammer on an issue until they see
real progress.
C H I L D R E N ’ S
Runner-up:
T H E
Marilyn Serafini, Megan Twohey,
Mark Murray, Erin Heath, Spencer
Rich, William Powers, National
Journal, for “Untested Safety Net.”
An informative, well-balanced depiction
of how very low-income people will
weather the storms of a weakening
economy.
Honorable Mention:
2 0 0 1
Brooke Lea Foster, Washingtonian
Magazine, “Breaking Through.”
A unique portrait of the educational
obstacles facing four young Latinos.
continued
F A L L
Non-daily
Newspapers
Mick Dumke, Brian Rogal, Sarah
Karp, Dan Weissman, Maureen
Kelleher, Bret Schaeffer and
Elizabeth Duffrin, The Chicago
Reporter, for “Chicago Matters:
Education Matters.” By mixing
compelling human interest stories with
old-fashioned muckraking, the Reporter
hooked readers, and then outraged them,
with this fine series on inner-city
schooling.The staff consistently busted
clichés and never lost sight of the people
at the center of the story: children and
families.
Dr. Donnie Russell has a large Medicaid practice.
7
The Dental Divide
continued
smile, the picture is often disturbingly different. Studies
show that the poorest 25 percent of the country’s children
and adolescents have 80 percent of the cavities.
The dental divide is acute in states like Alabama that
have many poor children and a low tax base, and struggle
to provide social services. In Alabama last year, only 21
percent of 350,000 eligible children got dental care under
Medicaid, according to the agency’s figures.
Neglectful parents bear some of the blame. But many
low-income parents make a good-faith effort to get their
kids care, only to see them languish on waiting lists for
months because of a shortage of dentists in rural areas, an
overall shortage of dentists willing to accept Medicaid
patients and a decline in the number of county health
departments offering dental care.
Even at UAB, where little Haley finally did get her
rotten tooth removed, there’s a three-month wait for a
non-emergency appointment with one of the resident
dentists. Most days, the waiting area outside the clinic is
filled with parents and kids.
“They call me from all over (the state),” said Gwen
Turner, who supervises the clinic’s admissions.
UAB is just one place to look for a backlog of poor
kids seeking dental care. The wait to see Dr. Donnie
Russell, a Selma dentist who has a large Medicaid practice,
can stretch to six months for a non-emergency. He treats as
many as 220 kids a week in Selma and at a satellite office
54 miles to the south in Thomasville.
“You can’t pick a place between here and Mobile where
we don’t have a bunch of patients,” he said in an interview
from his Selma office. “I just do the best I can because
nobody else will see them. And we’re not talking braces or
any of that fancy stuff. This is just basic care.”
Little comprehensive research has been done on the
extent of oral disease among Alabama’s poorest children,
and all of it is dated. But there are recent and alarming
snapshots.
The Jefferson County Health Department’s screenings of
pre-kindergarten Head Start children this September found
about 27 percent had some tooth decay, 19 percent needed
to see a dentist and 11 percent needed to see a dentist
immediately because of extensive decay or abscesses.
Federal research consistently shows that children from poor
families have about twice as many baby teeth cavities as
other children.
Read more of this series by Sam Hodges and William
Rabb at http://casey.umd.edu/casey/web/Medals.nsf/
docs/2001+Winners?opendocument
2001 Casey Medal Winners and Judges’ Comments
Photojournalism
No medal.
Honorable Mentions:
F A L L
2 0 0 1
T H E
C H I L D R E N ’ S
B E A T
8
Dominick Fiorille, Times HeraldRecord (Middletown, N.Y.), for
“Chase’s Battle.”
Colin Mulvany, The SpokesmanReview (Spokane, Wash.), for
“Dead-end Streets.”
Network Television
Andy Court, producer, John
Hockenberry, correspondent, and
contributors, Dateline NBC, for
“The Cost of Living.” Moving but
not maudlin, this report tackles a very
significant social issue, bringing to life
the complex problem of uninsured
families with passion but fairness.Wellwritten and produced, the broadcast
weaves together well-chosen case studies
to illustrate larger themes, rather than —
as is so often the case in television
newsmagazines — mere storytelling that
ignores broader relevance and social
import.The program treated each family
with respect and compassion, without
pity or condescension. A fine work of
social conscience that honors the heart
and head.
Runner-up:
Roberta Gordon and Diane Sawyer,
ABC News Primetime Thursday, for
“The Roots of Rage.” A fascinating
inside look at family dysfunction seen
through the unblinking lens of the
videocamera.This broadcast is clearly
and engagingly presented, original and
creative.
Honorable Mention:
Jason Samuels, Dateline NBC, for
“Breaking Away.”
Documentary
Television
Michel Martin, Janet Tobias, Laura
Rabhan Bar-On and contributors,
PBS Frontline and Oregon Public
Broadcasting, for “Juvenile Justice.”
A well-made, interesting and informative
piece.The producers gave us rare insight
into the minds of young people who
have committed heinous crimes, into the
minds of parents who find the strength
to forgive, and into the belly of a court
system overwrought and overburdened
by too many kids and too few resources.
Local Television
Carolyn Mungo, reporter, and
Michele Scarantino, photojournalist,
KHOU-TV/Houston, for
“Houston’s Hidden Children.” A
moving story about people that most
viewers would want to turn away from:
hungry children and families. By telling
the story through the travels of a food
delivery worker, the team created a
Attorney Mark Witt moves heaven and earth to protect
abused and neglected children
By Andrea Simakis, The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer Sunday
Magazine
May 6, 2001
It’s Mark Witt’s job to rifle through dresser drawers,
open kitchen cabinets and scan the condiments in refrigerators. He asks what video titles are around, and can he see
the attic? Don’t worry if it isn’t clean.
But don’t, he cautions, under any circumstances, lie to
him. The attorney is a 6-foot 4-inch, 280-pound polygraph
machine — and his findings are admissible in court. Witt
makes his living as a Guardian ad Litem (GAL), the legal
representative of abused and neglected children — kids
who have been burned with cigarettes, born addicted to
crack or beaten until the skin on their backs peels.
State law requires that all children taken into custody have
a guardian to protect their interests inside and out of the
courtroom. In Cuyahoga County, that means a GAL must
be assigned to nearly all the 400 new abuse, neglect and
dependency cases filed in Juvenile Court each month. The
volume is backbreaking by any standard; Chicago’s Cook
County Juvenile Court takes in half that number per month.
powerful picture of a problem that could
have remained well hidden in a time of
general prosperity.
Runner-up:
Runner-up:
Marianne McCune and Czerina
Patel, WNYC Radio, for “WNYC
Radio Rookies.” A terrific body of
work that draws the listener into the
lives of young people who were trained
to report on their own lives. All of these
segments were interesting and used real
life scenarios to get a social problem
across in an understandable way.
Honorable Mention:
John Biewen, Stephen Smith and
Deborah George, American Radio
Works: Minnesota Public Radio, for
“Jailing the Mentally Ill.”
C H I L D R E N ’ S
B E A T
Radio
Joe Richman, Radio Diaries/
National Public Radio, for “Prison
Diaries Series.” This is an incredibly
powerful piece of work.There really is
no substitute for a first-person voice, and
the voices in these pieces come through
with intelligence and tragedy, insight and
frustration. A compelling mix of real life
Virgen Ortiz told the York Daily
Record that a court protective order
still doesn’t make her feel safe.
T H E
Byron Henderson, Louisiana Public
Broadcasting, for “Louisiana: The
State We’re In.”
drama, graphic detail and natural sound.
Outstanding editing of 250 hours worth
of tape allows the listener to truly understand what’s behind the thinking and
actions of these troubled young people.
2 0 0 1
Honorable Mention:
continued
F A L L
Alex Zanini, Alex Jonsson and staff,
KRON4 News/San Francisco, for
“Beating the Odds.” This story, of
one boy’s achievements despite his
having cerebral palsy, reaches everyday
viewers, touches them and inspires them
to respond.
Unlike other private attorneys, guardians are expected
to do more than appear at hearings and trials. Not only do
they speak for their small clients in court, they are social
workers with law degrees, visiting kids in foster homes,
interrogating their parents, jump-starting cases that have
stalled and making sure the system is providing everything
from eyeglasses to Ritalin to underwear.
At best, the GAL is nothing less than a real-life guardian
angel — a protective omnipresence in a child’s life.
Judges and their magistrates rely heavily on their input
because in the battle for custody a GAL is like Switzerland
— he isn’t allied with the county’s child protection agency
or fighting for the parents. He is a neutral party, watching
out for the best interests of the child.
“I don’t always trust that the social worker and the
parent are gonna level with me,” says Juvenile Court
magistrate Nancy McMillen, herself a former guardian. “I
have to decide if the kid should go back home, and I really
like to hear from the GAL because it’s nice to have somebody there who’s purely for the child.”
Yet clogged court dockets, overwhelming caseloads and
pitiful pay often conspire to keep GALs from launching
thorough investigations. Some don’t take the time to visit
their young wards, relying instead on the observations of
PAU L K U E H N E L
Guardian Angel
9
Guardian Angel
continued
social workers. Not Mark Witt. Armed with a trunk full of
toys, a cavernous briefcase that snaps shut “to keep roaches
out” and a stack of pale yellow legal pads, Witt goes into
the field to gather enough evidence to craft a wellreasoned, independent recommendation for the court.
Judges, prosecutors and social workers alike request Witt
for the ugliest, most serpentine cases; his colleagues wish
he could be cloned.
The former assistant county prosecutor and Juvenile
Court magistrate is known for his willingness to go
anywhere. Maps of Ohio’s counties — along with balledup suits bound for the dry cleaners — litter the back
seat of his 1992 Crown Victoria. Witt spends more time
in the car, motoring to meet his clients, than he does in
the courtroom.
“I love walking into homes,” he says. “Don’t come to
my office and put on your dog-and-pony show. I wanna
see where you live, because I learn so much.” This is something shrewd parents know.
In one case, Witt showed up to find a mother and her
children sitting rigidly on a couch in the living room. As
he began his inquiry, he couldn’t shake the feeling that
something wasn’t right.
“Excuse me,” he said, “could I have a glass of water?”
When the woman scurried off to the kitchen, he asked
one of the kids where the bathroom was.
“I don’t know,” the boy responded.
“These people don’t live here,” Witt thought. And he
was right. The woman had appropriated a neighbor’s clean,
well-maintained house so Witt wouldn’t see her dirty,
dilapidated one and perhaps conclude she was neglecting
her children.
During other visits, Witt has found empty cereal boxes
and cans packed into cabinets to feign the appearance of a
well-stocked pantry. “You can’t just look, you gotta touch,”
Witt explains.
Read more of Andrea Simakis’ story at
http://casey.umd.edu/casey/web/Medals.nsf/docs/2001+
Winners?opendocument
Judges for divisions of this year’s awards:
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Betty Ann Bowser, correspondent,
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer; Ellen
Breslau, senior features editor, Woman’s
Day; Maureen Bunyan, anchor,
WJLA/Washington, D.C.; Chris
Callahan, associate dean, Philip Merrill
College of Journalism, University of
Maryland; Mark Feldstein, independent
producer, UNC School of Journalism
and Mass Communication; Linda
Fibich, national editor, Newhouse
News Service; Barak Goodman,
director/producer, 10/20 Productions;
Carol Guensburg, director, Journalism
Fellowships in Child and Family Policy;
Charlotte Hall, managing editor,
Newsday; Maria Henson, assistant
managing editor for enterprise, Austin
American-Statesman; Peter Jensen,
reporter, The Sun (Baltimore); Rachel
Jones, reporter, National Public Radio;
Sue Kopen Katcef, lecturer, Philip
Merrill College of Journalism, University
of Maryland; Amanda Lamb, reporter,
WRAL-TV/Raleigh; Tod Lending,
director/producer, Nomadic Pictures;
Marjie Lundstrom, senior editor and
columnist, The Sacramento Bee; Mark
Obmascik, reporter, The Denver Post;
John Patti, reporter,WBAL
Radio/Baltimore; Adam Pertman,
free-lance writer and author, “Adoption
Nation”; Rem Rieder, editor, American
Journalism Review; Rochelle Riley,
columnist, Detroit Free Press; José Luis
Rios, photo editor, The Washington Post;
George Rodrigue, vice president/
Washington, Belo; Julie Rovner, special
correspondent, CongressDaily and health
policy correspondent, National Public
Radio; Jacqueline Salmon, staff writer,
The Washington Post; Stephen Shames,
free-lance photographer.
The deadline for 2001–2002 Casey
Medals is August 1, 2002. Submitted
work must be published or aired in
the U.S. between July 1, 2001, and
June 30, 2002.
For an application or other information, visit www.casey.umd.edu or call
301-699-5133.
Parents
Covering
Parents
E
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I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y M A R I A S E S E PAU L
BY SUSAN BRENNA
very now and then I cringe over a snarky little quotation that, many years ago, I slipped into a newspaper
feature about the Zagats, the couple behind those
letter-sized restaurant rating books. Tim and Nina Zagat had
agreed to let me eat out with their family. One of their sons
— he was 6 or 7 — volunteered that the only seafood he
would eat was shrimp or smoked salmon. It seemed so
spoiled-brattish, so revealing of his upbringing.
I note here that like me, the editor who kept the quote
had no kids.
It’s one thing to regret scoring a cheap point off a firstgrader. But now, as a parent who often writes about families,
schools and children, it’s not the little misjudgments I worry
about committing. It’s the whoppers. Having children has
made me hyper-aware of the layers of complications, the
complexities and half-understood nuances that accompany
every crisis or misbehavior or significant turning within a
family. Yet the constraints of time, of space, of format often
work against being able to convey as a reporter what I know
from raising 10- and 12-year-old boys.
The journalist within me wants that quote, while the
mother within me wants to shush the fellow parent who will
sound so wrong-headed in print. As a mother I bribe my kids
with Twinkies to behave, as a journalist writing about obesity
I condemn such tactics. On a good writing day, this twotrack thinking adds resonance to my piece. On a bad writing
day, it’s paralyzing. It’s caused me to wonder how other
parent-journalists who work this territory keep straight with
their consciences.
It turns out many of us consider these to be central struggles of the beat.
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DAV I D B E R K W I T Z
“In the forum I have, which is often
very short stories, there is no way to
communicate the complexity of any
child development issue,” says Barbara
Kantrowitz, who has covered families for
Newsweek since 1985. “I often write as a
team with Pat Wingert, in the
Washington bureau, and we have a lot of
conversations about this. Have we oversimplified, have we let the reader in on
the secret that this
is much more
complicated than
we’re telling you?”
Kantrowitz said
she felt particularly
tested when the
Columbine story
was breaking in
April 1999. She
Barbara
helped author two
cover packages about Kantrowitz
troubled adolescents.
Herself a parent of teens, she internalized
the challenge of not knowing how to
read teen behavior. “For parents it’s hard
to tell whether a kid is eccentric,
whether there’s the beginning of a lifetime of mental illness, whether he’s just
going through a bad period — and the
quality of help you will find in the
community is not consistent.” As with
many stories that she knows will send
readers stampeding for help, she included
in her Columbine coverage references to
authoritative resources that welcome
public inquiries. She prepares a similar
list to e-mail, and sometimes records an
outgoing voice-mail detailing resources.
Ken Garfield, the religion editor at
The Charlotte Observer who also writes
a column on family values, felt chilled
as he observed the parents of the
Columbine shooters held up to instant
analysis. “The best writers write from
their own experience, and the most
powerful experience I have now is as the
parent of two teen-agers...The first thing
I thought about [after Columbine] was,
I don’t know half of what my kids do.
My son, I think, is checking his fantasy
baseball stats when he’s online, but I
don’t know what’s deep in his closet.”
Themes that run through his reporting, Garfield said, are the constantly
shifting nature of families, and the way
situations are perceived in conflicting
ways by members within a family. He
believes print journalism is the ideal
medium for examining big, difficult, life
issues — loss, mortality, divorce, alienation — yet he’s humbled by trying to
pull that off in 1,000-word chunks.
Garfield says, “Every newspaper should
be looking into the story” of teen
suicides. But because he hasn’t yet gotten
complete access to the important people
in the life of a teen who took that step,
he says, “I don’t feel worthy to even give
the reader a glimpse of understanding
that yet.”
Not in My Family
As a single mother
of five who has
struggled to raise
her children in a
poorly performing
urban school
system, Meriden
Mary Ellen Godin
(Conn.) Record
Journal suburban editor
Mary Ellen Godin finds that class
assumptions regarding families can sneak
into coverage. “Most of the reporters
come from middle-income families in
the suburbs.They attended good schools,
and maybe their distractions were
minimal compared to what some of
the kids they are covering have to
deal with.”
She also asks reporters to be skeptical
when officialdom lays the blame for
kids’ problems entirely on parents,
recalling that teachers have taken her to
task for not checking her children’s
homework when she was covering planning and zoning meetings into the night.
Godin is equally on guard against
sentimentalizing kids. A young reporter
turned in a story about children giving
their used toys to the needy. “The
reporter made the kids look like saints,”
Godin says. “I’m looking at her thinking,
‘These kids have more crap than you can
ever imagine.They’re not going to give
up something they’re actually playing
with.’ ”The story was re-cast.
Karen Thomas, a feature writer who
covers family issues for the Dallas
Morning News, is also cautious about the
natural inclination to draw on her own
family for story ideas. “If we only write
about what is affecting us, we are missing
the stories of so many other families,
particularly those who may not share
our middle-class lifestyle or who vary
greatly from our own ethnic background,” she said.
Parenting life and reporting have
crisscrossed in ways that have been
rewarding but painful for journalists
including Joline Gutierrez Krueger and
Sandra Peddie.While working the police
beat in recent years for The Albuquerque
Tribune (she is now a projects reporter),
Krueger often wrote about families, typically when a child was either dead or in
trouble with the law. However nine years
ago, she was in the more benign post of
writing a parenting column. After Susan
Smith killed her young boys, Krueger
suggested in her column that parents
channel their helpless grief into volunteer work for children.Taking her own
advice, Krueger became a member of
the Citizens Review Board, a group that
oversees New Mexico’s foster care
system. After hearing monthly about the
desperate need for more foster parents,
Krueger became a foster parent, along
with her husband, six years ago.
Serving on the review board
constantly exposes Krueger to potential
story material, which she cannot share
with the paper. “I have to be very
careful of which hat I’m wearing, and
when.” However, her personal experience with the inadequacies of the foster
care system occasionally bled into her
crime coverage, causing her to consider
her motives carefully. Earlier this year,
when an 18-month-old girl died while
in the care of a foster mother, Krueger
was skeptical of officials’ assurances that
the mother had been given appropriate
support. “I knew the questions to ask,”
Krueger said. She noted in the story
that the foster mother had been
provided neither an attorney nor
counsel from social workers. The
mother was not indicted on criminal
charges, but was sued by the birth
parents. Krueger chose not to write
about that, in part because she could
not get interviews with the families.
“Plus I have to walk that line between
writing about a foster parent and being
Stepp and other journalists who specialize
in explanatory pieces regarding children
sometimes find themselves torn between
what they say and what they do.
Personal Choices
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them would damage their lives for the
near future. She sometimes struggles
with feeling protective toward young
sources, particularly kids she comes to
know through extended reporting,
because her own maternal identification
is so strong. “I worry about being too
soft, not too harsh,” she says.
Technically the Post has a policy that
quotes from kids younger than 18 must
be run by their parents, Stepp says. She
goes farther with especially sensitive
stories, sometimes agreeing to read back
quotes from kids to their parents, and
to slightly alter them if both kids
and parents agree. However, Stepp says,
“I’ve never felt I had to compromise
my reporting to say something
more palatable.”
Having a teen-aged son has helped
guide her past the easy temptation of
producing What-Will-Those-CrazyKids-Do-Next stories. “Our editors like
them, they make us smile, it’s easy to get
them in the paper. But do teen-agers like
it, and does it accurately portray their
world? No.”
She knows. She lives with one.
Stepp and other journalists who
specialize in explanatory pieces regarding
children sometimes find themselves
torn between what they say and what
they do.
Karen Thomas of the Morning News
felt that disconnect while compiling tips
for parents to comfort their children in
the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorism
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Laura Sessions Stepp found herself at a
sticky personal and professional juncture
when she learned that students at her
son’s middle school had been engaging
in oral sex — this before any other
prominent journalist had written on the
oral sex habits of that age group.The
Washington Post reporter said she knew
before she wrote the piece that there
would be neighbors who would never
again speak to her — and there have
been. She also worried how it would
affect her son. “But I knew I was the
only reporter who could get that story,”
she said, in part because her strong relationship with the school’s principal gave
her access. She believed the health
consequences for kids were too critical
to let the story pass.
Stepp went to the high school the
kids had gone on to attend, and, in
violation of school rules regarding visits
by journalists, unobtrusively found
students who knew the kids who’d been
involved. She convinced them to let
those kids know that a reporter was
outside wanting to speak to them, and
she was able to interview both guys and
girls that way. Stepp says she got the
impression from the girls that they were
relieved to talk, in part because they
were disturbed by rumors that the practice had now spread to sixth-graders.
Stepp convinced her editors to allow
her to quote the teens anonymously, she
said, out of her conviction that naming
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one,” she said. “For both reasons, any
further coverage would best have been
handled by the courts reporter.”
Peddie is an investigative reporter for
Long Island’s Newsday and the mother
of an autistic child.While working her
regular beat, she has free-lanced mostly
service pieces on childhood neurological
disorders.Two years after a 13-year-old
autistic boy died in mysterious circumstances on his Long Island school bus,
Peddie woke one night, thinking,
“I have to find out what happened
to Christopher.”
On her own time she approached
Christopher’s parents and identified
herself both as reporter and the mother
of an autistic child. She spent seven
months investigating the death and interviewing the family on nights and
weekends, sometimes through her tears.
She went into Newsday early one Sunday
morning to write the piece and sat at
her desk, unable to stop weeping. Peddie
told her editor she couldn’t get
emotional distance, and together they
agreed to kill the story.
She abruptly woke a month later and
went into work at 5 a.m. “I had the top
third of the story in my head.” She
finished the 3,000-word piece in a few
hours, which for her was unprecedented.
While Peddie failed in her mission to
find out how the boy died, she felt that
the November 2000 story provided
peace to the family and to herself.
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attacks. “On the
one hand, [the
experts] were all
saying how this is a
time for families to
be together, and it’s
the very time when
[a reporter’s] hours
Karen Thomas
get longer. I’m
calling the school and
saying, can you put [my children] in
extended care?”
Thomas also wondered how many
people were reading past the voluminous
news to get to her features. “You do
wonder, am I really helping people or
am I just filling up the paper?” But she
absolutely benefited from the experts’
advice. Had she not done those interviews, she said, she probably would not
have had the self-discipline to keep the
TV news shut off while her kids were
awake. “And I found I really did need to
pay attention to what my 6-year-old was
saying. I had my listening ears on.”
Veteran Washington Post writer Jay
Mathews says, “As an education reporter,
I have often found a conflict between
programs I write about positively and
individual education choices that my
family makes. I am a big supporter of
public education, and yet my three children have spent most of the K-12 years
in private schools.”
He could justify that when he lived
in a low-performing school district in
California, Mathews says. “In Bethesda,
Maryland, where the school system is
very good, I cannot.” Nonetheless, his
daughter is attending Sidwell Friends
School, which costs more than $18,000 a
year.Why is that? “My wife and my
daughter preferred Sidwell,” he says.
So Mathews didn’t prevail within the
family. But that’s the other side of being
a parent on the kid beat.The struggles
you lose, you can always use, maybe in
your next story.
—Susan Brenna
is a free-lance
writer based in
Atlanta.
Pointers from Parents
We asked parents who specialize in stories on families and children to offer
tips on producing stories that ring true to their own experience.
Barbara Kantrowitz, senior writer for Newsweek: “What I’ve tried to do is
cultivate researchers who are much more articulate than I am. My trick, I
guess, is to find people who are able to distill the essence of complicated
issues” in ways that convey the most essential points.
She strikes any commentators who want to offer one-step fixes for
complicated family problems, “because the solution is never simple.”
Also, “A lot of my job is reading.” She’s trained herself to recognize the
soundest scholarship on a subject by reading volumes of academic
research on child life. She tracks research sponsored by the U.S.
Department of Education, follows the professional journals in the fields of
child and adolescent medicine and mental health and checks in regularly
with Education Week and The Chronicle of Higher Education, which tracks
what academic researchers are pursuing.
Lisa Benenson, former editorial director, Working Mother magazine:
“There’s one line I’ve used in some form in just about every parenting story
I’ve written or edited: ‘And this will work until it doesn’t, and then you’ll have
to try something else.’ Because that’s the truth of everything in parenting.”
To temper what she calls the “chirpiness” of much family reporting,
particularly in magazines, she’s tried to cultivate in writers a slightly selfdeprecating voice that allows for fallibility. “It gives us an excuse to be a
little more human and a little less perfect.”
Mary Hickey, senior editor, Parents magazine: “I always run advice through
my personal filters: does that make sense to me as a parent, would I do
that? I’m not sure as a journalist I should be doing that, but I can’t help it.
Would I run a tip suggesting you spank a kid? Never, I’d
edit it out.”
Ken Garfield, religion editor and family columnist, The
Charlotte Observer: “One of the many problems with
daily journalism is that people write in a vacuum. We
send people to write about things of which they do not
know. When I’m writing about how do you get Gen X to
go to church, it’s seen through the prism of, do my kids
like getting up at 8 on a Sunday?”
Ken Garfield
Laura Sessions Stepp, reporter, The Washington Post:
When she’s writing about kids who are old enough to read a newspaper with
some comprehension, “It doesn’t hurt to run the story by a kid, because in
some ways, it’s a different culture. And even though we have children in that
world, we don’t fully understand that world and never will.”
— Susan Brenna
Life Beyond the Anecdote
The Aftermath of Sept. 11
B Y PAT R I C E PA S C UA L
Dana, July 2001. The
family last year. Zoe broke
her elbow in spring, but
by summer, she earned
ribbons in swimming.
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Nothing I’ve learned
about covering stricken
families could help me manage my own life.When grown-ups
are overwhelmed, it’s much easier to give up on parenting than
I’d ever imagined.
Over the next few days, Pasky and I were absorbed in the
web of adult grievers, and we frankly lost track of the girls.Yes,
we knew enough to keep the TV off, except late at night, when
I watched so much of Peter Jennings that he felt like family.
Francesca’s Barbie lunchbox went missing, and her first-grade
homework folder nearly got tossed. She went without a bath
until I could smell her. Camila apparently remembered to feed
herself and her hamster. She wanted to go to soccer practice.
I was perplexed by her quick return to playdates.
We didn’t know how to decipher the kids’ needs; their grief
seemed so different from ours. Hours after the attack, Pasky
took Camila and some of her friends to see our priest, who
greeted them with words we hadn’t even considered: “You’re
safe.Your parents are safe. Nothing is going to happen to you.”
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Tuesday, Sept. 11, 12:30 p.m.
I dialed the number, but handed my husband the phone.
“Hello, Mrs. Falkenberg, this is Pasky. Have you heard from
Charlie?… Oh, I’m so sorry.”
So, my worst fears were true. Nearly three hours earlier, our
dear friends were on the plane that hurtled into the Pentagon at
340 miles an hour.
The news sent us into the backyard, my howls breaking the
calm of that clement day. Our daughter Francesca, 6, and a playmate, puzzled at us through the window, and moved away.
Camila’s face appeared next. Pasky and I argued briefly over
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when to tell her. Are you
supposed to have your
own grief under control
before you share such
news with a child? I
waved her to come
outside. She already
knew it was bad.
Pasky went to share
the news with a close
neighbor. Camila and I
sat on a bench sobbing,
sometimes hugging,
sometimes not.
Francesca came out.
She didn’t cry, but
beyond that, I can’t recall
her reaction. Her friend
Ellen said sensibly, “Well,
none of my friends were
on the plane.”
I wanted to scream.
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Monday
Sept. 10,
8 p.m.
“Hi, this is Zoe. I know
I probably won’t be able
to talk to Camila
tonight, but I wanted to
tell you I had the most
exciting day! I got to
ride in a limousine…”.
That phone message
was the last my 9-yearold, Camila, heard from
Zoe Falkenberg, age 8.
The next morning,
Zoe, 3-year-old Dana
and their parents,
Charles Falkenberg and
Leslie Whittington, both
45, were headed for a
two-month adventure
in Australia, where
Leslie would begin a
sabbatical from
Georgetown University.
Zoe and Dana envisioned kangaroos at the other end of
those long plane rides. Charlie joked about finding ways to
tranquilize the exuberant Dana and having chosen American
Airlines’ flight 77 for its movie offerings. First up, Zoe reported
with gusto: “Spy Kids!”
15
I’m glad he said that and I hope the children believe it. But I
felt incapable of giving such reassurance: it seemed monstrous to
suggest that we were exempt from the horrors that faced our
friends. Leslie and Charlie, who chose parenthood well into
their 17-year marriage, must have spent nearly an hour trying
to protect their terrified daughters as their plane kareened
toward Washington. My head filled with memories of them
firmly guiding Zoe and Dana, and nurturing in them a concern
for others. In the end, Charlie and Leslie couldn’t promise the
girls safety, only love.Weeks would pass before I thought to do
the same.
In the meantime, we adults found distraction and purpose in
memorializing the family. Unlike those with looser bonds or
fewer resources, our small suburban community could respond:
plan a service, host a
potluck, write an obituary, make a video. In my
backyard and at Zoe’s
former school, we videotaped children
completing the phrase:
“When I think of Zoe or
Dana, I remember...”.
They reminisced about
playing Beanie Babies
with Zoe; an overnight
with her at National
Zoo; Zoe, ponytailed and
dressed in a poodle skirt
for Halloween last year.
Or Dana exclaiming that
it would take “six
minutes — a whole day!”
— to get to Australia.
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The children were glad
to return to University
Park Elementary School,
Zoe’s alma mater. Many
took refuge in grief
counselors and in planning a memorial for the fourth grade. Celebrating Zoe’s life
became a special project. In lieu of class, eight students gathered
to write about her, to search out poems and stories she liked
and to trade anecdotes. After school, children solemnly arranged
mementos in front of the modest brick home off the town
soccer field.
We saw that they were busy. It mirrored our lives.We
thought it was good.
It probably was.The kids seemed to crave a return to
routine.Their parents did too — we just didn’t know how to
get there.
The intersection between my personal and professional lives
proved confounding as well. A Washington Post reporter left two
messages at our house on the 11th, asking for phone numbers
for Leslie’s and Charlie’s parents so she could confirm the
deaths. I instinctively wanted to return the call, but Pasky said
no. “I don’t want to subject them to that today,” he said. “Let
[the reporter] find it on her own.” I decided he was right.
On Sept. 12, the Post reported their deaths in four paragraphs; about the same space they gave several others profiled
that day.They ran Leslie’s photo, a dated one from the
Georgetown Web site, and summarized her brilliant career as an
economist specializing in how tax policies affect families.
Charlie got second mention as director of research at an environmentally focused software company. Zoe and Dana were
“their daughters.”
Of course Leslie “deserved” the most space. She was smart
and prolific with an increasingly public career. (She co-wrote an
article in the summer issue of “The Children’s Beat” and was
among the top speakers at CJC’s national conference in June.)
But there’s no question
that Leslie and Charlie
would name parenting as
their top job: they found
ways to celebrate their
girls’ lives without
coddling them.
I called Post’s news
obit department to ask if
they would profile the
girls, as they were doing
— early on — for others
killed in the crash. “We
already covered them,” I
was told. Ah yes, “their
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daughters.” Of course, I
understand the
Leslie and Dana. Zoe and
constraints of the newspaper — 189 died at the
Camila on Dana’s 3rd
Pentagon that day. But
what’s often true in
birthday. The girls last
other sections seems true
year. (PORTRAITS COURTESY
in obits: young lives
don’t count as much.
OF STERLING PHOTOGRAPHY.)
Reporters from
county newspapers, the
Prince George’s Journal and
the Prince George’s Gazette, wrote fuller profiles. Over the phone,
Pasky and I shared details of dinner with the family on Saturday
night and their excitement over the well-planned trip. Zoe had
even written a report on Australia (Leslie’s assignment).
Each reporter asked one question I couldn’t answer: “How
are your kids doing?” I flipped through possible replies: “As well
as could be expected” sounded right, but I had no idea what
that really meant. “I’m not really sure,” I said.
It’s not that we didn’t talk to the kids. Like other parents
since the attack, Pasky and I have been laying down with our
daughters before they go to bed.That’s when Camila asked if
they had been burned before they died.Without answering her
question, I snapped my fingers to describe how fast the plane
hit the Pentagon: “Camila, it happened like that.”
Francesca asked if they would be buried in the ground.
“No, honey, I think they wanted to be cremated,” I said,
knowing nothing of the sort. She wanted a gravesite to visit,
some physical marker. “I’m afraid I’ll forget them,” she said
quietly. Francesca’s 6. I’m afraid she’s right.
How are my children doing? Every parent wants to be able
to answer that question.
T H E
C H I L D R E N ’ S
B E A T
—Patrice Pascual is deputy director of the Casey
Journalism Center and editor of “The Children’s Beat.”
2 0 0 1
At the soccer game that Saturday morning, several parents
started to fret over the taping. Kate’s mom called me about 90
minutes before we were to meet Kathy.
“Some of us are wondering if this is really a good idea —
whether it will be good for the kids. I’m just not sure if we
should put Kate through this,” she said. Her husband feared that
strangers would contact the kids after the newscast.
“I understand the point, but I just don’t think that way,” I
snapped. I thought they were overreacting. I couldn’t see that
these parents, these kind, generous friends, were simply
exhausted by the tragedy and worried about their children.
“Who else feels this way?” I demanded. I hung up and made
two more calls, defensively telling another mother that she and
her husband had to make up their own minds whether this was
a good idea.
F A L L
It was Kathy Slobogin who thought to ask the children themselves.The CNN reporter had called Beth Frerking, my boss, the
day after the attack, with plans for a story on how children handle
grief. I gave Beth the phone number for our elementary school’s
principal, thinking Kathy could interview a grief counselor.
Instead, Kathy asked to interview Zoe’s friends.Too soon, the
principal said, and definitely not on school grounds. Call back in
a week.When Kathy did, the principal called me.Would parents
let their kids talk to a CNN reporter? I checked with two
parents, not realizing that
the reporter was Kathy.
Yes, it seemed possible.
She could come two days
later, on Saturday, after
the kids’ soccer game.
The children would
bring what they’d
written for Zoe’s school
memorial. I had already
interviewed many kids
for the home video. I felt
sure they could handle it.
I also saw the request
as a privilege.Thousands
of children are grieving
and fearful after the
attacks, yet how many
have been encouraged to
express how they feel? A
CNN story would also
shine attention on Zoe’s
joyful life, I reasoned.
And as these children
grew, a well-produced
piece might help them
keep her memory, and
the power of their lost friendship, alive.
I was drained by the conversations and my harsh reactions. I
know so many dedicated, compassionate journalists that I forgot
what polls say: the public isn’t nearly as trusting. I had promised
parents that they had nothing to fear from Kathy Slobogin.Yes,
she seemed like a thoughtful reporter, but I had talked with her
for what, 10 minutes? Had I put Zoe’s friends at risk?
An hour later, all eight children showed up to meet Kathy
and settled themselves around a dining room table. As the
camera rolled, they directed themselves: “O.K., let’s go in the
same order we’ll talk at school,” one suggested.
The squirmy 9-year-olds went through their speeches; they
laughed and made faces. They were unselfconscious and
relaxed. Their parents took their cue; I felt my own jaw
starting to loosen.
Next, Kathy moved
them to the living room
for a group interview. By
then, the kids were calm
and reflective. “We went
to ballet together and I
miss her a lot,” said Tom.
“I’m glad the terrorists
can’t hurt her anymore,”
Molly said. “Doing the
memorial is like a gift,”
Ali told Kathy.
I teased Ali’s mother
that she must have fed
her daughter that line.
Zoe Falkenberg
But in truth, I think we
all saw something new in
Nov. 8, 1992 – Sept. 11, 2001
our children that day.
Kathy’s compassion and
Dana Falkenberg
sensitive questioning
showed us that our chilJuly 21, 1998 – Sept. 11, 2001
dren are doing better
than we thought.That
they’re in touch with
their own profound feelings about Zoe and the
tragedy; that they’ve
found peace in their memories; that they have been strengthened by each other’s support.
A few days after the broadcast, Kathy sent letters to each of
the children and a tape so we could make dubs of her fourminute story. “Thank you so much for letting me share your
feelings at such a sad time,” she wrote in part. “Millions of
people watched the piece about you and your friend Zoe, and
many of them contacted me to tell me how impressed they
were with the answers you gave.”
She couldn’t have given them a more profound and
sustaining compliment: Zoe’s life, and their feelings about her,
matter.They are not alone in their grief.
Good journalism always creates such assurance. But I doubt
I’ll ever appreciate it more.
17
New In Town
Covering Change in Rural Communities
TEXT
AND
PHOTOGRAPHS
BY
PAU L C UA D RO S
Maria was reluctant to let me into her trailer. It was 4:30 p.m. in Siler City, N.C., and
she had just finished an eight-hour shift plucking the feathers off dead chickens.
When I knocked, Maria was preparing formula for her baby, who had spent the day
at a neighbor’s house. Here I was, a stranger and a reporter, wanting to ask about
Maria’s life as an undocumented immigrant, her job and her health.
Siler City poultry workers on a break.
Young guest at a Quinceañiera
(a girl’s 15th birthday party).
Siler City protester.
18
I reminded Maria that we had spoken at
St. Julia Catholic Church last Sunday.
That worked. She opened the door.
Maria is short, round and young, still
in her early twenties. Like most poultry
workers after a shift, she smelled of
boiled chicken. Her girlish face was
traced with a thin, shy smile.
With her baby gently rocking beside
her, Maria told me how hard it was for
her and other Hispanic mothers at the
plant to get health care.They couldn’t
speak English and not a single doctor in
town spoke Spanish. Interpreters were
rare.The few workers who paid for their
own health insurance did not know how
to use it. And poultry plant managers
discouraged workers from taking time
off, even for health reasons. Unexcused
absences were cause for demerits, and too
many of those meant the end of a job.
Pregnant women faced even bigger
obstacles, Maria explained. Maternity leave
— delivery leave, really — wasn’t granted
without a physician’s note. But while an
undocumented woman will use phony
identification for work and that prized
medical exemption, she wants her baby
born with a real name, a chance to be
fully legal. Most Siler City doctors see that
as fraud, so women like Maria journey an
hour away to a community-based health
center where the doctors don’t care about
aliases. Once a woman schedules the clinic
visit, she still can’t be sure she’ll have time
off, or even find a ride.
Rural America has always been a
place of hard knocks and enduring tales
of neighbors pulling together. But rural
communities are changing. I learned that
my reporting needed to change too.
Making the Move
reporting is to break barriers and gain
the trust of people who feel vulnerable.
Getting In
Mexican Christmas tree
worker in Sparta, N.C.
Siblings at Snipes Trailer Park,
Siler City.
This Rose Hill, N.C., poultry worker
lives in a converted gas station.
Across the street is the Raeford
Poultry Plant.
Siler City protester.
T H E
C H I L D R E N ’ S
B E A T
a lot of church.The payoff was big — I
met a lot of sources. But more importantly, people could see me as a part of
the community.
That was how I was able to get the
story of Juan Garcia, a Siler City poultry
worker who had followed his brother’s
trail from Mexico. I saw Juan outside of
church, shielding his eyes from the sun. I
went over to chat and learned that a
chemical spill left him unable to tolerate
bright light.
2 0 0 1
Thinking like a foreign correspondent
gave me one valuable reporting tool: a
fixer.This is a “native” who knows the
lay of the land and can act as guide.
Mine is Lisa Muñoz, a health outreach
worker from nearby Duplin County,
N.C. Lisa’s job is track down Latino
immigrant workers and see if they need
health care. She helped me see a wealth
of stories from the health angle.
Lisa can work both the Englishspeaking and the Spanish-speaking
community.The first place she took me
was a remote trailer park.We knocked on
the door of one trailer and Rosa Maria
stepped out. She was five months pregnant
and like Maria, undocumented. She fled an
abusive boyfriend in Guatemala and didn’t
know she was pregnant until she reached
North Carolina. Rosa Maria lived in a
trailer park reserved for turkey processing
workers; in exchange for room and board,
she served as their housekeeper and cook.
Rosa Maria had no reliable transportation.When I asked how was she
going to get to the hospital to deliver
her baby, she said simply she would ask
someone for a ride.
Lisa had driven her twice to a clinic
in Kenansville, the county seat, for
prenatal care. Undocumented women
are allowed two months of Medicaid
coverage through a program called
presumptive eligibility. Intrigued, I did a
computer-assisted analysis of the program
and learned that the number of Hispanic
women on presumptive eligibility had
skyrocketed in Chatham County over
ten years. But more than 90 percent of
Hispanic pregnant women who used
presumptive eligibility were later denied
further Medicaid treatment because they
were found to be undocumented.
Several months later, I drove back
down to Rosa Maria’s trailer. She had
found her ride and had a healthy baby girl.
Finding a guide like Lisa is great, but
the real trick is to break through those
small town barriers yourself. One of the
best ways to do this was to go to church.
Churches are the threads that bind the
fabric of rural life. It’s also a place where
a reporter can interact with communities
without being officially on duty.The first
several months after my move, I went to
F A L L
I moved to Chatham County, N.C.,
home to Siler City’s 7,000 residents, on
an Alicia Patterson fellowship in 1999.
I chose the county for its 300 poultry
farms, three processing plants and fastgrowing Hispanic population. I came to
write about people like Maria and the
impact they were having on rural
Southern towns that process the
country’s meat and poultry. Food
processing has always been a gateway
industry for immigrants, and those plants
have helped North Carolina to attract
more Hispanics than any other state in
the past 10 years, according to the U.S.
Census.Workers aren’t coming alone,
they’re bringing their families.
My move wasn’t easy. I had been a
reporter in Chicago and I loved the
hustle and bustle, the corruption stories
and the fast beat of the street. Reporters
focus so much on central cities that we
forget that while the percentages are
down, many Americans still live in small
towns. Rural communities remain a
major source of our nation’s character,
and in many ways, the nation defines
itself, its morals and its values from these
small towns. George W. Bush won the
presidency on the rural vote.
While writing a chapter on the
food processing industry for the book,
“The Buying of Congress” (Center for
Public Integrity, 1998), I came to believe
that immigration and other trends
are permanently changing America’s
rural communities.
Many rural areas are being redefined
as bedroom communities for big cities.
Schools scramble to find qualified
teachers to teach Spanish-speaking kids.
Courtrooms are desperate for translators.
Housing is scarce and conditions
can be harsh. In North Carolina, health
clinics that used to serve Medicaideligible African-Americans are now
struggling to serve Latinos who lack
government insurance.
Covering the rural U.S. is like being a
foreign correspondent. Rural communities are small and closed. It’s hard for
people who have lived for generations in
one town to trust someone from the
outside. Long-time residents resent the
newcomers and fear that their community will lose its identity, but many are
also worried that those views sound
racist.The biggest challenge of rural
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F A L L
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20
He explained the accident:
“They order me to pick up the
buckets, but the error of the company
was that each bucket should have had a
label that says what the liquid is, chlorine, hot water, acid. I didn’t know. At
the moment I fell, I didn’t know it was
acid. It fell all over me.” (He pointed to
the front of his shirt.) “I didn’t feel
anything. I…poured water over myself,
and when I went outside, the rest were
laughing. …I got dizzy and I fell, and
they took me to the hospital.”
The entire plant had to be evacuated
after Juan's accident.Twenty people were
sent to the hospital that day.Three
people were admitted. Months later, Juan
still suffered from blood in his urine,
joint pain and headaches.
“I couldn’t cook yesterday because I
had dizziness,” he told me.“When I get
dizzy, I lie down. If I stand up, I get dizzy.”
Juan had been making $8 an hour as
a maintenance worker but had gone
three months without pay while waiting
for his Worker’s Comp claim to be
resolved. He has since left town, and I
have lost track of him. He knew he was
going to be fired from the plant. He was
too injured to go back to work, and after
three months, he was certain the plant
was not going to support him.
One of the things I have learned
in covering this community is how
vulnerable this new population is to
exploitation.They are exploited on the
job, harassed by police, and denied access
to basic services.Yet, they have provided
much of the labor these past ten years
during the South’s economic boom.
As these new Americans become
part of us, their stories help us to understand the country we are fast becoming.
—Paul Cuadros is a free-lance
reporter and photographer based in
Pittsboro, N.C. He was a speaker at
the Casey Journalism Center’s June
2001 conference
on covering lowwage families.
Previously,
Cuadros worked
for The Chicago
Reporter.
Tips for Covering Immigrants
in Rural Communities
1)
It’s essential to speak Spanish, which allows a reporter to build trust
with a source. A greater advantage is be a bilingual/bicultural reporter
who understands both the English- and Spanish-speaking worlds.
With the dramatic growth of the Latino population in the past 10 years,
news organizations need to firmly commit to nurturing and hiring
Latino reporters.
2)
Go to church. One of the ways that rural communities are glued
together is through faith organizations. If you can make friends with
the pastor, they can become a source and give you a heads-up on
community struggles.
3)
If you can’t go to church, take your wash to the local laundromat.
Many poor residents don’t have washing machines.
4)
If you are willing to make a move to get these stories, base yourself in
a small town. I chose Pittsboro (population 2,000) instead of Chapel
Hill, home to the University of North Carolina. Chapel Hill is just 30
minutes away but my sources know that in terms of lifestyle, education levels and attitudes, it’s very far.
5)
If you can’t move, be careful about choosing sources. I have seen
many reporters come into North Carolina only to get the same story
because they rely on the same small group of advocates as guides. In
turn, those advocates lead them to sources who have their stories
down pat. The only way to get fresh, original material is to do your
own reporting. Take the time to build relationships and to develop your
own community sources.
6)
The biggest difference between big city reporting and small town
reporting is accountability. When writing a large city, you have a
certain degree of anonymity that does not exist in a small town. That’s
changed me as a reporter. Now, I read back quotes to all my sources,
and take the time to call them when a story will run. Because of this,
people trust me more and are willing to talk to me more than once.
7)
Be sensitive about reporting the residency status of Latino sources.
Several years ago, a Raleigh News & Observer reporter revealed the
undocumented status of a Hispanic worker in a a well-reported profile.
Shortly after the story ran, the INS detained and deported the source.
Even though a Spanish-speaker had written the story and the source
gave permission to reveal his status, neither the source nor the
reporter anticipated the result.
8)
Life is slower in rural communities. Take the time to get involved
in activities that allow you to interact with people and not just report
on them.
— Paul Cuadros
RICHARD CARSON/REUTERS
The Story Beyond the ‘Killer Mommy’
B Y PAT E T H E R I D G E
It’s difficult to imagine a more unsettling story: a 37-year-old mother faces the death penalty following the
systematic drowning of her five children. While much has been written and broadcast about the horrific
details surrounding the case of Andrea Yates since June 20, researchers worry that only scant coverage
has focused on the larger issue it raises: the stigma and fallout of maternal depression.
2 0 0 1
T H E
C H I L D R E N ’ S
B E A T
goes to work,” she writes. “And they’re
bouncing off the walls in that way little
boys do, except for the baby, who needs
to be fed. And fed. And fed again… And
I add all that depression, mental illness,
whatever was happening in that house.
I’m not making excuses for Andrea Yates.
I love my children more than life itself.
But just because you love people doesn’t
mean that taking care of them day in
and day out isn’t often hard, and sometimes even horrible.”
What reporters often miss, say
researchers, is the big story behind this
one awful event. It is the story of an
entire culture that places little emphasis
on the concept of “mothering the
mother” and is in deep denial about the
consequences that brings.
“In America, we still have no comprehensive screening to detect the most
common of all postpartum problems,”
says Dr. Katherine Wisner, a University of
Louisville psychiatrist and researcher
specializing in postpartum disorders.“I
have been in the field 17 years, and I
have seen many ‘Andrea Yates’ in the
news. I hope and pray for the day that
major public policy change will result,”
Wisner says.“How many Andreas must
we see before this will happen?”
“There are two things we are
fighting: ignorance and denial,” adds
Jane Honikman, founding director of
Postpartum Support International, a
leading resource on postpartum mental
F A L L
In my own non-scientific examination
of more than 50 newspaper articles, plus
network and local radio and television
reports, I found that few stories delve
into the symptoms or treatments associated with postpartum disorders, which
had been Yates’ long-standing diagnosis.
A full 90 percent of coverage was
straightforward news clips which chart
the chilling sequence of events: the reaction of shaken police officers first
arriving on the scene; a father’s heart
wrenching goodbyes at the children’s
funeral; and pre-trial proceedings in
Houston where Yates was found fit to
stand trial. Most troubling are accounts
that dwell on graphic details months
after the children’s deaths.
The range in the sensitivity of
coverage was apparent from the start. In
a July 2nd cover story, Newsweek’s Evan
Thomas pushes the limit with disturbing
speculation. “Anyone who has ever given
a boy a bath may wonder at how she
subdued the squirming, bony body of a
7-year-old and forced him to submit to
the fate of his siblings. But Andrea Yates
must have been possessed by a demonic
energy, and perhaps the boy was too
stupefied by the horror of his mother’s
betrayal to resist,” it reads.
Yet in the same issue, Anna Quindlen
pens a column that cuts to the core of
every mother’s quiet desperation. “I’m
imagining myself with five children
under the age of 7, all alone after Dad
21
C O U RT E S Y O F YAT E S F A M I LY / R E U T E R S
F A L L
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C H I L D R E N ’ S
B E A T
22
health. Honikman and her organization
received dozens of media inquiries
following the arrest of Andrea Yates.
While she characterizes most of the
coverage as “even and ethical,”
Honikman was disturbed by reports
that “emphasized details of the horror”
and requests to pit her against sources
who refused to countenance Yates’
mental state.
In radio talk shows across the
country, Honikman tried to focus on
the physical symptoms of postpartum
depression, the difference between postpartum depression and the more serious
form of psychosis, and methods to identify and treat these disorders. Instead, she
said she spent a lot of time trying to shift
the conversation away from how Andrea
Yates should be judged.
“This is about mental illness and
mental illness is very difficult for
reporters to write about,” says Melissa
Healy, a free-lance journalist who
recently wrote a lengthy article on
mothers and chronic depression for the
Los Angeles Times. “It’s easier to focus on
the grizzly details of the crime than the
underlying dynamics that led to it. It
seems we would rather cover evil than
illness. Andrea Yates was clearly ill. And
that’s a harder story to write, sell and get
by an editor,” she observes.
A senior producer at a network news
magazine, who didn’t want to be named,
captured the general tone and extent of
most reporting. “We covered the story as
it broke with basic facts and background
interviews.We really haven’t aired
anything beyond that.”
The not-often reported facts are that
baby blues affect up to 80 percent of new
mothers.This kind of mild depression is
not considered a mental disorder. More
serious is postpartum depression, affecting
about 10 percent of women. Less than
two-tenths of a percent of mothers experience postpartum psychosis, which is
what Andrea Yates reportedly battled
following the birth of her last two
children. In the most desperate of
circumstances, mothers sometimes harm
their children. More often, says
Honikman, they harm themselves.
The cause is not altogether known.
Doctors and researchers suspect a
complex interaction of biology, chemical
imbalance and major life events.What is
clear is that more women enter hospitals
for psychological treatment in the
months following childbirth than in any
other time in their lives. And new studies
reveal that depression that begins during
pregnancy can persist for months, even
years after the baby is born. Symptoms
range from just not feeling right to
having repetitive, obsessive thoughts of
harming themselves or their child.
Because pregnancy and childbirth are
supposed to be the happiest of times,
women who experience maternal
depression may try to hide those feelings
from family and friends. Obstetricians
and pediatricians often fail to identify or
inquire about the early signs of maternal
depression.Treatment with medication,
counseling and family support has
proven to be highly effective but is not
widely available.
“Women need to get the message
that they are not alone, that it’s not their
fault and that they can get well,”
Honikman emphasizes.
“Until we recognize the scope of
maternal depression and take steps to
bring about changes, we have failed as
a society.”
For journalists that may mean
looking harder at what lies beyond a
story so awful, so appalling, so unsettling:
reporting over and over again, the little
known and potentially life-saving facts
about what makes mothers sad and
sometimes very sick.
—Pat Etheridge
is an awardwinning journalist
and communications specialist
with expertise in
a wide range of
family issues.
She serves as a
strategist and advisory board
member for the Johnson & Johnson
Pediatric Institute.
CONFERENCE REPORT
Families in Flux
B Y RO B E RT H O D I E R N E
A complicated relationship exists
between money and the family choices
people make: Get married or not? Stay
married or not? Have kids? How many?
While there is widespread agreement
that stable, two-parent families may be a
desirable social goal, especially for
children, a growing body of research
suggests that for the working poor, such
marriages are difficult to create and
sustain. It isn’t just that economic stress
causes unstable families; researchers such
as University of Pennsylvania sociologist
Frank Furstenberg say there are
significant differences in how racial
and income groups view money
and marriage.
“I think there is a cultural story to be
told and I think that cultural story is
webbed together with an economic
story,” Furstenberg said.
work, thus raising them out of poverty,
which is good for family stability. But
the tax code can also discourage
marriage and reward larger families,
which can exacerbate financial struggle.
Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow in
economic studies at the Brookings
Institution, examined the taxes of a twoparent family with two children and
an income of $30,000.The family is
“working poor,” that is, their income
is less than twice the poverty level
($17,761 for such a family). Sawhill said
one-third of Americans fit that definition
of working poor, while about 12 percent
of Americans live below the poverty
level.Through the EITC and provisions
of the recent tax law, Sawhill’s hypothetical family pays no taxes but in fact gets
back $543 from the federal government.
marriage penalty or marriage tax…hits
very hard at low income levels,”
Whittington said.Those tax implications
can affect marital decisions.
“Are the responses large? No, of
course they’re not large.This isn’t the
major reason people marry, but it has
an impact.”
Likewise, she said, a small number
of low-wage earners take advantage
of higher tax credits by having
more children.
A changing social landscape
Income aside, there is little question that
America’s family patterns are in flux.
“During the last three decades of the
20th century,” said Frank Furstenberg,
“we probably witnessed more change in
the structure and functioning of the
family than in any comparable period in
American history.”
Belinda Tucker, a professor of psychiatry and bio-behavioral sciences from
the University of California, Los
Angeles, summarized the demographic
trends: People stay single longer and
divorce rates remain high; there’s more
Conference fellows from
left: Lynn Neary, NPR and
Lisa Prue Spellman, Omaha
World-Herald; Peter Perl of
The Washington Post
Magazine; Free-lancer
Leah Latimer.
Penalties for the working poor
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childbearing without marriage and more
cohabitation. And, as the Census reports,
the percentage of traditional, two-parent
families is falling. After a steady climb
for several decades, the rate of out-ofwedlock births has stabilized:Today
about 32 percent of the children born
are born to unmarried mothers.
Furstenberg, who has conducted
hundreds of interviews in struggling
neighborhoods, said the changes in
American family structure have causes
that go beyond economics. “Most people
feel that they don’t have the…economic
wherewithal and the psychological
wherewithal to enter and sustain a
marital relationship,” he said. “There is a
kind of feeling across the generations of
the idea that marriage is a very difficult
thing to achieve.”
2 0 0 1
One concern about the earned
income tax credit is that at a certain
income level (about $15,000 for that
two-parent, two-child family) the credit
starts falling from its peak of $4,000.
The bottom line: As incomes rise, so
do taxes. At the same time, the value of
the EITC falls.
Does this discourage people from
increasing their income through work?
Leslie Whittington, associate dean of
policy studies and an associate professor
of public policy at Georgetown
University, said no. However, it does
create a marriage penalty.
While middle-class people think of
the marriage penalty as bumping them
into a higher tax bracket, at the lower
end of the scale it means being phased
out of eligibility for the EITC. “This
F A L L
Government efforts to help the poor and
the working poor have been mutating.
Today, by far the single largest government anti-poverty program is not direct
welfare payments but the earned income
tax credit (EITC).
The importance of tax credits raises
two questions:
Do tax credits encourage people
to work more, raising themselves out
of poverty and thus making families
more stable?
Do the tax credits contribute in other
ways to creating stable families?
During CJC’s June conference, 30
journalists questioned experts on tax
policies and their implications.There was
no simple take-away message.Yes, the tax
credits seem to encourage people to
23
CONFERENCE REPORT
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For example, he said one reason that
fewer people marry and stay married in
America’s inner cities is “a deep and very
powerful distrust, gender distrust…where
men and women do not really think that
most men or most women will behave
in an altruistic way.
“That culture of gender mistrust I
think is related to what they’ve seen over
the years in their families,” he said.
Tucker’s research also reveals “very,
very significant ethnic differences in the
importance of having an income for
marriage. For African Americans it was
most important.” She said that blacks
“saw that there were…greater economic
benefits from getting married than did
either Mexican Americans or whites.”
As a result, she said, “African
Americans and Mexican Americans place
a much greater emphasis than whites on
economic viability of potential mates.”
Thus, if you live in an impoverished area
and “if you don’t find somebody who
can be economically viable as a provider,
then maybe you don’t want to get
married.”
Furstenberg was not optimistic that
such issues will be easily solved. “I think
it requires a combined [social and
economic] strategy that neither the left
nor the right are … talking about.
“…We need some kind of balanced
approach that will gradually raise the
median income in the U.S.,” he said.
“We also need, I think, to take on this
issue of gender. It’s discussed in everyday
life in middle-income families.The same
dilemmas exist among low-income families, but are more severe. …It’s not just a
negotiation that goes on between men
and women interpersonally, it’s how it’s
supported by the larger culture.”
—Robert Hodierne is a Marylandbased free-lance writer and
editor with 30 years of journalism
experience.
Editor’s Note: Leslie Whittington was
killed, along with her family, on Sept. 11,
2001. She was among the top speakers
of the June conference. Whittington
often collaborated with James A. Alm,
professor and chair of the Department of
Economics at Georgia State University.
T
hirty professional journalists were chosen to attend the Casey
Journalism Center’s June 2001 conference, “Covering America’s
Working Families.” Over six days, fellows attended sessions featuring 55
speakers on a range of topics.
CJC’s next national conference, April 21-26, 2002, is “Children and Trauma.”
Two-day regional conferences are held throughout the year in varied locations.
For information, visit www.casey.umd.edu or call 301-699-5133.
Conference Fellows, June 10-15, 2001 (listed alphabetically). Don Bradley,
Reporter, The Kansas City Star; Ellen Breslau, Senior Features Editor,
Woman’s Day; Mareva Brown, Staff Writer, The Sacramento Bee; Jacqueline
Charles, Reporter, The Miami Herald; Ron Cole, Education Writer/Editor, The
Vindicator, Youngstown, Ohio; Karen de Sá, Reporter, San Jose Mercury
News; David Charles Donald, Precision Editor, Savannah Morning News; Laura
Forster, Education Reporter, The Anniston (Ala.) Star; Joanne Fowler, National
Correspondent, PEOPLE magazine, New York, N.Y.; Chris Gray,
Reporter/Acting Saturday Editor, The Times-Picayune, New Orleans, La.; Kate
Gurnett, Feature Writer/Columnist, Times Union, Albany, N.Y.; Martha Irvine,
National Writer, The Associated Press, Chicago, Ill.; Debra Jensen,
Anchor/Producer, KOTA-TV/Radio, Rapid City, S.D.; Jackie Judd, Special
Assignment Correspondent, ABC News, Washington, D.C.; Pamela Kruger,
Contributing Editor, Child magazine, Millburn, N.J.; Amanda Lamb, News
Reporter, WRAL-TV, Raleigh, N.C.; Leah Y. Latimer, Free-lance Columnist and
Online Producer, BET.com; Carrie Melago, Reporter, New Haven (Conn.)
Register; Lynn Neary, Cultural Correspondent, National Public Radio,
Washington, D.C.; Peter Perl, Staff Writer, The Washington Post Magazine;
Kimberley Pierce, News and Public Affairs Director, WRVS-FM, Elizabeth City,
N.C.; Antonio M. Prado, Reporter, Star-Gazette, Elmira, N.Y.; Ross Reynolds,
Host, KUOW-FM, Seattle, Wash.; Tom Robertson, Bureau Chief, Minnesota
Public Radio, Bemidji, Minn.; Cheryl Romo, Staff Writer, Los Angeles Daily
Journal; Rebecca Roybal, Staff Writer, Albuquerque Journal; Bonnie Miller
Rubin, Reporter, Chicago Tribune; Lisa Prue Spellman, Reporter, Omaha
World-Herald; Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje, Reporter/Columnist, San Antonio
Express-News; Karen M. Thomas, Staff Writer, The Dallas Morning News.
Powerful Pitches, Stronger Stories
he eighth annual conference of the Casey Journalism Center on
T
Children and Families featured some 55 speakers, including
HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson, Sen. Christopher Dodd and Patrick
Fagan of the Heritage Foundation. Few were as well received as Amanda
Bennett, then the Pulitzer-winning managing editor/special projects for
The Oregonian. Now the editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader, Bennett
shared the following remarks in a session called “Powerful Pitches,
Stronger Stories.”
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is he?’ She said, ‘Eight.’That stuck with
me because…how would I feel at my
job every day [if] I had to give up my
cell phone so that my son wouldn’t call
me and say, ‘Mama, come home’? It
brought me close to tears then, it brings
me close to tears now. It…shows the
way people actually live their lives when
they’re working poor.
What does that mean in terms of
pitching your story? Well, in preparation
for coming here, I did a news retrieval
search of the last year and I put in
working mother, not working family
because working family didn’t turn up
very much. And everything I read was
boring. It was all boring.There was tons
of stuff. I went to television and there
actually was tons of stuff…but it was all
the same. It was the lack of quality
daycare. It was studies on the effect of
daycare on children. It was worries about
F A L L
I’d like to tell you a little story that
happened to me when I was here in
Washington the last time, just a couple of
weeks ago. I was in a taxi.We were stuck
in traffic. And the taxi driver, a woman,
turned to me and said, ‘Do you have a
cell phone?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ She said, ‘Could
I use it?’ Sure, no problem. So she gets
on the phone and says, ‘Jermaine, could
you order a pizza and tell them to
deliver it in 30 minutes? I’m going to
drop off my fare. I’m going to come
home. I’ll eat with you. I’ll have the
money to pay for it. And then, you
know, I’ll go back on the road.’ I could
hear him on the other end: ‘Okay.’ She
gave me back the cell phone.
She said, ‘You know, I used to carry a
cell phone with me but I had to get rid
of it because he was just calling me all
the time saying, “Mama, come home.” ’ I
couldn’t bear it — I said, ‘Well, how old
suspected abuse at daycare. Everything
had this kind of mushed-together sameness to it. And yet, these stories have
within them the germs of some things
[that] relate to us on such powerful
human levels, and it’s up to us to go out
and find them.When you find them and
bring them to me, you won’t need to
pitch anything. I’ll see what you’re
talking about.
So what’s in common with the
stories that grab my gut and your gut —
the ones that I’ll remember two years
from now and still have powerful
emotion? The ones that I found were
boring were where the focus was in the
wrong place. It was studies. It was data. It
was reports. It was where the idea was
foremost and not the effect of the idea.
The telescope was pointed in the wrong
direction. So what you get is a little lead
anecdote…‘So-and-so used to be able to
drop her kid off at six in the morning at
daycare but now this program is being
cut and she doesn’t know where to drop
her kid off. More and more families like
this are having problems like this....’
I think of it as looking through the
wrong end of the telescope.
I will confess right now that this is a
technique that I learned at The Wall
Street Journal. It was honed into me: the
nut graph is what saves you because it
enables you to flip the telescope around.
You can make the person, and the experience of that person, and the way this
social phenomenon plays out in a single
individual’s life relevant to your news
readers.The data becomes the
compressed center of your story.
So if I were to do a story in which
the life of this taxi driver becomes the
issue, [I might use] any of the data that
are readily available from the Census
about the number of women who are
working with children under 10. Or the
number of hours women have to work.
Or the number of women who are
working because...as she later explained
to me in great detail, her husband wasn’t
paying child support. But you compress
that data into a small thing.The big part
of the story becomes, how does this play
out in a real person’s life?
One of the wonderful things about
the family beat, the working beat, is
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CONFERENCE REPORT
common sense and observation.We can
see these things. It’s just that we forget
them or toss them into the sidelines in
our quest for the data… Think about
what you wonder about. Focus on that;
the thing about this taxi driver is I was
interested in her. I mean, it’s a cliché that
an editor rides in a taxi and gets a great
anecdote, right? But genuinely, as a
person, I was interested in how she was
running her life because of this small
observation. If I’m interested in the
person, then I’m going to be interested
as a reader. And if I’m interested as a
reader then hopefully other people
would be interested as readers. …
As part of sweeping through the
different operations of our building, I
about somebody who comes in once a
week to clean — these people were
coming in four days a week for six hours
a day.The fact is five years ago, that
wasn’t the case.
If you talk about the wage gap
between rich and poor, is this not an
example of what’s happening? Isn’t this
how it’s playing out? Is it possible my
friends have become just slightly more
affluent than they were five years ago?
The wage they have to pay has perhaps
stayed just slightly lower to make it
possible for them to now have a woman
come in to clean their house, chop their
vegetables, return the overdue videos for
them six days a week.What does that
that mean? Isn’t that a powerful story?
“It frightens and shocks me to think about
the gap between what other people have to
do just to make their lives work and what
I have to do to make my life work.”
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spent a couple of days with our news
carriers; they stuff [the papers] between
2 and 4 a.m. I was out at one of the
stuffing stations and I observed that a
number of women had their children
with them and had parked them in
grocery shopping carts. So the kids in
the grocery shopping carts were sitting
there playing between 2 and 4 a.m. And
one of the kids looked like he was
between 8 and 10. I wondered, how
does he get to school in the morning?
How does he feel in the morning if he’s
with his mother all night? And maybe
this isn’t her regular job. Maybe she’s got
a big credit card bill and so she’s taking
this extra job for a month or two and is
bringing her 8-year-old. …I’m interested
in how this family lives its life. I mean,
this one blew me away.
I came back to the East Coast and
saw my friends. I hadn’t seen some of
them in a while, and I started doing the
arithmetic. Five of my closest friends
who were working women of my age
now have housekeepers. I’m not talking
Isn’t that a...more powerful story than an
anecdote [about] the wage gap between
rich and poor?
And, again, just proving I’m a
member of the ruling class, I own a small
studio apartment where there actually is
a place that I couldn’t sell when I moved
out of it. But nonetheless, I still have it.
I collected, just last month, a new
tenant with the first and last month’s
rent.Typical thing: get the first and last
month’s rent. I looked at the check and
said, Holy mackerel, you know, this is a
studio apartment.That’s a lot of money.
What this young woman just starting
out as a law clerk, had to pay me just to
get into my apartment, was a lot of
money.Think about this.When you’re
talking about the working poor, how
about a story on the security deposit?
And the security deposit is a barrier to
housing. I just thought, look at the nut
graph.When you talk about the gap
between the rich and poor or barriers
to getting into the normal life, even if
somebody’s working really hard, getting
together that security deposit must be a
tremendously difficult thing.That...you
don’t need to pitch that to me.That
intrigues me. If you could prove to me
that it links in with some statistics that
you have, I will go for that story. I will
love to see that telescope turned around
the other way. Flip it in and get close to
that person’s life.
And that said...I told you all the
boring stories I didn’t like and the
acronym was, of course, my eyes glaze
over, you know, MEGO. So how do you
make it relevant to people? In some ways
I think we’re failing to make it relevant…but these other stories, I care
about them a lot. I care about how
people live their lives. It frightens and
shocks me to think about the gap
between what other people have to do
just to make their lives work and what I
have to do to make my life work. And so
those kinds of stories, I think, will
frighten and shock your readers and
make them feel that they have some
kind of awareness or kinship with the
kind of things people are going through.
So, I’ll just leave you with my favorite
moment.This is my touchstone of the
kind of detail that we want to get…that I
read years ago and has never left me and
feels very profound to me. Remember
The Washington Post story [by Katharine
Boo] about the crime in the inner cities
and there’s a mother sending her young
boy out into the street in the morning?
And she takes him and she takes one of
these magical protection spray cans…and
she sprays him up and down. She sprays
him so he won’t get hurt when he leaves
the house. And I thought, this is a
woman who is really living her life with
no control over her life and what
happens to her child except what’s in this
spray can.This is her wish.This is her
hope.The story never said that. It never
mentioned it.There was no data in it to
show it. But I think about it probably
two or three times a week, still, years
after I read it. Somebody got close
enough to this woman’s life to understand how she was actually living her life
and what the factors of her life were.
When you find that kind of a moment,
you won’t need to pitch to me. I will
know what you’re bringing to me. ■
Keeping it Together
Families’ Needs are Complex, Interconnected
B Y PAT T Y R H U L E
Life’s necessities — housing, health care and sometimes even food — are out of
reach for many of America’s working families, said speakers at the June conference.
And the constant struggle to meet those needs can take a toll, affecting children’s
school performance, health and how well a family functions within a community.
Housing hard to find
It is “a shameful fact in America that
housing is unaffordable, not only to
workers earning the minimum wage, but
to those who make two or three times
that amount,” said Jennifer G.Twombly,
Needs unmet, students
struggle in school
When a place to sleep and a full stomach
are not constants in a child’s life, the
effects often show up in school. One in
four 9th graders in the United States
perform below their white counterparts
in school, the emphasis on testing standards is especially vexing. “We want high
standards, but it’s cruel to have them
without the resources needed to achieve
them,” said Young.
The gains of such early childhood
programs as Head Start last beyond the
third grade, said Young, not just for the
child. Still, only Georgia is committed to
providing universal pre-kindergarten.
“Kindergarten is a policy issue,” said
Donna Klein, vice president of diversity
and workplace effectiveness for Marriott
International.The hotel chain has spearheaded the Corporate Voices for
Working Families Initiative, to make
policy-makers aware of the needs of
business and employees. “There is a business case for universal pre-K. It frees up
labor,” said Klein.
Not all employees see the value in
quality child care, however. Marriott built
From left: Andrea Young and
Jay Smink.
D.C. residents Rhonda Walker and
Albert Winley detailed their family’s
economic struggles.
a child-care center for low-income
workers in Atlanta, with Marriott paying
90 percent of the employee’s cost to use
it.“We built it but they did not come,”
said Klein.“They rely on self-care, sibling
care, custodial care.There is a disconnect
about the concept of early learning and
success in school.They perceive child
care as being game-playing, custodial”
rather than developmental.
Confusion over health care
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To the working poor, health insurance
can seem an impossible luxury: 44
million Americans — 10 million of
them children — lack health insurance,
said Lynda Flowers, senior policy analyst
of the National Academy for State
Health Policy.
People lack insurance for a variety of
reasons: employers don’t offer it; the
employee contribution is too high; they
don’t understand how to access federally
funded insurance; they don’t understand
2 0 0 1
today will not graduate high school, said
Jay Smink, executive director of the
National Dropout Prevention Center at
Clemson University in South Carolina.
Failure to graduate can lead to grim
prospects: 80 percent of U.S. prisoners
are dropouts, Smink said.
Developing partnerships among
parents and schools is a key element to
helping a child succeed, but that can be
difficult when both parents are working,
or for immigrant families for whom
language is a barrier, said M. Elena
Lopez, senior consultant of the Harvard
Family Research Project.
Many adults feel unwanted in school
buildings, due to their own experiences,
added Andrea Young, director of public
policy for the National Black Child
Development Institute, which has developed curriculums that teach parents the
value of participating in schools.
For children of color — currently 40
percent of children under 18 — who
F A L L
research director of the National Low
Income Housing Coalition.Twombly
cited data from “Out of Reach 2000,”
her organization’s report on affordability
of housing nationwide.Two parents
working for minimum wage earn about
$21,000. “Nowhere in the country is the
minimum wage income enough to rent
a two-bedroom home,” Twombly said.
The Department of Housing and
Urban Development estimates that 4.9
million households — with 3.6 million
children — live in “worst case” housing.
These families pay more than half their
income for housing or live in severely
substandard units.
Funds for housing assistance have
decreased in the past 20 years, said
Twombly. She encouraged reporters to
examine her group’s “housing wage” —
a measure of how much income a
person needs to afford a modest home
in communities across the U.S.
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28
the need for insurance; gaps exist in
publicly funded insurance; income fluctuations make them eligible one day and
not the next.
Even if their children are covered,
uninsured parents often don’t get children into care until a trip to the
emergency room or hospitalization is
required, Flowers said.
“It’s not enough to make it available,
but to teach people why you need to use
it,” said Flowers. For the first time, the
federal government has given states extra
money to inform people how they can
get insurance.
“Creating financial access is just the
beginning,” Flowers said. “We need to
get people into accessible care.”
Community health centers provide
that care for about 12 million
Americans, without regard for their
ability to pay, in 1,000 communities
nationwide. President Bush has vowed to
double the number of people served by
the community health system, said
Daniel R. Hawkins Jr., vice president for
federal and state affairs of the National
Association of Community Health
Centers Inc.
While 44 million Americans lack
health insurance, 120 million have no
dental insurance, Hawkins said, and
mental health and dental care are the
two most pressing needs within the
community health center system.
Policy-makers need to provide incentives for employers to offer insurance,
incentives for people to buy coverage and
fill in the gaps in public coverage for the
working poor, added Peter Cunningham,
senior health researcher of the Center for
Studying Health System Change.
Families worry about
having enough food
Not only is sheltering a family beyond
the means of the working poor, many
feel pressed to feed their families.The
Food Research and Action Center tracks
what it calls “food insecurity.” “People
usually are starting to cut back on the
size of meals, foods that they serve …
cut back on what the adults get, then
they start to cut down on what they are
giving their kids,” said Ellen Vollinger,
legal director of FRAC.
Many states are reporting large drops
in the use of Food Stamps, which
Vollinger says is often due to errors that
removed eligible families from the rolls.
Food banks and soup kitchens are
reporting increased need in summer
months.When school ends, just one
child in five who receives school lunches
continues to get subsidized meals.
“The resources are there, it’s a question of having enough people to operate
a meal site,” said Vollinger. An added
challenge is removing the stigma from
children who receive subsidized lunches.
Getting the whole story
Journalists have done a good job at
putting a positive face on the welfare-towork population, said Vollinger. But it’s
not always easy to put a human face on
public policy.
Policy-makers, advocates and other
panelists offered ideas for stories
concerning the working poor that are
being overlooked:
■ The gap between the minimum wage
and what is affordable housing in a
community, said Twombly.
■ Major drops in participation in food
stamps programs among eligible needy
families, said Vollinger.
■ The affordable housing gap and its
impact on school success, said
Twombly. “Housing underpins
anything you are trying to do to
develop a stable life. Child mobility is
an emerging issue.The outcome for
kids who move three to four times a
year is worse.”
■ States using excess TANF funds for
housing support as people leave
welfare, said Twombly. North Carolina
is one of those states.
■ The Adult Care Food Program, an
entitlement program that provides
subsidies to family daycare homes and
child-care centers for meals and
snacks, said Vollinger.
■ The uninsured adults with no
children who are too young for
Medicare and have terrible health
problems, said Flowers. One success
story: the positive impact a federal
breast and cervical cancer treatment
program is having on that population.
■ Lynda Flowers also suggested that
papers create a “linking tree” graphic
to help readers understand the range
of government-subsidized support
programs available to help them.
■ That the dropout problem is more
serious and greater than reported, but
there are solutions to combating it
that work, said Smink.
■ How crisis care for the uninsured
affects the hospitals and clinics that
treat them, said Lynda McDonnell of
the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
Despite the many challenges facing
low-wage earning families, several
speakers urged journalists to report on
families’ resiliency as well.
Rhonda Walker, a mother of three
making $11.22 an hour (more than
twice the minimum wage), said she
struggles to pay for child care and still
can’t afford health care.
“It is rough, but you have to have the
determination to keep going. Because
without having that determination, you
cannot set an example for the next person
not to give up,” she said. “We are people
really trying to make ends meet, and I just
have to say to a lot of women if they were
in my shoes, they couldn’t make it.”
Her partner, Albert Winley,
concurred. Instead of dwelling on problems, he feels determined to “live in a
solution today.”
When asked how he finds coverage
of economically struggling families,
Winley had an implicit challenge to
journalists: “Incomplete,” he said.
—Patty Rhule is a free-lance editor
and writer in University Park, Md.
She was an editor at USA Today for
12 years.
Conference Keynoter:
H E A LT H
AND
H U M A N S E RV I C E S S E C R E T A R Y
TOMMY THOMPSON
As Wisconsin’s governor,
Tommy Thompson liked to invite
welfare recipients to lunch at the
governor’s mansion.
C H I L D R E N ’ S
B E A T
—Joan Hennessy is a free-lance
reporter and editor. She was the
2000–2001 Casey Fellow at the
Philip Merrill College of Journalism
at the University of Maryland.
T H E
to be working,” he said. He mentioned
the possibility of offering government
work or community services for
these recipients.
Asked about proposals aimed at
providing incentives for low-income
people to marry,Thompson was unenthusiastic. “I think it’s nice to have a
family of your own,” he said. “Raising
children in a two-person family, children
are more adjusted, well adjusted, than in
poverty. But ... I don’t think my job is to
require marriage as a prerequisite.”
Thompson does not see welfare
reform as a partisan issue. Both sides, he
quipped, want credit for the legislation.
This does not mean there will be
congressional harmony as lawmakers
consider what to do next with
welfare reform.
“I’m going to be lobbying hard,” he
said. “I’m going to be advancing my
proposal which I think is necessary to
continue to move welfare reform down
the road and help poor people get out
of poverty. ...”
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My argument against that is that the
people still left ... are the ones that are
going to be the hardest to place,”
Thompson said.
Two-thirds of recipients have alcohol
or drug problems or a combination of
both, he said. Half do not have a high
school education, “and about 40 percent
are probably individuals who have never
worked before.”To help these people,
“you’re going to have to require more
individual attention.”
Thompson recalled that in 1994, he
told members of Congress that “welfare
reform could not be done on the
cheap.” He said his thinking hasn’t
changed.The country must invest in
recipients who need better skills so they
can move out of low-paying jobs.
Recipients should be encouraged to
consider professions that need
manpower,Thompson said, such as
health care.
Other areas of the law need finetuning,Thompson said. Currently,
participants can receive cash assistance for
a total of five years throughout their
adult life. States can exempt portions of
their caseloads, according to federal rules.
Lawmakers will also have to rethink
time limits. “The five years will be
running out and not everybody is going
F A L L
In this lush environment — as
Thompson describes it, a lakeside manse
with 35 rooms — he asked welfare
mothers why they couldn’t work.
“I was very poor growing up and I
really wanted to help them,” he recalled.
The women said they needed health
insurance and child care.They clearly
wanted to go to work,Thompson said,
but they had been “beaten down, criticized, had children at a very early age, a
lot of spousal abuse, a lot of alcohol or
drug problems....”.
Often,Thompson walked away from
these meetings with solid ideas about
how to help people get back to work.
In 2002, when Congress reauthorizes
the Personal Responsibility and Work
Opportunity Reconciliation Act of
1996,Thompson, now secretary of the
Department of Health and Human
Services, says he’ll be going to bat for
these recipients. Lawmakers must focus
on helping long-term recipients find
work,Thompson told 30 journalists.
Federal spending on welfare services
should continue at current level,
Thompson said, a proposal that will
draw certain opposition.
In 1996, Congress approved $16.5
billion in annual state block grants
through fiscal year 2002. Since the
measure was approved, however, the
nation’s welfare rolls have been cut in
half. In 1995, there were 13.6 million
recipients. As of September 2000, there
were 5.7 million.
“Now, there’s several people on
Capitol Hill that will tell you, well, since
you’ve reduced the welfare caseload
...we should be able to reduce the allotments by one-half.
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Feeling Their Pain
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It was startling how quickly Lynn Neary of National Public
Radio became a thief.
She wasn’t the only one. Three other journalists also
quickly turned to crime to survive. Not to survive real life as
they know it. But survive in a simulation of life that is all too
real for 36.5 million Americans, a life of poverty.
As part of their weeklong Casey Journalism Center
session on “Covering America’s Working Families,” 30 journalists took part in a hour-long exercise in which they
became members of fictional families facing real challenges:
keeping their families housed, fed, clothed and in school for
one month.
Dian N. Rowe, of the University of Maryland’s cooperative
extension program, ran the exercise, which was created by
her counterparts at the University of Missouri. Rowe said
reporters would learn what it might be like to live a month in
a low-income working family. “It is a simulation, not a game.
Nobody is going to win or lose.”
The journalists were divided into families facing different challenges. For
example, the “Boling” family: The father, Ben, 43, is a laid-off steel worker whose
unemployment compensation has run out. The mother, Betty, 42, has never
worked. They have two teen-agers, a mortgaged house and a car with an
outstanding loan. Their total savings is $125 and their monthly bills run $1,440.
To survive, the Bolings and the other families were to make use of an array of
community services found at a welfare office, a community food pantry, a soup
kitchen, a check cashing service, school and a jail.
They had to use transportation vouchers to move from their “homes” to any
of those services. “Transportation was a huge issue,” said Amanda Lamb,
reporter for WRAL-TV in Raleigh, N.C.
With its transportation vouchers and food chits and make-believe money, the
simulation was like a nightmare version of Monopoly.
It quickly became a losing struggle for most families. By the second week —
15 minutes in real time — several participants had been evicted, even more had
their lights turned off and “malnutrition notices” were sprouting on the chairs
that served as “home” for the families.
And it was transportation problems that turned Neary to a life of crime.
Playing Carol Chen, 15, Neary organized other teen-agers into a gang that stole
those valued vouchers. (One family had to forgo paying its utility bill to bail one
of Neary’s teen-age cronies out of jail.)
It was surprising how fast others fell into their roles. Joanne Fowler, a
national correspondent at People magazine, sounded truly aggrieved when she
complained about the fees charged at the check cashing service. “You can’t do
that,” she complained. “Give me my dollar.”
And author Leah Y. Latimer didn’t much like the attitude of the workers in the
welfare office. “They were gossiping about me while I was right there,” she said.
Setbacks that might cause an upper-middle class family discomfort were
disasters for these families. When the “Morris” family was robbed of their last
$300 they didn’t eat for a week.
One of the major lessons the journalists learned was summed up by Jackie
Judd of ABC News: “It was amazing how quickly the sense of unfairness
settles in.”
— Robert Hodierne
At a later session, Carrie Melago of
the New Haven Register (right),
listens to NPR’s Lynn Neary question
a speaker.
This Just In
Updates From
Our Fellows
Ruth Teichroeb (1999
national conference)
and fellow Seattle PostIntelligencer reporter
Larry Johnson won the
National Press Club’s
Teichroeb
top award for foreign
policy reporting for
“Crack in the Culture.”Their May 2001
project details how Honduran teen-agers
journey across four international borders
to sell crack cocaine on the streets of
Vancouver, B.C., and send money home
to their families.
The stories won first place in the
Edwin Hood Diplomatic Correspondence
category. SPJ’s Western Washington
chapter also awarded Teichroeb and
Johnson first-place in social issues
reporting from SPJ’s Western Washington
chapter in April.The stories are online:
http://seattlep-i.nwsource.com/honduras/
Latimer
The Centers for Disease Control
welcomed New Orleans Times-Picayune
reporter John Pope (2001 New Orleans
conference), as one of six Knight
Journalism Fellows assigned to the CDC.A
medical and health reporter, Pope’s fourmonth stint will allow him to examine
the effect of HIV infection on maternal
mortality, both in the U.S. and overseas.
“The Lost Children of
Wilder,” a book on
foster care written by
New York Times reporter
Nina Bernstein, was
nominated for a
Bernstein
National Book Award.
Winners will be
announced in November. Bernstein
discussed her work in the summer issue
of The Children’s Beat.
More Beat News
Detroit News reporter
Kim Kozlowski added
social services to her
beat this summer.
Kozlowski already
covers religious issues.
Kozlowski
Prior to joining The
News two years ago,
Kozlowski worked at four other dailies,
including The Kansas City Star.
February 25 Application deadline
for CJC national conference,
“Children and Trauma.” Open to all
professional journalists. Info: 301699-5133; [email protected]
April 21-26 CJC national conference, “Children and Trauma,”
College Park, Md. (outside of
Washington, D.C.).
Subscribe to
The Children’s
Beat
CJC’s quarterly magazine is free, but
subscription is required. Send an email to: [email protected]
subject line should read “Subscribe.”
In the body of the message, write
your name, organization and mailing
address. (If you are not a journalist,
please include your area of research
or expertise, and why you wish to
receive the magazine.)
Share Your News!
Keep us posted on your stories, beat
and job changes and other developments in your life.
Send clips and news to:
The Children’s Beat, CJC
4321 Hartwick Road, Suite 320
College Park, MD 20740
Fax: 301-699-9755
E-mail: [email protected]
C H I L D R E N ’ S
B E A T
The Fort Wayne (Ind.) Journal Gazette
deputy editorial page editor Bonnie
Blackburn has left the paper to become
an English teacher at an alternative high
school. Blackburn had written about the
school last year, and was enthusiastically
welcomed to the school by former
sources.That may have been her first
clue that life was about to change; she
reports, “It’s not often a journalist gets a
hug from a source!”
February (mid) Results announced
of CJC-sponsored study on coverage
of five trends in child/family life.
T H E
BET.com and BET television news
named Leah Latimer (2001 national
conference) as supervising/originating
producer for a a Pew-funded civic jour-
November Newsroom seminars,
New York and Denver
2 0 0 1
Megan Stack (1999 Austin conference)
became Houston bureau chief of the Los
Angeles Times last spring. Stack’s territory
includes Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and
Arkansas, though she worked overseas
following the Sept. 11 attacks. She was
previously with The Associated Press.
CJC Datebook
F A L L
USA Today’s Marilyn
Elias (2000 national
conference) has won
several awards for
reporting excellence.
The American
Association for the
Elias
Advancement of
Psychology recognized
Elias this summer for mental health
reporting. Last year, the American
Academy of Pediatrics gave Elias an
award for outstanding coverage of children’s health issues. Among Elias’s recent
stories are loopholes in international
adoption laws and the growth of
Internet psychotherapy sites.
nalism project on
African-American families.The project will
launch in November
with results from a
BET.com/CBS News
poll on family, political
and cultural concerns.
31
Children and Trauma
April 21- 26, 2002
The biggest threats facing America’s children won’t
be stopped by a gas mask.
Join 30 professional journalists for a weeklong examination of how trauma affects
children. Renowned experts will discuss the effects of domestic violence or abuse;
the impact of poverty on children; the stresses and resiliency of children in high-crime
neighborhoods; the lives of young refugees who have fled war; how the events of
Sept. 11 may affect children’s perceptions of safety and their future, and more.
Application Deadline: Monday, Feb. 25, 2002
Fellowships cover lodging, materials and a travel stipend to Washington, D.C.
To apply, send the following to Beth Frerking, director, at the address below:
■ a biographical sketch and one sample of your work
■ a brief statement of why you want to attend the conference
■ a short nominating letter from a supervisor
4321 Hartwick Rd., Suite 320 • College Park, MD 20740
301-699-5133 • Fax 301-699-9755
[email protected] • www.casey.umd.edu
A program of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and The David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
4321 Hartwick Rd., Suite 320
College Park, MD 20740