Award
Winners
2000
MEDIA AWARD
NATIONAL
LEVEL
Wendy Schmelzer
National Public Radio
Wendy
Schmelzer is a National Public Radio (NPR) correspondent based in Los Angeles.
She can be heard regularly on NPR's news magazines All Things Considered,
Morning Edition and Weekend Edition. She is a previous winner
of ASA's media competition.
For the last five years,
her news and feature reporting has focused primarily on issues of the elderly
and the biology of aging. Her award-winning reports range from public-policy
concerns, including elder mistreatment and neglect, to features on the role
of religion in supporting the mental health of older adults. The seven honored
pieces reflect the depth and breadth of her coverage.
Two features on alternative
living arrangements for older adults focused attention on both the acute needs
of elders to find safe and affordable housing and the added social benefit
that some older adults find through communal living. NPR's Audience Services
Department and Ms. Schmelzer received numerous requests for referrals and
information following the airing of these reports on NPR's news magazine Morning
Edition.
Her two-part series on
late-life hearing loss (also aired on Morning Edition) first explored
some of the genetic and environmental factors that contribute to poor hearing,
along with common barriers to purchasing hearing aids. Part two clarified
what elders can expect from today's and tomorrow's technology.
An All Things Considered
report on placing a loved one in a nursing home and another on a Florida adult
daycare pilot program featured prominently in NPR's five-part series on the
long-term care needs of ailing elders. While few Americans welcome a move
to a nursin ghome, an estimated one-and-a-half million now live in the 17,000
facilities around the country, the first feature spotlighted the emotional
hurdles families face with nursing home placement, while the second report
detailed the trials and rewards of caregiving at home.
Schmelzer's feature on
older drivers (All Things Considered) turned the spotlight on several
Florida-based programs designed to improve driving skills and maximize elders'
time behind the wheel. In the next 25 years, the number of older drivers on
U.S. roads will double. For Florida, though, the future has already arrived--about
1 million elders over 75 still hold valid driver's licenses. The piece explored
many of the difficulties associated with giving up driving, especially in
a state noted for its poor public transit.
These features represent
only a small part of Ms. Schmelzer's extensive body of work; they exemplify
her commitment to informing the public discourse on aging issues. The pieces
uphold the highest professional journalistic standards. They represent an
excellent interweaving of personal issues with national statistics and policy
perspectives.
Ms. Schmelzer's features
do much to dispel damaging and negative stereotypes about aging and to give
voice to the myriad concerns of older adults. They treat both subject and
topic sensitively, thoroughly and thoughtfully.
Before joining NPR, Schmelzer
was an exhibits planner and science writer for the Boston Museum of Science.
She earned a bachelor's degree from Clark University in Worcester, Mass.,
and a master's from Boston University. She and her husband reside in Los Angeles
with their three children.
Honorable
Mention
Sara Rimer
New York Times
Sara
Rimer covers the age beat for the New York Times. She defines the beat broadly--aging
is something that happens to all of us as individuals, as our parents' children,
as friends and neighbors, as members of society. She defines her mission ambitiously:
to report on aging as a human condition.
In her reporting Ms. Rimer
has learned that aging and the old are viewed in different ways by different
generations. Too often, she has found, the subject is defined for the public
by younger generations who see being old as a problem--indeed, as a fate to
avoid (or deny) at all costs.
The entry ASA has chosen
to honor consists of a single article that attempts to respond to a question:
Can there really be such a thing as a good nursing home? It is, of course,
the question of someone who dreads the thought of having to enter a nursing
home, as most Americans do. Ms. Rimer's many-layered answer included a positive
exemplar of good nursing-home care rather than the usual horror stories.
Ms. Rimer's work reflects
sensitive reporting on difficult subjects. It bridges the gulf in understanding
between the generations, and is filled with human insights and health-consumer
information. A collection of her articles would constitute a guide both to
growing old and to caring for the old.
She has written on many
aspects of New York life since joining the Times in September 1983. And she
has received awards for her efforts including the Meyer Berger award. She
also shared, with other Times writers, the Polk award for the newspaper's
series on downsizing. In 1998, Ms. Rimer became a national correspondent covering
aging, and moved the next year to Philadelphia.
Ms. Rimer's career in
journalism began at the University of Michigan, where she was a reporter and
editor on the Michigan Daily, the campus paper. Born in Abington, Pa., in
1954, she grew up in Pennsylvania and graduated from the University of Michigan
in 1976.
LOCAL/REGIONAL
LEVEL
Jane Glenn Haas
Orange County Register
Orange
County, CA
Jane
Glenn Haas, 62, has been writing exclusively about aging and longevity issues
for the Orange County Register since 1991. She has previously received an
honorable mention in ASA's media competition. Her assignments are broad-based,
dealing with issues, personalities, attitudes and news of interest to people
50 and older. Her weekly column, "Our Time," is distributed nationally on
the Knight-Ridder Tribune Syndicate and appears regularly in more than 20
newspapers. Haas also produces and hosts a live cable television show. She
writes and produces commentaries for television, including a PBS special titled
"Alzheimer's: A California Perspective," which she developed, wrote and anchored.
When a board and care
home operator closed 26 homes and evicted more than 200 elders on a Friday
morning, a Register news team gathered the pertinent facts for a daily story
while Haas started on a perspective piece for the Sunday paper. The results:
a story that explained the lack of regulations for this burgeoning business.
One week later, an in -depth Sunday piece put the growth of assisted living
facilities in perspective for Orange County readers, focusing on adult children
anxious to find adequate elder housing for their parents.
A week later, another
angle on the story was published--a feature on a former Orange County resident
who moved her husband, who had Alzheimer's, to a care home in the state of
Washington. This piece not only contrasted care in Washington and California
but also compared what California contributes to Medicaid coverage to the
contributions of other states. As the Register's editor commented at the time,
"These stories are in our newspaper because we have a skilled reporter who
does nothing but focus on the aging of our county." Speciality coverage does
occasionally pay off.
Haas also wrote a two-part
series on her decision to have a face lift; it was surprising and fresh, and
had layers of discovery. The decision forced her to become introspective as
she asked herself, Why am I doing this, anyway? The series garnered more than
500 e-mails, letters, faxes and telephone calls, with only one negative response.
Highlighted features this
year included a story on Orpha Price, who lives on a Social Security allowance
of $543 per month yet still finds joy in everyday events, and one on John
Folcarelli, whose decline resulting from Alzheimer's Ms. Haas has chronicled
for more than eight years. What made John's story particularly compelling
this year was the focus on his wife, Charlene, and how she was learning to
live without John.
Haas' weekly column, "Our
Time," tackles tough aging issues in an easy-to-digest format. Issues range
from grandchildren to elder abuse, from sex to cyberseniors, from workplace
issues to centenarians. She is a wife, mother and grandmother.
Honorable
Mention
Diane Lade and John
Maines
Sun-Sentinel
Fort Lauderdale,
FL
Diane Lade is the aging-issues
writer for the Sun-Sentinel, a Fort Lauderdalebased newspaper with a Sunday
circulation of 370,000. The per capita senior population in two of the three
South Florida counties the paper covers is greater than 20 percent, and its
members are incredibly diverse, making it a great place to be on the age beat.
The entry this year quantified
a topic that often makes news: Do seniors have more potential to be unsafe
drivers than the rest of the population? As such, do we need to consider stricter
licensing requirements for them? Using a database, Lade and John Maines, an
editorial researcher, checked 4 million accident reports spanning 10 years.
The story was told from a variety of angles, not just safe versus unsafe according
to the numbers; it examined the trauma associated with giving up driving,
the lack of alternative forms of transportation, and the flaws in current
testing methods.
The article explored in
depth the challenge states face in licensing older drivers in a way that is
fair to elders as well as safe for society. More than 2 million older Floridians
hold driver's licenses, an increase of 28 percent over the previous decade.
And the greatest increases are seen in the very old driving population. Florida
now has 149,595 licensed drivers ages 85 and older, double the numbers of
a decade ago.
Yet Florida also has one
of the most lenient license-renewal policies in the country. Older adults
can keep driving legally for up to 18 years without ever having to walk into
a state license bureau. Lade and Maines examined the myths and realities behind
this hot topic.
Some of the results were
surprising. While younger drivers had the highest accident rate when compared
to the total number of driver's licenses issued, the oldest drivers were the
ones most likely to get ticketed for causing an accident. Older adults also
were more likely than teens to be charged with drunk driving. And the older
adult fatality rate for motor vehicle accidents was growing much more rapidly
than expected.
The article also explored
the lack of transportation alternatives, Florida's antiquated vision tests
that don't really measure driving ability, and new experimental programs like
Getting in Gear in St. Petersburg, where older adults can get on-the-road
training and "transportation counseling." A review of driver improvement programs
offering insurance discounts for elders who complete them found that anyone
who showed up got a safe driver certificate. Members of the state legislature
have renewed interest in responding effectively to this challenging issue.
A graduate of the University
of Missouri Journalism School, Lade has been a municipal reporter, feature
writer and assistant city editor at the Sun-Sentinel, and has covered aging
on and off for about 12 years. In 1998 she was a Pulitzer nominee; she also
won an Honorable Mention in the 1998 ASA media competition. Her entry this
year was her first serious attempt at computer-assisted reporting, so Lade
was teamed with researcher Maines--which means Lade, being math-illiterate,
moved the mouse around and did what Maines told her to do.
