Earlier this year Local Media Foundation and the Associated Press Media Editors were awarded a McCormick Foundation grant to conduct a special two-day symposium. The goal of this symposium was to educate community journalists on how to uncover local stories related to the impacts of the current economic crisis on the mental health of North American families and their communities.

The following resources are provided as a follow-up to this symposium as part of an ongoing comprehensive learning experience.

WEBINARS:
How to Cover the Effects of the Bad Economy on Mental Health Services in Local Communities
Hosted by Local Media Association and Local Media Foundation
Tuesday, October 16, 2012 @ 3:00pm EDT (2:00pm CDT, 1:00pm MDT, 12:00pm PDT)

Click here to register.

Medicare Reform:  Reporting Past the Rhetoric
Hosted by Poytner.News University
Wednesday, October 17, 2012 @ 2:00pm EDT (1:00pm CDT, 12:00pm MDT, 11:00am PDT)
Click here to register.


RESOURCES:
Reporting on the Economy and Mental Health
A collection of resources for journalists that grew out of a reporting workshop hosted by LMA and APME.

VIDEOS:  | To be available soon.
Business and Economy. Fundamentals of understanding forces and trends, communicating them clearly and making them relevant to a general audience. What matters, and why.
Tom Contiliano, Senior News Executive, Bloomberg/Business Week, Washington D.C. and Leslie Patton, Reporter, Bloomberg News, Chicago

Community Stress. The global economic crisis has left communities and providers in a battle against budget cuts; ambushing the quality of services and supports to those with intellectual disabilities and mental illness. This story, of our most marginalized population, has become a blind spot to the public eye. How are communities responding?
Marian Saulino, Director, Values Into Action, Media, Pennsylvania

Suicide. Why it happens. How mental-health problems escalate. Seeking meaning. How to identify and quantify suicide.
Steve Moore, Illinois Board Member, American Foundation for Suicide Prevention

A journalist’s ethical questions. When does private agony become a public story? What to report and how to report it? Are there rights and wrongs, or does each case stand on its own? Does competition matter?
Jack Doppelt, Professor, Medill School, Northwestern University

Convening the Community Discussion: Social media are more than status updates. Harness the power of online crowds with new tools, technologies and strategies. Build upon traditional reporting instincts and skills in an interactive environment with new solutions and better audience understanding.
Jeremy Gilbert, Assistant Professor, Medill School, Northwestern University

Numbers and databases. Trends, stats, charts, graphs. How to find them, read them, use them. Interpreting numbers and using them intelligently.
Alex Richards, Staff Writer, Chicago Tribune

Organizing yourself and your newsroom for effective, ongoing coverage of an critical community issue. Staffing and priorities. Time and resource management when there’s not an abundance of either.
Tom Koetting, Deputy Managing Editor, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

Recap: The Economy and Mental Health

 

SPECIALIZED REPORTING INSTITUTE ON
THE RECESSION AND MENTAL HEALTH:

20 SCHOLARSHIPS FOR COMMUNITY JOURNALISTS TO BE AWARDED

All costs covered to attend this specialized two-day symposium in Chicago

The LMA Foundation and the Associated Press Media Editors have been awarded a McCormick Foundation grant to conduct a special two-day symposium to educate community journalists on how to uncover local stories on the impacts of the current economic crisis on the mental health of North American families and their communities.

The symposium will take a deep dive into this subject and will feature top speakers from the academic world, as well as journalists who cover highly-specialized aspects of this topic. The ultimate goal is to provide scholarship recipients with a host of tools and information to better cover the topic at a local level in their communities. Follow-up webinars with symposium attendees will also be part of this comprehensive learning experience.

Scholarship applications are due by April 20; click here to access the application form and information. The symposium takes place July 16 - 17 in Chicago (air, hotel and meals are included). Special thanks to the Sun-Times Media Group for hosting this event.

Editors and reporters are eligible to apply. Special consideration will be given to those who are in a position to drive the coverage of this topic at their newspaper. Depending on the size of the paper, this may be the editor, an assignment editor or a reporter. These scholarships are only being awarded to community journalists who work at daily newspapers with a circulation of 100,000 or less or for weekly newspapers. A number of slots have been reserved for weekly newspaper editors and for smaller dailies under 10,000 circulation. The goal is to have a diverse audience.

The symposium presents a one-of-a-kind learning experience at a very in-depth level. The cost to develop and implement this program is $40,000 (the amount of the McCormick grant). Attendees will be treated to an extremely special experience that will pay off for years to come.

"We are very grateful to the McCormick Foundation," said Nancy Lane, President of Local Media Association and the Local Media Association Foundation. "This provides a wonderful opportunity to educate community journalists on a very important topic during a time when training dollars are tight at most companies. We are also grateful to APME for co-sponsoring this grant with us and providing invaluable assistance with the program."

“We are thrilled the McCormick Foundation saw merit in this program and we are greatly appreciative of their funding,” said APME Vice President Brad Dennison. “It’s also an honor to have an opportunity to partner with a great organization like LMA with a common mission of helping newspapers break new reporting ground on a topic that affects far too many.”

The grant is made possible by the McCormick Foundation's Specialized Reporting Institute. Each year, McCormick funds various seminars to educate and inform journalists on how to cover these narrow but critically important topics. Past topics have included: how to cover the BP oil spill, immigration and covering the Olympics.

Local Media Association and APME will also host free educational webinars after the symposium to share with the entire industry best practices and some of the lessons learned.

The SNA Foundation and the Associated Press Managing Editors were awarded a grant by The McCormick Foundation to conduct a specialized two-day reporting workshop. The symposium, part of McCormick’s Specialized Reporting Institutes program, educated 20 community journalists on how to uncover local stories on the impacts of the current economic crisis on the American family.

The symposium took a deep dive into this subject and featured top speakers from the academic world, as well as journalists who cover highly-specialized aspects of this topic. The ultimate goal was to provide scholarship recipients with a host of tools and information to better cover the topic at a local level in their communities. Follow-up webinars with symposium attendees will also be part of this comprehensive learning experience.

Go to www.newsu.org/resources/sri/economic-crisis-families for more information.

Click here to learn more about our discussion leaders and participants.