ASA - American Society on Aging

2004 Awards Programs
Recognizing Excellence in the Field of Aging

Award Winners

The ASA Media Awards recognize journalists whose work has had an exceptional impact on public awareness of issues related to aging at the local or regional levels.

2004 MEDIA AWARDS

NATIONAL MEDIA

Harry Wiland & Dale Bell, Writers

Santa Monica, CA

Over a three-year period beginning in Spring 1999, Harry Wiland and Dale Bell raised $2.4 million to create the first of their media/outreach models dealing with caregiving and eldercare. The first project, And Thou Shalt HonorŠ was PBS's Program of Note for October 2002, and rallied more than 1,500 grassroots coalitions in a comprehensive nationwide outreach campaign. It received an unprecedented 98% carriage among PBS stations nationwide, while it organized 59 national outreach partners and a peerless 36-member Board of Advisors. This two-hour program about caregiving‹and the people who care for their loved ones‹received universal critical acclaim and higher than normal ratings, created 110 million media impressions in print and on television, spawned a companion book published by Rodale Inc. and edited by Pulitzer-nominated author Beth Witrogen McLeod, attracted Rosalynn Carter to write the foreword, employed an interactive Web site that featured a database of 40,000 names of service providers (accessible by their zip codes), motivated thousands of people to call their local PBS stations, and finally, fostered 12 other caregiving films that are being offered to more than 100,000 professional organizations with educational support. It represented PBS' best-coordinated marketing effort in 2002-03. The ATSH video was the #1 best-selling video, in its category, from October to December 2002. And Thou Shalt HonorŠ is now being rebroadcast by stations across the country and some are using it as a pledge program to solicit funds for the local PBS station.

Still, caregiving consumers need to know how to navigate their healthcare universe. As the second phase in their effort to empower caregivers across the country, Wiland-Bell Productions is staging a series of 12-15 Caregiving Town Hall Meetings over the next 15 months in PBS cities across the country. Harry Wiland is a versatile producer with an Emmy Award-winning career as a television producer/director as well as a new media innovator in the field of educational multimedia courseware. He has produced and directed numerous specials on network, public and cable television, including the Emmy-Awarded productions Showdown at the Palace, an internationally syndicated special, and Bridge over Troubled Waters. His documentaries and music specials such as White Gospel and Earl Scruggs: His Family and Friends have led him to work with many of America's best-known recording artists including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Dolly Parton and Johnny Cash. Wiland is a director member of the Directors Guild of America, and he holds an MFA in film from Columbia University.

A television producer and executive with many awards to his credit, Dale Bell's wide-ranging career has seen him write, produce, direct and sell many hours of documentary film. His recent works include The Secrets of War, Shangri-La: Ancient Mystery and California and the Dream Seekers for A&E, Pirate Tales for TBS, Battleship! for Discovery, A Driving Need for PBS, and Chariots of the Gods?: The Mystery Continues for ABC. His productions in both film and television have earned him an Academy Award, an Emmy, a Peabody Award, two Christopher Awards and two Cine Golden Eagle Awards. Bell has also just written and edited a 30th anniversary book which tells the many personal stories behind the Academy Award-winning movie Woodstock, of which he was a producer. He was also Martin Scorsese's assistant director on Mean Streets, producer of The Italian Americans, and Associate Producer of The Groove Tube. And, during Bell's four-year tenure as executive producer of the PBS book-based family movie series, WonderWorks won the Children's Act Award annually, as well as other domestic and international awards of excellence. Bell is a member of the Directors Guild of America and the Writers Guild of America.

Wiland-Bell Productions is a multiple award-winning media production company, specializing in the design and implementation of socially relevant projects in an entertaining and enlightening context.

Wiland and Bell's latest project, And Thou Shalt Honor: Caring for Our Parents, Spouses, and Friends, has a web site at www.atsh.org. To replicate the CareGiving model and mission, the company has created a CareGiver Resource Center Video Library, as well as marketing sequels, and similar multi-media cause-related projects in the fields of the elderly, the environment, and education.

Honorable Mention

Kelly Greene

Atlanta, GA
The Wall Street Journal

Kelly Greene is honored for a body of work on some of the most pressing concerns for an aging population. Ms. Greene has covered retirement planning and aging issues at The Wall Street Journal since January 2001. She is the Journal's only reporter dedicated to writing for Encore, the Journal's quarterly report on retirement, and she is based in the Journal's Atlanta bureau. Her features, ranging from the impact of historically low interest rates on the lives of older Americans to classes teaching men in their 70s how to cook, have appeared on page one and other section fronts. Her weekly column, also called Encore, runs in The Wall Street Journal Sunday, a syndicated section published in more than 80 metropolitan daily newspapers with a combined circulation of more than 10 million readers. What she values most from her work on the aging beat is the readers' passion for and engagement with the subject, along with the extensive feedback they provide.

Before reporting about retirement, Ms. Greene spent four years covering health policy and writing the "Heard on the Street" column for the Journal's Southeast and Florida regional sections. She spent the first two years of her career as a general assignment reporter at The Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina, then moved to a succession of business journals in Greensboro and Charlotte, NC, and Atlanta. In 1994, she won the North Carolina Working Press Award for General Excellence for a series of stories revealing that companies receiving millions of dollars from state's economic-development fund did not create the jobs they had promised. In 1996, she won a Southeast Region Green Eyeshade Award for a story using computer-assisted analysis of bank records to show how an Atlanta bank merger hurt small-business lending.

Ms. Greene graduated from Wake Forest University in 1991 with a bachelor's degree in history with honors and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

Joseph Shapiro

Washington, D.C.
National Public Radio

Joseph Shapiro is honored for his body of work for National Public Radio (NPR) on issues of older adults and alcoholism; nursing home improvements; assisted living, the Bush administration's calculations of the value of an older person; and an aging developmentally disabled neighbor and how his neighbor helped him stay connected and contributing to the neighborhood. Mr. Shapiro is a correspondent on the science desk at National Public Radio. He covers aging, disability, health, family and children's issues and other areas of social policy. His stories can be heard on All Things Considered, Morning Edition and the other NPR news shows. His reporting on aging covers a wide area, from public policy issues such as Medicare coverage and end-of-life care to features such as one on people with early-stage Alzheimer's disease chipping away at the stigma of their illness.

He joined NPR in 2001 after spending 19 years at U.S. News & World Report, where he covered social policy issues, and served as Rome bureau chief, White House correspondent and congressional reporter. Shapiro came to aging issues by first doing groundbreaking reporting on disability issues and disability civil rights history. He is the author of the award-winning book NO PITY: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement. The so-called problems of aging, he says, are often the issues of aging with a disability. And in his aging reporting‹along the lines of his work on disability‹he's focused on stories that show older people trying to maintain purposeful lives.

Shapiro has a special interest in long-term care issues, particularly in how people maintain their independence and how societies create good places to grow old. Shapiro has written about problem nursing homes and assisted living facilities. But he believes it's also important to cover long-term care facilities that are models of the best care.

He has been a recipient of the Kaiser Family Foundation Media Fellow in Health, a yearlong fellowship he used to study long-term care. He used a similar Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship to study aging. A native of Washington, DC, he resides there with his wife and two daughters.

LOCAL & REGIONAL MEDIA

Nancy Weaver Teichert

Sacramento, CA
The Sacramento Bee

As a Pulitzer-prize winning senior writer, Ms. Teichert is honored for her body of work on issues ranging from dementia to elder abuse to hearing loss to older drivers. Her work exemplifies in-depth aging knowledge and sensitivity to ageism while fulfilling high professional journalism standards. Writing in California's state capitol, she creates appropriate awareness of aging issues and contributes to positive public discussions on those issues.

Nancy Weaver Teichert has been a reporter at the Sacramento Bee since 1985. She has written several award-winning series for The Bee on hunger, poverty and child abuse and currently covers aging issues. She received a First Amendment Beacon from the California First Amendment Coalition for the best use of public records in reporting. A graduate of Indiana University, she also worked for the Jackson (MS) Clarion-Ledger where she was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1983 for a series about public education that resulted in significant improvements to the state's schools. She has also worked for The Denver Post. She won first place in local and regional coverage in this year's ASA media contest and won second place in 2002.

Honorable Mention

Susan Jaffe

Cleveland, OH
The Plain Dealer

Susan Jaffe is honored for a body of work. Ms. Jaffe launched the aging issues beat for The Cleveland Plain Dealer in 2001 and covers just about everything that concerns seniors, from health insurance and government regulation to medical research and social trends. Her "Aging Matters" column offers news and consumer advice.

The breadth of her stories, capturing the heart of the issues, contributes significantly to public discussion and stimulates action. After she wrote that cuts in Ohio's home-health care program would cost five times more when older adult recipients enter nursing homes, state legislators gave the program $35 million more in funding.

Jaffe came to The Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1996, after working at The Tampa Tribune and Sarasota Herald-Tribune. She has also published work in The Boston Globe, The Baltimore Sun, and The Village Voice. She received a Revson Foundation Fellowship to attend Columbia University, where she earned a Masters degree from the School of Public Health.

This writer has combined hard-hitting reportage with compassion to cover the complexities of the aging beat.