Children's Health, Tips

Basic medical care is important—but so are the environments in which children grow up. Communities must find ways to help parents meet these three goals, which are crucial for the healthy development of children:

* provide quality health care to pregnant women, infants and toddlers;
* protect children from injury, and educate parents and caregivers about the hazards to children; and
* ensure that children live, play and go to school in safe environments.

As urban infrastructures age, there is a corresponding rise in pollution and toxic contamination, both of which are especially damaging to children. Safety issues around health and food inspections are also critically important; levels of contamination tolerated by adults may be deadly for young children. Communities must find ways to stretch shrinking budgets to maintain safe public infrastructures and to limit or eliminate toxic and dangerous conditions. The Children's Environmental Health Network has resources on its

The second National Summit for Community Wireless Networks will be held March 31-April 2, 2006 in Champaign-Urbana, IL. It's the largest gathering of community wireless networking developers, implementers and allies focused on building the alliance of technologists, policy experts, and implementers, and encouraging participants to discuss the great variety of challenges and opportunities facing the movement.

This federal web site has resources on physical fitness, nutrition, preventive care, and avoiding risky behavior. Follow the eight links with helpful descriptions to more government health sites.

Interactive narratives are informational and storytelling experiences designed and produced for the web. They leverage great design, visual journalism and rich-media content. There's a Weblog for folks who want to put up sites to share and discuss. A database of narratives and links and resources on producing Interactive Narratives and web design. From Hurricane Katrina diaries to newspaper stories online, you'll enjoy this only with a high speed connection.

J-Lab's new how-to site for community journalism is a companion to the New Voices citizen media initiative. J-Learning will cover Web hosting, HTML coding, digital photography, new media reporting and more.

Ypulse is an independent blog for media and marketing professionals looking to understand the commercial Generation Y (teen) market. It's published by Anastasia Goodstein a journalist who worked with several leading consumer online & television brands before starting Ypulse in 2004. Don't miss her links to Youth Media (KUSP's Youthtopia made the cut, as did former SPers Radio Arte and Blunt Youth Radio) and Teen Blogs. And if you're making youth media, promote your project here!

PDFonline.com allows you to create PDF files from a wide variety of formats, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and JPEG files. Just attach a document by browsing to it on your local computer (PC or Mac), choose a file name for the new PDF and enter your e-mail address. Within minutes, you will receive your PDF file via e-mail. File sizes are restricted to 2MB. To reduce Spam, consider using a free Hotmail or Yahoo address just for this purpose.

The Alliance for Health Reform, a nonpartisan organization, has published a book especially for journalists, but of interest to any who want to know about health policy issues. Each chapter contains a long list of resources and plenty of story ideas. Available for download, in English and Spanish, as one large pdf file, or chapter-by-chapter.

A free publication from Harvard School of Public Health and MetLife Foundation provides ideas to get baby boomers involved in their communities--ways to utilize their time, energy, and talents in productive ways. The boomer population, by every measure of civic engagement has participated much less in civic life than the previous generation. Get the whole publication as a PDF or just read the highlights in a summary document on the Web.

Every Sound Partners project has an opportunity to place their ongoing reporting on health issues into a meaningful context by building permanent Web resource centers such as FAQs, primers and timelines. With just a bit of imagination and creativity, you can take home key concepts by reading an article by Dan Froomkin of The Washington Post. He extolls the in-depth knowledge obtained by "beat reporters," (such as Health Reporters) over the long haul of covering "chronic stories" (those stories that just won't go away or that unfold over extended periods of time). Froomkin says that good context reporting can stick around on the Web in an "evergreen" package. Don't be put off by his newspaper-based examples or the tension between the newsroom and online producers that exists in print journalism. Remember that we maximize our results through our media and community partnerships.