MPR's Public Insight Journalism
For the past two years, Minnesota Public Radio has been practicing what it calls "Public Insight Journalism," using its audience to help find the best sources and information for stories. The model is build around the Public Insight Network - a group of thousands of Minnesotans who help the station's journalists cover the news.
"Every week, we ask people in that network to share their observations, knowledge and expertise with us. We take that information, distill it, and pass it on to our reporters and editors. They may follow up with a request for more information, or perhaps an interview."
This is similar to the reader advisory networks many newspapers have been implementing and using in the past few years.
Apr 12, 2005 | E-MAIL | SAVE | PRINT | PERMALINK | DISCUSS(1)
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1 comments about 'MPR's Public Insight Journalism'a new source for MPR
Dear editor,
Please contact me for more stories or information about abused and neglected children. I would be happy to collaborate on an article, radio interview, or write longer or shorter pieces (I have a whole book full.)
These are important issues that need exposure to raise public awareness for change to come.
Thank you,
Mike T
www.invisiblechildren.org
www.invisiblechildren.org/weblog
Preteen mothers, adolescent felons, and what we can do about them.
What we do to our children they will do to society
Pliny the Elder
Friends,
I met with State Senator Mee Moua recently. I am a guardian ad-Litem concerned with the twice-abused children I know through County Child Protection.
Senator Moua is the first State legislator to speak to me with a genuine interest in creating a public dialogue around Children’s mental health issues (especially for the millions of children reported to Child Protection Services each year.)
We agree that a significant part of the problem with failing schools is the big numbers of traumatized children being warehoused in classrooms.
Teachers are in the terrible position of being responsible for educating students and managing traumatized children at the same time.
Because it is a complicated issue with no simple answers, legislators avoid the topic and don’t provide useful solutions.
The public is quick to blame parents, immigrants, and teachers for school failure, but unable to grasp the seriousness of a million new cases of abused and neglected children entering American classrooms each year. Blaming mentally ill or drug addicted abusive parents is useless. Blaming children or immigrants is wrong.
Until we can get our minds wrapped around the inter-relatedness of child abuse, mental illness, education, crime and pregnancy, we will continue to be a nation of teenage pregnancies and young criminals.
By federal statute, children removed from their homes by Child Protection Services have suffered the trauma of having their lives in danger of imminent harm (or they are left in the home.) That is the law under which children are removed from their home (the Imminent Harm doctrine.)
In my guardian ad-Litem cases, most children removed from their homes by the county need counseling very badly and they do not receive it.
The terrible behaviors abused children develop to stay alive in the toxic environment of beatings, drugs, sex, and neglect, make them social outcasts and define them as mentally ill in their new life settings.
Children that have suffered severe or prolonged abuse need a counseling regimen that will be part of their life for a long time to overcome the trauma and asocial behaviors learned in their early years. How do we unteach violence, sexual behaviors, or illegal drug use taught to a seven-year-old?
Short term counseling for severely damaged children is just one more abandonment.
Can prescriptions of psychotropic drugs like Ritalin, Prozac, without commensurate mental health services take the place of professional mental health counseling and the teaching of life skills for a disturbed seven year old?
Too large a percentage of children in the Child Protection System are receiving serious doses of psychotropic medication and not nearly enough mental health services. This is not saving our communities any money. We pay for the institutionalization of these children for many years.
What can we as parents, citizens, educators, and spiritual people do to create awareness of the seriously troubled children are being “managed” with psychotropic medications and expected to “become normal” without the help of therapy?
At the very least, tell your legislator you are tired of full prisons, dangerous streets, and failing schools. Tell them that you support mental health services for children.
www.invisiblechildren.org
Posted by Mike T at May 2, 2005 7:50 PM
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