Cross posted, with permission, from Mary Lou Fulton's blog The Media Optimist:

As the 2010 Census gets underway, journalists need a more sophisticated understanding of people over 65 to report on them accurately, says Steven Wallace, a University of California-Los Angeles public health researcher.

"There is no 'The Elderly,'" he told California Endowment Health Journalism Fellows at a Los Angeles seminar on Sunday. "The elderly are a complex mixture of individuals. It's important to realize there are different groups and profile the diversity within them."

Depending on who you ask, an "informavore" is either really smart and well-connected or overly wired and confused.

Jody Ranck is an informavore of the first kind. An independent consultant and pricipal investigator at the Public Health Institute in Oakland, he is working now to create the Public Health Innovation Center, which seeks to reign in the power of social media and mobile tools to "re-mix" practices in public health.

On a Saturday morning, four people wait outside the front door of a converted mini-mall in Rosemead, CA. Ten minutes later -- the doors open exactly at 9 a.m. -- the two women and two men file into the lobby to sign in for their appointments at the Asian Pacific Family Center. The front desk is covered with pamphlets in the many languages of the significant Asian immigrant populations of the San Gabriel Valley. The clinic operates in Vietnamese, Mandarin, Cantonese. Cambodian Chiu Chow, Japanese and Korean, serving over 1,700 immigrant Asian Pacific outpatient families per year.

Shorter is better. Seven seconds on the Internet is an eternity. Human voices can add an emotional component to a story in a way that text never does.

From top-10 lists to video clips to narrated slideshows, journalists are adding multimedia components to their print and broadcast stories to add depth to their storytelling, get more “bank for the buck” out in the field and create new audiences and distribution channels for their content.

At 7 p.m. on a Friday night, the waiting room of LAC+USC Medical Center's emergency department is crowded and will get worse as the hours tick by. This public safety net hospital sees, on average, 450 emergency patients each day, some for ear infections, others with gunshot wounds.