Nothing like a healthy diversion
Carla K. Johnson, formerly a reporter at The Spokesman-Review, now lives in Chicago and writes about health for the Associated Press.
Here are some of her favorite sites:
Covering the medical industry
http://medlineplus.gov
http://ksjtracker.mit.edu
A good place to start researching diseases and treatments is http://medlineplus.gov, a project of the National Library of Medicine. The site offers a medical encyclopedia, surgery videos, slide show tutorials and more than 700 health topics from A (abdominal pain) to Z (zoonoses).
Before I interview researchers in Europe, I refer to the World Clock offered at www.timeanddate.com to make sure I’m not calling them in the middle of the night. The site also can calculate how many days, minutes and seconds you have to wait until your birthday.
To keep tabs on what other health writers are doing, I visit two sites regularly. Gary Schwitzer, a health journalism professor at University of Minnesota, created www.healthnewsreview.org, which uses a star system to rate news stories about medicine while offering instructive analysis. Also collecting and commenting on medical news stories is the Knight Science Journalism Tracker — http://ksjtracker.mit.edu — from the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Just chillin’
I never miss “On the Media,” the weekly radio show from New York Public Radio, because I download the podcast here http://www.onthemedia.org.
For fun, I read fake news at www.theonion.com, download the latest crossword at http://www.nytimes.com/pages/ crosswords/index.html and enter the cartoon caption contest at http://www.newyorker.com/ captioncontest.
I belong to three organizations that communicate using the free “Groups” function at www.yahoo.com.
I rely on www.snopes.com to debunk the viral urban legends e-mailed to me by friends. (You know who you are!)
Smart gifts
For the person who has everything, I recommend a gift certificate from www.kiva.org. With the gift, your friend can make a microloan to a small business in the developing world.