By Howard Gleckman
As a longtime print journalist, I find myself in the surprising position of writing not one but two blogs. I hope that the first, which covers a range of issues surrounding long-term care for the elderly and other adults with disabilities, has become a valuable resource for caregivers, policy wonks, and providers.
These issues are woefully under covered in the mainstream press, where editors tend to knock down stories as “too depressing.” But long-term care is an important subject that raises lots of complex and interesting policy issues.
How did I come to this? Until about five years ago, I was a traditional journalist who had spent 20 years in the Washington bureau of Business Week. For much of that time, I covered two beats that seemed disconnected but were not – tax and budget policy and health policy. As we’ve all learned in recent months, tax and health policy turn out to be closely linked. And no discussion of fiscal policy ever ends without circling back to Medicare and Medicaid.
In the late 1990s, I also developed a personal interest in elder care (my wife and I cared for both her dad and mine). I wrote a few pieces for the magazine, but Business Week was the wrong venue for that kind of writing.
In 2006, I took a leave from Business Week to take a Kaiser Family Foundation fellowship. That made it possible for me to start a book on long-term care which was published in 2009 as “Caring for Our Parents” by St. Martin’s Press. Unlike many books on this subject, “Caring for Our Parents” is neither a how-to book nor a personal memoir. Instead, I used the personal stories of people receiving care and their caregivers as a window into the flaws of the long-term care system.
My blog, at www.caringforourparents.com, started as a way to market the book.
These days, I’m lucky enough to continue to live in the space between fiscal policy and health and long-term care policy. I never returned to Business Week but did get a job at The Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington.
There, I created a blog for the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center called TaxVox. I spend about 25 hours a week on that one, which pays well and is also reposted at Forbes.com and the Christian Science Monitor’s website. I spend the rest of my time researching, writing and speaking on long-term care policy and, of course, writing my caringforourparents blog.
I post about once a week – more if news happens – and seem to have developed about 1000-1500 regular readers who find me at my own site or at Forbes.com, which also reposts this blog. My audience includes long-term care professionals, researchers and policy types, and some family caregivers. I get it into the broader social media world through tweets, Facebook, and a bunch of Linkedin user groups.
For example,on Aug. 6, I posted on how the media’s practice of hyping alleged cures for dementia distracts from the more immediate need to learn how to best care for those who already have the disease. The Obama Administration’s new war on Alzheimer’s is heavily focused on prevention and cure and does little to support those who are caring for those with dementia or to improve clinical practice. I got the idea for the piece after reading a blog post by Dr. Al Power, but was able to combine his thoughts with what I know about the White House’s dementia initiative. The piece has already gotten a lot of attention among advocates, physicians, and on Capitol Hill.
The blog fills an important niche – there are very few of us writing about long-term care policy in any medium. I try for a mix of posts on financing (long-term care insurance, Medicaid etc.), delivery issues (integrated care, home and community based care, nursing homes and residential care facilities, and caregiver issues (both family caregivers and paid aides).
I make very little money directly from the blog. Forbes.com pays a pittance but I don’t accept ads, nor do I play the social media marketing games such as paying for Facebook “likes,” Twitter followers and the rest.
But there is a nice indirect financial payoff. The blog probably still helps sell a few books but mostly generates speech requests and freelance writing jobs.
As we all know, the social media world can be a huge time-sink and it takes some discipline to manage my workload. But I like the feedback I get from the blog. Besides, after all those years at editor-heavy Business Week, it is nice to publish stuff that hasn’t been ground into generic magazine mush.
Howard Gleckman is the author of two blogs, www.caringforourparents.com and www.taxvox.org, as well as the book “Caring for Our Parents.” Now a resident fellow at the Urban Institute, he was a senior correspondent in the Washington, D.C., bureau of Business Week.
