FluPortal.org

[el patojo / cc (usable on your site) / Flickr]

Did you know that the CDC offers podcasts on H1N1? You can find them by clicking here and then selecting “H1N1″ in the “By Topic” menu. You can also go to the search page and type “H1N1″ into the “description” box to pull up a slightly different list.

The subjects of the podcasts range from underreporting of H1N1 cases to mixing Tamiflu with liquids for your kids to an explanation of the delay in vaccine production.

Here’s a recent one promoting the H1N1 vaccine. (Click on the “play” arrow to start it.)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Stations looking to add interactive features to their website should consider giving CoveritLive a try. CoveritLive is a “live blogging” platform that can be used to host real-time conversations between stations and their online audiences. We’ve just added a new guide to using CoveritLive to our roster of web tools.

In recent years, there has been much discussion about how public media can better incorporate audiences into the content it creates. There are examples of audience assisted journalism, crowd sourcing of information and ideas, and harnessing user-generated content. All valuable, but often overlooked is the simple act of providing regular online forums where users can interact in real-time with each other and with station personnel. CoveritLive offers an online approach to audience participation that mirrors the broadcast call-in show.

I do want to note that CoveritLive is one of many tools that allow online publishers to interact with their audience in real time. But in researching the available options and talking with stations that use CoveritLive, it became clear that it is the best fit for most public media outlets at this time. You can expect more innovation and new services to emerge in this space, and I would like to point out two others to keep an eye on.

Google Wave – Google Wave is still in limited beta release, but many media outlets are experimenting with using this new communication and collaboration platform. The Red Eye, a free Chicago daily paper (owned by the Chicago Tribune) has begun to use Google Wave for daily live chats with its audience. After a few successful trials, they now conduct a 30 minute public wave each weekday, usually around the topic of that day’s cover story.

Disqus – Another service to watch is Disqus, a commenting platform you can integrate into your station website. It offers real time updates to comment threads and has the ability to connect related conversations from various pages on your site that may otherwise live in isolation of one another. A service like Disqus has the most potential for stations websites that have an active commenting user base.

If you have any questions about getting started with CoveritLive (or the other tools mentioned), feel free to contact the FluPortal team. We will be happy to lend a hand.

The CDC has been promoting its travel tips for avoiding H1N1 over the holidays. If you’re reporting on H1N1 spreading through family gatherings or on strategies for beating the virus while on the road, these creative-commons photos are available to illustrate your stories.

LexnGer an “Editor/Publisher of cheapeats restaurant guides” in Toronto, took this picture to prove that she was, as instructed, taking her Tamiflu with food.

[LexnGer / cc (usable on your site) / Flickr]

Also from Toronto: Danielle Scott captured this Ontario government poster advocating the H1N1 shot.

[Danielle Scott / cc (usable on your site) / Flickr]

Futureatlas.com caught this kid boasting a “flu fighter” sticker — presumably a reward for submitting to a flu vaccine.

[futureatlas.com (of www.Futureatlas.com) / cc (usable on your site) / Flickr]

[FluPortal will be back with new posts on Monday, January 4th.]

We posted some swine-flu street art a while back — and an exchange with one of the stencil artists. So here’s a follow-up photo (also with a creative-commons license, allowing you to use it for free). This one is from snowy Vienna three days ago, where Christian Mayrhofer (or Phreak 2.0) captured a testy pig with a Dalmatian named Archie.

[Phreak 2.0 / cc (usable on your site) / Flickr]

Archie is apparently a pro at posing with street art.

[FluPortal will be back with fresh posts starting Monday, December 28th.]

Flu.gov has put out an H1N1 timeline. It highlights, naturally, government interventions, but it’s a handy review of the progress of the virus in the U.S.

Here’s a screen shot of the beginning of the timeline:

[Flu.gov]

You can click through it month by month. It begins back in March when the virus was discovered in Mexico; it ends with a plea that everyone get vaccinated, pointing out that “community/herd immunity” will be the best defense against a third wave of swine flu.

Back in October, we featured a student-made H1N1 PSA video — and noted that Vimeo and YouTube are worth scouring every now and then for swine-flu creativity — either as something to report on or to feature on an H1N1 page. Here are two recent vids that caught our eye.

Two days ago, Emily Adamson posted this report about University of Montana students modifying the rules of beer pong — to protect themselves from H1N1. She made it for “360 News”; it’s not clear what “360 News” is, but perhaps it refers to U of MT’s “U 360 Advanced Broadcast Reporting” class?

[Emily Adamson / Vimeo]

Buzziebeeteacher is an English teacher in Gettysburg, PA. She’s also a theater “expatriot” who loves technology — and recently she combined these two passions to create a couple of videos encouraging students to get the H1N1 vaccine.

In this one, she becomes rhyming “Nurse Buzz” to remind students when and where to line up for the vaccine:

[buzziebeeteacher / Vimeo]

(You’ll find Nurse Buzz’s earlier video about filling out vaccine paperwork here.)

[Richelle Antczak McCuen]

Richelle Antczak McCuen wears at least three hats at WCBE in Columbus, OH. She’s the membership director, a substitute local music host, and the webkeeper. As webkeeper, it fell to her to put together the station’s H1N1 page. Here’s how she did it in two days flat, while still taking calls for her other jobs at ‘CBE.

Richelle told me that her GM, “always on the lookout for cool opportunites for the station,” suggested that a swine-flu page could engage and serve the station’s community. He pointed her to FluPortal as a guide.

Before starting in on any of the technical stuff, Richelle decided she “had to know what was important to the user… not just what would fit in the page layout.” To figure that out, she asked herself what she, as a new mom, would want to see on the page. She decided to provide basic H1N1 information, links to more in-depth resources, and good local tips and hotlines. She recognized, too, that self-updating widgets would keep the page from looking static — and that people like to learn things through social-media channels (like Twitter) that “aren’t 100% educational and are enjoyable to use.” Richelle said that this process of sifting through the options was “really a huge portion” of the two-day project.

Next she built the page. Richelle says she’s “not a web designer — in no way a master.” She considers herself “more of a maintenance person” who knows basic html and javascript but no complicated CSS. This, she said, was enough to let her create her page using the simpler tips from FluPortal. She felt she was able to match the “level of sophistication that people expect” from WCBE’s site. She was also able to give the page the feeling of change and momentum she was looking for (by using news widgets).

As a final check, Richelle ran her H1N1 page by WCBE’s news team “because they’re on the front lines of the story.” The newsroom gave its content a thumbs-up.

If you too are at a small station with limited resources, but you’d like to build an H1N1 page, check out our get-started guides. Richelle felt they “gave [her] the tools” she needed.

PLoS — the Public Library of Science — offers a free online collection of articles on flu: PLoS Currents: Influenza. The collection’s goal is “the rapid exchange of scientific results and ideas” to, as Harold Varmus put it, “accelerate scientific discovery.”

This flu collection as well as all of PLoS’s journals are open access — meaning you can distribute or reproduce articles with attribution. Most of the journals are peer reviewed, but PLOS Currents: Influenza is simply moderated by flu experts. Anyone can upload an article — or even just a data set — to the collection at no cost. Once an article has been moderated, it’s fully available to the public.

Susan Jones, a senior editor of PLOS Medicine, explained to me that the Currents: Influenza moderators donate their time to vet articles for “robust science.” The site elaborates: they “make a rapid determination as to whether a contribution is intelligible, relevant, ethical and scientifically credible, but will otherwise not impose restrictions on the nature, format or content of the contributions.” Moderation isn’t as muscular an evaluation as peer review, but it allows PLoS to disseminate articles extremely quickly. This speed is important for following and understanding a disease as fast moving as flu. It’s also an advantage for journalists wanting to stay on the leading edge of H1N1.

You can search PLoS Currents: Influenza using keywords, and you can read any comments that have been written about an article. You can also see how many times an article has been downloaded and how many “stars” (one to five) readers have given it.

If you prefer to stick to peer-reviewed articles, you can try keyword searches on PLoS Biology (an “H1N1″ search turns up these articles) or PLoS Medicine (where an “H1N1″ search brings up these papers). Or try searches on any of the other peer-reviewed PLoS journals avaliable through the PLoS homepage. You can also browse the article-level metrics for any journal article. These tell you how frequently a piece has been cited, downloaded, viewed, blogged about, commented on, etc. Jones explained that these metrics, taken together, can “give clues to which papers are attracting attention” — and therefore which ones might include interesting story leads or angles. She also pointed out that another way to assess the quality of an article is to check it “for a really good explanation of what was done and why.”

The H1N1 special, “Anatomy of a Pandemic,” is scheduled to air tonight on public television stations nationwide. For a video preview of the documentary, a co-production of WETA and PBS NewsHour, check out our blog post from last week.

We reached out to the production team to discus the challenges of covering an evolving story like H1N1. We asked Larry Klein, the producer, director and writer of the documentary, if the focus of the production had to be adjusted to respond the shifts in the H1N1 story. Klein says, “The main focus of the program – is the country prepared to take on a major flu outbreak – remained pretty much our guiding principle throughout. What we didn’t know was when the flu would actually strike the areas we had prepped for filming, and more importantly, how virulent the disease would be for most people.” Klein adds, “This one has so far remained fairly consistent although there are spot outbreaks – like the one in the Ukraine – that may point to a changing (for the worse) virus. There is also the fact that pandemics like this one often come in waves. Although it looks like things may be slowing down right now, the outbreak could pick up steam for another round in the late winter or even the spring. But we knew that at some point we had an airdate to meet and that we would need to report on the status of the pandemic before we knew all the answers.”

Betty Ann Bowser is Health Correspondent for the NewsHour and will be hosting the Insider Forum, an online component of the production. Viewers go the the NewsHour’s Insider Forum website and submit questions to two leading health experts. Tuesday evening, one day after the broadcast, the Forum will go live online and the experts will answer the submitted questions.  Bowser says, “The Insider Forums are a way for our audience to get information we may have missed in our online or TV coverage. And the experts have more time to give context and depth in their answers.”

Asked if there are any under-reported angles in the H1N1 story, Bowser points to the public understanding about who should receive a vaccination. “Some people think they are immune after being sick. And some experts say they are. But most of the experts I’ve talked to insist even if you’ve been ill you should still be vaccinated.”

Bowser urges caution in journalists covering the apparent lessening of the pandemic. We need to keep reminding the public that this thing is not over and a new wave could be coming. Klein adds, “As one of our experts said: ‘If anyone tells you they know what will happen with this pandemic, don’t believe them.’”

Check your local listings to find the broadcast time of “Anatomy of a Pandemic” on your public television station.

photo: WETA/Courtesy Production Group Inc.

On December 14th, public television stations will be airing Anatomy of a Pandemic, a co-production of PBS NewsHour and WETA, Washington D.C. The hour-long documentary, hosted by the NewsHour’s Ray Suarez, will explore the science, politics, and social impact of the H1N1 pandemic. The program will assess the severity of the threat posed by H1N1 and evaluate our nation’s readiness for widespread health crises.

Online, the Anatomy of a Pandemic website offers flu science resources, H1N1 news updates, and videos of extended interviews with health experts. Leading up to the broadcast, the public can go the NewsHour’s Insider Forum website and pose H1N1 related questions for two leading public policy experts. The forum will be taking questions from now until noon on December 15, 2009. Answers to the public’s questions will be posted later on the evening of the 15th.

Anatomy of a Pandemic is scheduled to air December 14th on PBS stations nationwide – check local listings for times. Here’s a video preview of the special: