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Al's Morning Meeting

Story ideas that you can localize and enterprise. Posted by 7:30 a.m. Mon-Fri.

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A dozen sites
I'm diggin'

1. "She's like a moose going after a cabbage." A fun piece watching the Palin speech with locals in Alaska.

2. Track Hannah with these storm tools I created on Ning.

3. Stay on top of Hannah with this site that includes radar, satellite, tracking maps, warnings and more.

4. The coolest storm tracking site I have seen in a while.

5. The site watches TV and Web mentions of candidates. It also monitors Tweets and more.

6. Instead of scheduling meetings by e-mail, everybody can work out a time and date online.

7. Here are tons of GREAT tools that will help you find anything on flickr.

8. Vloggerheads fights back against YouTube chaos.

9. YouTomb is where videos go after they're booted off YouTube.

10. The evolution of voting in America is shown by interactive mapping.

11. I have never seen anything like this amazing "Swan Lake" performance. [Flash]

12. This is my current home page.

All of my Diggin' sites are saved on Poynter's del.icio.us page.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Al's Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and other materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as original concepts and analysis. When the information comes directly from another source, it will be attributed and a link will be provided whenever possible. The column is fact-checked, but depends on the accuracy and integrity of the original sources cited. We will correct errors and inaccuracies when we become aware of them.

Five Father's Day Story Ideas

Here are some story ideas from my friends at the Journalism Center on Children & Families, a nonprofit affiliate of the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism.

I recommend you join the thousands of other journalists who get their daily and weekly updates of child/family news coverage via e-mail. I find tons of ideas there all the time. I asked the center to send me some story ideas for "Al's Morning Meeting's" readers. Here are some of the ideas they sent:

As we approach Father's Day, you might be tempted to dust off those light-hearted story ideas. But a father's presence in a child's life has far-reaching impact. For example, of the 11 million related children living in poverty, just over 50 percent lived in homes with no father present. In fact, children living in single-parent families are nearly five times as likely to be poor as children living in married-couple families. So think about using the Hallmark holiday to examine the profound role fathers hold in today’s U.S families.

Out of the picture -- In 2006, there were 12.9 million one-parent families -- 10.4 million single-mother families and 2.5 million single-father families.

Getting schooled -- A father's involvement in school is significantly associated with a greater likelihood that their children get good grades and that they enjoy school.

"Not with my daughter" -- A father's absence was an overriding risk factor [PDF] for a girl's early sexual activity and teenage pregnancy, according to a 2003 report on the topic.

Out of jail card -- Young people in father-absent families had significantly higher odds of incarceration than those from two-parent families -- and youths who never had a father in the household had the highest incarceration odds -- according to a 2004 report. See "Father Absence and Youth Incarceration," by Cynthia C. Harper and Sara S. McLanahan in the "Journal of Research on Adolescence."

(A 1994 U.S. Department of Justice report found that 39 percent of the women in prison grew up in a household without a father.)

Resources:

Census Bureau Father’s Day press release:

National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [PDF]: "Fertility, Contraception, and Fatherhood: Data on Men and Women From Cycle 6 (2002) of the National Survey of Family Growth"

National Fatherhood Initiative

National Center on Fathers and Families

Need more ideas, sources or information? Contact us ...

Posted by Al Tompkins 5:01 PM June 12, 2008

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