We just aired our July 2010 episode on rural health in Northern California, featuring stories from people living and working in towns all along State Route 299. The map features photos and interviews with people who are in the radio broadcast, plus many more we couldn’t fit into the hour.

I grew up fly fishing on the rivers and streams in this far northern section of California, and have spent some time in many of these towns. It was great to hear host Scott Shafer and reporter Sarah Varney file stories from Weaverville, Trinity Center and Fall River Mills, among other places.

Even greater, in my opinion, is that rather than talking to “experts” on rural health issues from the comfort of a radio studio, we took the show on the road and did all the reporting in the field. I think the show really worked, and the map helps bring a sense of place to Scott and Sarah’s terrific reporting.

With talk bubbling up lately about whether people who are underwater should just treat their home as a bad investment and simply walk away, we decided to take a look at Case-Shiller values over the last 20 years or so. Some markets appear to have climbed back toward their previous peak values – enough that your home might still be a good long-term investment. Other markets look like they have a long way to go, especially if you bought close to the peak.

In researching the topic, I found that a lot of commentary was ignoring the fact that you might live in a recourse state, where the lender can claim more than just your house if you walk. So the map also shows which states allow recourse, and which don’t.

You can find the full activity (discussion, links, embed code) here. If you just want the interactive that I embedded above, you can grab it here.

In the opening segment (embedded below), I spoke with a group of high school students from San Francisco about how they think about health: what are they concerned about? Who do they trust for info? How would they raise a healthy teen?

With the help of partner stations and freelance reporters, I also collected answers to the same questions from teens across California, and built an embeddable Flash interactive to showcase their responses. I think the content turned out well. Hopefully, we can use the module as a template for further projects.

Widgets for each activity are available for you to embed on your site. You can also embed the entire activity, like below.

Check out the You Decide website for all our activities. You can subscribe to the RSS feed to get an email notification every time a new activity is published.

The redesign gives us some added features, as well. Most notable to the user, you can now click through to the segment level, meaning that you can bookmark or otherwise share links to a specific segment of a show. You can also leave comments and embed segment audio on your own website. The program archive is also much more functional, with episode listings and descriptions.

The idea is to create a conversation among our authors and the general public, via comments and follow-up posts, that will inform Washington as to what kind of health care reform California wants and needs. The June 18 episode of Health Dialogues will be on the same topic, and will be informed by the online discussion. When the project wraps up on July 1, we’ll deliver a summary of the discussion and ideas to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus and Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Chairman Edward Kennedy.

So if you’re interested in health care reform, take a few minutes to read through our first round of posts. You can rate posts and leave your comments. Our authors will be contributing new posts every week for the next two months, so make sure to check back again later to follow the evolving conversation.

Healthy Ideas: Californians Weigh In on Health Care Reform

From the announcement:

The PASS Awards (Prevention for a Safer Society) is the only national recognition of print and broadcast journalists, TV news and feature reporters, producers, writers, and those in film and literature who try to focus America’s attention on our criminal justice, juvenile justice, and child welfare systems in a thoughtful and considered manner.

The show was produced live from San Francisco General Hospital, and featured interviews that I recorded with host Scott Shafer at San Quentin State Prison. The first hour focused on inmate health care, and the second hour focused on juvenile justice and mental health.

Hour One: Inmate Health Care

Hour Two: Juvenile Justice and Mental Health

Cheers to everyone involved, including our web producers and editors, interactive developers and, of course, our dedicated newsroom staff.

Now, where’s my congratulatory hot dog?

I had the fortune of producing the radio news on KQED this morning. We had two reporters in D.C. who called in to give us a feel for what it was like on the ground.

This first piece of audio is this morning’s The California Report. Scott Shafer called in from the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol, as thousands of people streamed into the area for the inauguration ceremony.

And here is part of the 6:30am Northern California news break, with this morning’s host, Sarah Varney, speaking with reporter Tamara Keith, who was also on location in D.C.

These reports aired a couple of hours before the ceremony, so there wasn’t much in the way of hard news to report. But it was fun to get a sense for the anxious atmosphere.

UPDATE: Check out this series of photos of the inauguration from around the world.