Covering long-term care often stems from personal experience — Washington Post reporter Christopher Rowland’s mom had dementia.

“It really opened my eyes to … the difficulty of managing your parents’ decline in their old age when they have dementia and they need a lot of help,” he said. “There’s no guidebook, there’s nowhere to go on the internet to find one-stop shopping on how to do it.”

Rowland, a business reporter focused on the healthcare economy’s effect on patient health, costs and privacy, spoke to NPF Long-Term Care Crisis Fellows about what it means to report on the business of health.

‘Everybody’s [long-term care] experience is different.’

“There’s so many different factors that go into it. Socioeconomic, geographic, the economy. And then personal resources, government insurance, everything about it is messed up and broken. And so actually that’s what I like to cover is things that are broken, systems that are broken, and then translate down to how it affects normal people.”

Work your way in for sources.

“Right away, you don’t say, ‘How’d you become homeless?’ But you work in slowly. And then once you gain their trust and you’re talking and you have a rapport, then they’ll just start spilling everything. Like how they became homeless, why they’re estranged from their children, how much their social security check is every month, why it doesn’t go far enough to give them a lifeline.”

When Rowland was working on a story about people getting evicted out of long-term care, he learned that there’s nowhere for them to go if they don’t have enough money. Rowland decided to go to Phoenix and report on the unhoused senior population.

“I was astonished that the number of wheelchairs and walkers just in the streets and the homeless encampments all over the place. And then it was just a matter of talking to the folks and getting their life stories as much as possible and picking the right subjects.”

“Most people, the fact that you even care about them and you want to talk to them, they love that.”

Figure out what the systemic problems are that you can sell your editors on, he said.

“How the market and the capitalist system are failing, how the regulations are failing, how the policymakers are failing, why there’s inertia and lack of reform in these spaces. And then you can weave it together.

“Like I did with this senior housing thing, it’s like, okay, there’s a national systemic problem, write about that big broad in your nut graf in your context section, but then you’re zeroing in at that local level and you’re getting that human experience on the street.”

He also said that The Post has a large number of online subscribers who are over 50, but they’re after younger readers.

“So this is right in the wheelhouse of a lot of our readers, but it’s also in the wheelhouse of the next generation, the children. … The earliest boomers are now turning 80, and half the population in residential long-term care in the United States is 85 and above. So, this wave is all coming through. There’s huge demand, and people are scrambling for money, they’re scrambling for strategies, how to deal with it.”

Editors also worry about traffic, he says, even if they say they’re just after the good stories. But in Rowland’s experience, these stories get a lot of traffic – from high page views to comments with personal stories.

“It’s high reader interest, multi-generational, plenty of horror stories, systemic failure. If your editors won’t bite on that, they won’t bite on anything.”

Solutions-based stories can make an impact.

Look at what communities have done successfully or unsuccessfully to help the long-term care crisis.

“The community has come together in Phoenix to recognize the plight of these homeless seniors and to help them, give them the extra support they need in a residential facility. They’re taking an old hotel and turning it into a facility,” he said.

“But the best we can do as journalists is put the solutions out there on the page, make sure our editors give it good treatment, do it the best job we can of writing it, and making it compelling and human. And then hope for the best that the policymakers will make change. But beyond that, we just got to keep writing about it.”

Access the full transcript here.

The America’s Long-Term Care Crisis Fellowship is sponsored by AARP, which also sponsors the AARP Award for Excellence in Journalism on Aging. NPF is solely responsible for the content.