Jay Winsten

What are the ingredients for success in pro-social media campaigns?

This holiday season marks the "21st Birthday" of the U.S. Designated Driver Campaign, which was created by the Harvard School of Public Health's Center for Health Communication in partnership with Hollywood's creative community and leading TV networks. This...

Police say that Anthony Galluccio, a Massachusetts state senator and former mayor of Cambridge, MA, was "pretty drunk" in the early hours of October 4. Galluccio walked into Basha Café in Cambridge sometime after 2:00 am. The night manager gave him something to eat, and offered to drive him home....

A truly remarkable initiative was kicked-off this week in Abuja, Nigeria. If successful, it will protect millions of young children and pregnant women whose lives are at daily risk of being snuffed out by a single bite of a malaria-carrying mosquito. There are 57 million cases of malaria in Nigeria...

For those of us old enough to have lived through John F. Kennedy's assassination, Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas is forever seared in our memory as the place where JFK died. This week, Parkland made news of a better sort, announcing plans to shut down an on-premises McDonald's fast-food outlet....

Nicholas Kristof hit the nail on the head in his New York Times column last week when he wrote about the failure of many humanitarian groups to package and market themselves effectively to build public support and generate essential funds. There have been some exceptions to this dismal record,...

Sometimes it's crystal clear how to make a positive difference in the world--like helping a homebound neighbor.

But for millions of Americans who are looking for meaningful ways to donate their time or money, it's not necessarily obvious what choices to make. Some options--becoming a mentor to an...

During the transition in 1992, I worked with then President-elect Bill Clinton to videotape a PSA promoting the use of designated drivers. Rahm Emanuel helped make it happen. The PSA was taped in Little Rock, and ran on all the networks in the lead-up to New Year's Eve. Clinton continued...

A while ago, MTV produced a remarkable video diary of Angelina Jolie traveling through Africa with economist Jeffrey Sachs to support Sachs' mission to eliminate extreme poverty in the next 20 years through the work of the nonprofit Millennium Promise. Footage from that diary is featured in a

Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times tells a profoundly disturbing story about a Cambodian peasant, Nhem Yen, who was living with her family in an area of the Cambodian jungle that was infested with malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Her oldest daughter, twenty-four and pregnant with her second child, contracted the disease....

Yesterday's announcement by the Motion Picture Association and the movie Ratings Board that tobacco smoking will be a factor in determining a film's rating--along with sex and violence--is an important victory for public health. The most important consequence of this decision is that it creates an incentive for filmmakers to...

Has the tobacco industry discovered gold on YouTube?

If you want to gaze at the face of evil, check out this video. It's one of 63,000 videos on YouTube that deal with "smoking." This one features a young woman, Taylos87, who offers detailed instruction to young girls on...

In Africa, malaria-carrying mosquitoes are active mostly at night, and a $10 insecticide-treated bed net can help protect a child for 5 years. Right now, something remarkable is happening in Uganda. The President's Malaria Initiative (PMI) and a coalition of nonprofit organizations are distributing 570,000 bed nets in rural...

Is the glamorization of tobacco smoking by Hollywood partially responsible for kids getting hooked on the deadly habit? A number of commentators responded to my last post on this subject with a resounding "no!"

But consider this data collected by the Sacramento Chapter of the American Lung Association:

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At a closed-door meeting in Hollywood on Feb. 23, public health experts from Harvard and Johns Hopkins presented scientific evidence of the harm to children associated with the depiction of tobacco smoking in movies. The meeting was convened by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Approximately 40 executives attended...

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has been traveling in Ethiopia with Jimmy Carter, where the former president's Carter Center has been tackling several devastating--but preventable-- infectious diseases like river blindness and malaria that destroy millions of lives. Kristof writes that Carter is "leading a private war on...

They don't mess around with designated drivers at Carlie's Lounge in Pinellas Park, Florida. Bar owner Vincent Romano allegedly tossed Gary Maujean, Jr. from the bar for serving as a designated driver for his wife and friends. Apparently, the tab on his Cokes wasn't big enough, though the rest of...

Not only will Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith be the first African-American head coaches to lead their teams to the Super Bowl this Sunday, they also are mentor and mentee. Dungy gave Smith his first NFL coaching job when they were both at Tampa Bay. Smith considers Dungy his mentor,...

The world could use some good news right about now, so here's my contribution.

You've probably never heard of Scott Neeson. He was enjoying a successful Hollywood career with senior marketing positions at 20th Century Fox and Sony. On a visit to Cambodia, he came upon Stoeng Meanchey, a notorious...

Two of the most influential people on earth, Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, have stepped forward as champions of public health, and in the process have catapulted the public health agenda--preventing disease, promoting health--to the pinnacle of global visibility.

When you combine Bill Clinton's worldwide stature, drive and personality...

If they build it, will we come? NBC has gone out on a limb, green-lighting a sitcom starring John Lithgow and Jeffrey Tambor as two aging boomers who set out to reinvent their lives and make the most of the twenty good years they hope they've got left. But will...