Writers: Sign up for the Freelance PitchFest

David Bronstein is the editorial director of hospital publications at McMahon Group, which includes titles in anesthesiology, surgery, oncology and gastroenterology. He also is the executive editor of Pharmacy Practice News, a monthly publication that covers key trends in clinical research and staffing/operations. Topics include infectious disease, cancer, critical care, medication safety, Joint Commission compliance, bar coding and other drug distribution technology. Bronstein has been a medical writer and editor for 25 years.

Bronstein is responsible for assigning news articles for Pharmacy Practice News, the No. 1 read monthly newspaper among U.S. hospital pharmacists. He also welcomes pitches for his group’s other newspapers, which cover infectious disease, GI disorders, pain medicine, anesthesiology, oncology and general surgery. We are always seeking highly skilled freelance writers to cover conferences in the above specialty areas. Freelancers are expected to file daily from the meetings (average article length, 400-500 words). For Pharmacy Practice News, coverage also includes timely features. Topics include the use of bar coding and other technology to promote patient safety; strategies for preventing costly medication errors; clinical controversies in drug therapy; tips for complying with Joint Commission requirements; and profiles of hospitals that have succeeded in making pharmacists an integral part of the patient-care team. Pitches should be one to two paragraphs in length, explain why the topic is timely and include one to two sources to be interviewed. Writing samples should be provided.

Daniel J. Denoon is senior medical writer for WebMD, researching and reporting daily news stories and health features. Before joining WebMD in 1999, he was senior editor for CW Henderson publications and a freelance medical writer, editor, and communications consultant. DeNoon began his career as a daily newspaper reporter. He became a full-time medical journalist in 1985. A charter member of the International AIDS Society, he was founding editor of the newsletters AIDSWeekly and VaccineWeekly and is the author of AIDS Therapies, a 1,500-page encyclopedia of AIDS treatments and vaccines. He is the recipient of several professional awards, including a commendation from the Centers for Disease Control for his work during the 2001-02 bioterror attacks and three Sigma Delta Chi awards from the Society for Professional Journalists.

WebMD publishes a wide variety of health content, created to empower our users to make healthy decisions. We create five to eight news articles a day, multiple lifestyle and topic-specific features a week, along with reference content, blogs, tools, special reports, conference coverage, and content for WebMD the magazine. We have an in-house team of writers, editors and medical editors (MDs). While we generate ideas in-house, we also work with a large team of freelancers, and we do accept ideas for news and feature topics. Our lead time for assignment varies from weeks to daily. We are always looking for fresh ideas and top-notch writers, from regions all over the U.S., and internationally. Ideally, with the limited time we have at the pitchfest, a resume and a summary of your specialties and preferred style of content, would be ideal. Specific ideas can come later.

Matthew Heimer is the deputy editor of SmartMoney, the Wall Street Journal’s monthly magazine. He oversees the magazine’s feature articles and consumer finance coverage, including coverage of health and medicine. He was SmartMoney’s health and medicine beat reporter from 2001 to 2004.
 
SmartMoney’s health-care coverage fits within a larger mission of helping our readers make better decisions about spending and investing. We focus less on breakthroughs in science, and more on how the economics of medicine intersect with the patient’s experience. Recent articles have focused on the nuances of doctor-drug rep relationships; the ethics and logistics of negotiating discounts on medical services; and the financial challenges faced by retirees and layoff victims too young to qualify for Medicare. We assign many of our articles in-house, but we have room for pitches from freelancers – especially those with proven experience converting jargon to English! Ideas should be relevant to a broad, national audience and should represent the kind of story you can bring in at 2,500 words or less. For a quick link to some of our recent stories, you can visit http://www.healthjournalism.org/awards-winners-detail.php?id=426.

Diana J. Mason, R.N., Ph.D., is editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Nursing. AJN has published numerous special reports, including the September 2008 Professional Partners Supporting Family Caregivers in partnership with AARP and funded by the John A. Hartford and Jacob and Valerie Langeloth Foundations. Mason is also co-producer and moderator of Healthstyles, a weekly radio program on WBAI-New York City.

The American Journal of Nursing is the oldest and largest circulating nursing journal in the world and has received awards from AHCJ, the American Society for Healthcare Publication Editors, and Association for Women in Communications, among others. Published since 1900, AJN seeks to promote excellence in nursing and health care through publication of clinical information, original research, and news analysis providing nursing perspectives. We’re looking for writers who can interview nurses, provide resources for clinicians and patients, and synthesize current study findings in a friendly, accessible tone for a broad-based nursing audience. Hot topics include food safety, health care reform, infectious disease, breaking medical research findings, the effect of the economy on nursing and health care, women’s health, and controversies in treatments.

Meredith Matthews is senior editor of Current Health 1 and Current Health 2, health magazines for preteens and teens published by Weekly Reader. She has served as managing editor of Medicom International, publisher of the trade journals Managed Care Interface, Long-Term Care Interface and Product Management Today. Her freelance work includes articles on men's health and prevention and wellness for Westchester Magazine. She is a member of AHCJ and the Society of Professional Journalists.

Current Health is a pair of magazines published by Weekly Reader and primarily used in school health and physical education classes. Current Health 1 is geared toward students in grades 4-7 (upper elementary and middle school) and Current Health 2 is targeted at grades 8-12 (middle school and high school). We supplement teachers' other resources and give them a fresh new way to cover health topics. The approach is fun and informative. Readers gain the knowledge they need to make smart decisions. Each magazine publishes eight issues per school year, and we work off of an editorial calendar so we generally make assignments rather than accepting pitches. We generally turn to freelancers for the six feature stories in each issue, which cover physical health, decision making, fitness and nutrition, mental health and emotional well-being, relationships, and public health; sometimes both magazines will share stories. We seek writers who can generate lively, well-grounded stories; possess the ability to write for a preteen/teen audience; understand how to craft a smart and fun-to-read magazine feature article; and can expertly blend the voices of real teens and kids, as well as health experts.

Laurie McGinley is the executive editor for news at Kaiser Health News, a new nonprofit health care policy news service by the Kaiser Family Foundation. She joined KHN in October 2008. Between September 2007 and October 2008, McGinley was deputy bureau chief for global economics at The Wall Street Journal’s Washington bureau. Prior to that, she was a reporter and editor at the Journal for more than two decades, and spent much of her time writing and editing stories on health care.

Kaiser Health News is a new health policy service being started by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan foundation. KHN is looking for in-depth and newsy stories on a variety of issues, including the health-care delivery system (stories about doctors, hospitals, patients and other participants); the financing of health care; how efforts to overhaul the system might affect consumers and others; Medicare, Medicaid and other major federal and state efforts; immigrants' and children's health; IT, medical costs. We encourage a variety of formats, including narratives and analyses. The stories will be published on a new Web site to be launched later this spring, and in interested news outlets.

Christian Millman has been the health editor for the past six years at Better Homes and Gardens, a magazine based in Des Moines, Iowa, with a circulation of 7.6 million. He began his foray into health journalism at Rodale Press in 1997 and, except for a brief return to the business beat at daily newspapers, has been unable to extricate himself since.

Better Homes and Gardens is a leisure-time magazine and that is also reflected in the health section. What that means in practical terms is that we don’t do rare and scary diseases (or many diseases at all, really, focusing instead on prevention and wellness), we don’t take an alarmist tone, and we don’t write anything that doesn’t offer a solution. We’re looking for ideas that can be written in 150 to 1,500 words in the reassuring, friendly tone of someone who’s been there too. The biggest challenge most health writers face in pitching us is understanding the difference between health news pieces and health service pieces. We specialize in the latter. If a reader can’t put down the magazine and act on the item she just read, it won’t work for us. And she will act on it – we have 39 million readers who have an intense interest in health. Topics that are perennial favorites include interesting takes on fitness activities, nutrition solutions, emotional and mental wellbeing, family health (especially teen issues), and women’s health. We pay promptly and we pay well and pretty much never kill anything (I can think of only one example in many hundreds of assignments over the years). If you ask around, you’ll find we’re easy and fun to work with. In return, we ask for all rights to health stories. I don’t like it either but no one asked me.

Ivan Oransky, M.D., is managing editor, online, at Scientific American. Previously, he was deputy editor of The Scientist. He has served as editor in chief of Praxis Post, an online magazine of medicine and culture. He has also written for publications including The Boston Globe, the Lancet, Slate and The Wall Street Journal Online. He teaches medical journalism at New York University and the City University of New York, and was first elected to the AHCJ board of directors in 2002.

Scientific American's Web site is aimed at readers broadly interested in science. We like pitches that are truly original, that deal with emerging or cutting-edge research, or that bring new insight to issues with which our readers may already be familiar. We tend to cover straight news in-house, although for the right pitches we make exceptions. We're very open to pitches for features, and always have a need for more smart and skeptical coverage of the environment and energy issues. If you can package content in a more web-friendly way (eg a slideshow), you've got a leg up. I'd strongly recommend freelancers spend some time looking carefully at our online offerings to find something that makes sense. Follow us on Twitter (@sciam), sign up for our RSS feeds at http://rss.sciam.com/ScientificAmerican-Global, or our daily e-mails at sciam.com/daily. Here are two examples of stories that freelancers wrote for us:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=bear-hibernation-science
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=10-nobel-snubs

Colleen Paretty is executive editor of WebMD Health. She edits and manages WebMD the Magazine, the national print extension of the consumer health website, WebMD.com. Her background as a consumer health journalist includes editing, writing, and project managing for a variey of consumer health websites and magazines, such as Time Inc. Health, Health magazine, BabyCenter.com, Consumer Health Interactive, Penguin Putnam, Chronicle Books and numerous health media publishers, consumer health organizations, and universities. She is the chair of the San Francisco-Bay Area AHCJ chapter.

WebMD publishes a wide variety of consumer health content, created to empower our users to make smart decisions about their health. For the Web site, we create five to eight news articles a day, multiple lifestyle and topic-specific features a week, along with reference content, blogs, tools, special reports, and conference coverage. WebMD the Magazine is produced 8 times a year, is distributed to 90% of U.S. doctors' office waiting rooms, and publishes several features and departments in each issue. We have an in-house team of writers, editors and medical editors (MDs) but we also work with a large team of freelancers and we do accept ideas for news and feature topics. Our lead time for assignments varies from weeks to daily. We are always looking for fresh ideas and top-notch writers, from regions all over the U.S. and internationally. The magazine is specifically looking for freelancers with experience writing consumer health feature stories for national lifestyle/womens'/health magazines. Ideally, with the limited time we have at the PitchFest, a resume and a summary of your specialties and preferred style of content is best; please save specific pitches for later.

Julia Sommerfeld has been the senior editor of msnbc.com’s Health section since 2006, developing the site’s vision for health coverage and leading a team of writers, editors and producers. Before joining the site, she was a medical reporter at The Seattle Times, where she was a Pulitzer finalist in investigative reporting for a series on sexual abuse by health care providers. 

Msnbc.com is the No. 1 news site on the Internet with 40 million unique visitors. Health is a consumer-focused section that features breaking medical news, trend stories, expert columns, blogs, multimedia reports and interactive tools. The section is looking for well-formed pitches on new research, controversies in health care, emerging trends and service features (as well as the occasional oddball water-cooler story) from professional health writers. Msnbc.com is looking for self-reliant writers who are available to quickly turn around a story, as well as craft more in-depth pieces. Story ideas must be fresh, grabby and relevant to a mainstream national audience. 

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