AHCJ’s Freelance Center market guides are all up to date. New ones have been added monthly. Each guide includes information about fees, editor contacts, pitching advice, quotes from at least one of the publication’s editors, and, where available, a link to the publication’s written pitching guidelines.
Since my last blog post about the latest freelance market guides, I have added four new and revised market guides (The Philadelphia Inquirer, Brain & Life, Spectrum and Wired).
The Philadelphia Inquirer is looking for pitches for the health section of its Sunday print edition. “Anything in health is fair game,” said Kelly O’Shea, deputy health editor. Local focus around Philadelphia and South Jersey is necessary; a photo opportunity is always a plus. The editors place a premium on featuring a patient in the story. Another approach is to pitch a profile about a prominent researcher in the geographic area. The fee averages about $300 for a 1,100-word story.
Brain & Life is published on behalf of the American Academy of Neurology. The publication pays experienced writers $1 per word for print and digital articles, which range in length from 800 to 2,500 words. Readers are people with neurologic disorders and family members. The print magazine can be found at neurologists’ offices and you can subscribe to it for free. Neurologic disorders that are covered include “everything from autism and Alzheimer’s to Zika,” Managing Editor Mary Bolster said. Most story ideas are generated internally, so freelancers don’t need to pitch a specific idea. Rather, they should introduce themselves through email.
Fees at Spectrum, the leading source of news, analysis and expert opinion on autism research, start at $1 per word. The audience for this digital magazine is primarily autism researchers. Nevertheless, “our articles need to be written in language that is accessible to lots of people because a lot of other people do read our content,” including families and clinicians, Features Editor Ingrid Wickelgren said. “We are looking for scoops, trends stories, explainers and feature articles that will interest our core audience of autism researchers.”
Freelancers can pitch ideas for features, which average around 5000 words and run on the website and sometimes in the monthly print magazine, or ideas for the digital science section. Science section stories range in length from 800 to 1200 words. Fees are competitive and are negotiated with each writer. Feature stories are narratives; science section stories are based on recent, but not breaking news. Every Wired story “has technology, science, or innovation as one of its key variables,” according to Wired’s pitching guidelines.
If you would like pitching instructions from a particular publication or you have a contact for a publication that you think I should approach, please email me at freelance@healthjournalism.org.
