Photo by Christina Morillo via pexels.
After a two-month hiatus from working on the market guides, I’m back to ensuring AHCJ’s existing pitching advice from various publications is current.
I have reviewed most of the market guides created or updated in 2021 to confirm editors quoted are still working at their respective publications. Where that is the case, those guides are now marked “Checked for accuracy July 13, 2022.”
Where editors have changed, in most cases, I have interviewed new editors and revised the guides. In total, three updated guides — for The BMJ, Next Avenue, and Spectrum — and one new guide for AARP have been posted on the AHCJ website this month.
There are now a total of 29 market guides, with more coming every month. Please email me with suggestions of publications you would like to see added.
New market guide
AARP pays freelancers $1 per word for articles between 800 and 1,400 words in length. Its health channel publishes “innovative and engaging content that can help Americans 50 and older make informed decisions on how to live the healthiest life possible,” according to its guidelines for writers. Editors ask that writers be careful to avoid language that stigmatizes age, including terms such as “seniors” and “the elderly.”
Updated market guides
The BMJ is a publication from the British Medical Association and is editorially independent from the association. The BMJ publishes online stories on a rolling basis for its audience of physicians and scientists, who are mostly from the United Kingdom, the U.S., India and China. “We publish rigorous, accessible, and entertaining material of interest to doctors worldwide,” according to its submission guidelines, and pays freelancers between $480 to $600 for feature articles, at current exchange rates. “I generally prefer stories that could be ‘evergreen’,” said Mun-Keat Looi, International Features Editor.
Next Avenue pays freelancers between $350 and $500 for reported stories that typically have three sources. Next Avenue editors ask freelancers to use the website’s submission form to submit pitches. Editors put the topics they are interested in having freelancers explore at the top of the form and revise that list of topics every two months or so. The categories in Next Avenue’s health channel are Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, cancer, chronic pain, fitness and exercise, food and nutrition, health care, heart disease and stroke, mental health and well-being and sexual health.
Spectrum is the leading source of news, analysis and expert opinion on autism research. It pays freelancers a minimum of $1 per word for articles aimed at autism researchers and health care professionals. The digital publisher runs enterprise stories, profiles, explainers about autism concepts and news features. “One of the most recent news features we did was about COVID infection during pregnancy, and a bunch of researchers who are looking into whether that has any connection to autism,” said Managing Editor Nicholette Zeliadt.
