By Michele Cohen Marill, AHCJ Freelance Committee member
Journalism may be our passion, but it’s also our business. At this Lunch & Learn, freelancers agreed that leveraging knowledge and sources on a topic is a vital part of building that business. At the same time, our contracts often deem our stories “work for hire,” which means the publication owns the copyright. Lunch & Learners shared how they are able to turn a story idea into multiple assignments while avoiding potential conflicts.
- Look for a new audience. A story for a professional or trade publication could be reoriented for a consumer publication, or a local story could be broadened for a national outlet. That could also mean writing one story that focuses on research while another highlights a patient experience. Lunch & Learners agreed that while they might use material from a previous interview, they would include new sources and would never reuse quotes or verbatim content from a prior story.
- Make it personal. If you have a personal connection to a subject – for example, an experience seeking care for yourself or a loved one or navigating the healthcare maze – you can write a first-person essay for one publication while taking a news-oriented approach for another. Or one story could focus on the researcher’s journey of discovering a new treatment approach while another simply highlights research findings.
- Be transparent. Your editor may not care that you wrote a similar story for a non-competing publication. One writer even included the link to the prior story in her query — and got the assignment. Writers also said they would inform their sources that they planned to use quotes from their interview for a story for a different publication.
- Think ahead. Some writers plan to pursue more than one angle on a story before they begin queries and interviews. That enables them to cover different issues in their interviews and to plan for adjacent ideas that don’t conflict. If a publication asks for notes or transcripts as part of fact-checking (which is uncommon but does occur), writers said they would provide the notes from the portion of the interview related to the story they wrote – excluding material that doesn’t apply to that story.
- Read your contracts. Your client often owns all the rights to your work, which means they can publish it online and even re-purpose it into other formats. Some Lunch & Learners said that they insist on retaining control over their work and would not sign contracts that give away all rights – at least not without a time limit on those rights, such as six months or a year. Writers have also walked away from publications that demand they not write for certain competitors. Negotiating contracts can be difficult, but if you have a compelling idea that the publication wants, you might be able to get favorable language.
- Lean into your expertise. Our value lies in our knowledge about health and medicine. Writing frequently about the same topic (such as aging, infectious diseases, or vaccines) can make you a go-to journalist when a publication is looking for that content. Fellowship programs often look for journalists who have focused on a specific field, such as cancer or genetics. So, it’s in our best interest to look at each interview and story as a wellspring for new (but related) ideas.
