Fees: The freelance fee for news features at JAMA, a medical journal, ranges from $1 to $2 per word, depending on the journalist’s level of experience and the nature of the article. Features, which appear both online and in print, can range in length from 800 to 3,000 words.
Submit to: Jennifer Abbasi, director of JAMA Medical News, at jennifer.abbasi@jamanetwork.org.
Website: jamanetwork.com/channels/medical-news
Owner: American Medical Association
Readership demographics: The core audience is general physicians as well as researchers. Patients also read the journal’s features.
Frequency of publication: New content is published weekly.
What they look for in a pitch: Features take a variety of formats, including narrative features, summaries of a single study (called “Quick Uptakes”), and stories about a study published in one of JAMA’s other 12 journals (called “News from the JAMA Network”).
Here are some examples:
- Regular features
- Quick Uptakes
- News from the JAMA Network
Pitches should be relevant for physicians who are practicing medicine and for patients. Abbasi said she looks for stories that are backed up by studies that have a broad impact on health or are of great interest to people.
“Anything exercise-related and diet-related tend to be of interest to our readers,” she said.
Abbasi is also looking for coverage of research around practice-changing medicine. In addition, she is interested in stories that report on and analyze health trends; in the past, she has run stories about the upswing in interest in probiotics. And she welcomes pitches on current events related to health and health care, like the recent news about bird flu.
Putting a lead and nut graph into the pitch would be welcome, but not essential. Freelancers should include clips and a short bio.
“I want people who can interpret translational studies, the more science-heavy studies where biological mechanisms will need to be explained,” said Abbasi. And she wants writers who are meticulous. “One of the things I encounter all the time is a loosey-goosey [approach] with how things are phrased, and that does not fly at JAMA.”
Do the editors accept pre-pitches: “I am totally fine with a very short pre-submission,” said Abbasi. A few sentences will suffice.
Biggest mistakes the editors see in pitches: Abbasi finds that most writers understand how to craft feature pitches for JAMA.
Lead time: Abbasi tries to acknowledge the receipt of each pitch immediately, but it can take a few weeks for her to respond in full. Once accepted, a feature can take weeks to months to be published, depending on its length and the work involved.
Best place to break in: “It would be rare that I would assign a 3,000-word feature to someone I have never worked with,” said Abbasi. She recommended pitching a Quick Uptake to start.