Fees: For features, which can run from 800 to 3,000 words, pay varies by article complexity. Medscape’s fees are project-based and are competitive with market rates, generally above $1/word. For news articles, which typically run between 500 and 800 words, rates start at $500 but, again, vary by complexity.
Submit to: David Olmos, executive director for news and features, dolmos@webmd.net, or Aurora Aguilar, executive director for editorial, aaguilar@webmd.net. Bilingual writers can contact Debbie Flapan, dflapan@medscape.net, vp for global news & features editorial. They will route the pitch to the appropriate editor.
Website: medscape.com
Ownership: Internet Brands
Readership demographics: Physicians and health care professionals around the world.
Frequency of publication: Rolling online stories.
What they look for in a pitch:
Features: Medscape is seeking timely stories about the practice of medicine, including patient-care innovations, clinicians’ daily struggles and workplace mistreatment. The publication is interested in all forms: short news features, profiles, Q&As, longer narratives, and investigative reports.
“We publish a wide range of features,” Flapan says. “So the subject matter could vary a lot, from a profile of a physician or someone who has really affected medicine to an investigative piece that digs into a database or a story that answers a question, such as ‘Why have we never had a treatment for X?’”
All pitches should include an angle relevant to physicians and other health care providers. Although not essential, a news hook is always a plus to explain why Medscape should be covering this now, Flapan says.
News: “Our staff generally is seeing everything coming out of the journals,” Flapan says, so a news pitch would have to be something that the editors haven’t heard about, for example news at a particular hospital. For example, Medscape ran a story about a hospital in Wisconsin that fired its anesthesiologists and hired certified nurse anesthetists as replacements.
Still, Medscape needs freelancers it can assign to write about journal articles and cover conferences. Freelancers should feel free to contact Flapan to let her know that they are available for these kinds of assignments. Include links to a few clips and a short bio.
Ideally, reporters will have experience writing for a clinical audience and the ability to view research with a skeptical eye. Journal-based stories will have a same-day to three-day turnaround. Conference coverage typically requires travel and requires same-day or next-day turnaround. Experience in oncology, cardiology, diabetes, neurology, and psychiatry is a plus. Medscape’s news can be more complex than news geared toward consumers. It can be assumed that readers have a foundation in basic medical knowledge. Most articles require comments from the researcher as well as an independent commentator.
Most common mistake Flapan sees in pitches: “The most common is that we have already covered it. Freelancers should search our site before pitching,” she says.
Lead time for pitching: For news, the lead time could be a day to a week. For features, the lead time could be weeks or longer, depending on the pitch.
Best place for a freelancer to break into Medscape: “News might be a little easier than features because we do more of them,” Flapan says.