Nature Medicine Freelance Market Guide

Fees: Nature Medicine pays freelance journalists $1.25 a word, and in some cases that is negotiable. Features run between 2,000 and 2,500 words. News articles are up to 1,000 words.

Submit to: Benjamin Johnson, magazine editor at Nature Medicine. ben.johnson@nature.com.

Website: www.nature.com/nm

Owner: Springer Nature, a publisher of journals covering science, technology, medicine and social sciences.

Readership demographics: Nature Medicine publishes original research and reviews and perspectives from scientists. News and features are published in the magazine section of the journal. Readers are biomedical and clinical researchers, including scientists working in labs, clinicians working in hospitals and physician scientists.

Frequency of publication: All content goes online when ready. The print edition is published monthly.

What editors look for in a pitch: For news and features, there are three main types of content, Johnson says. One is science, in which a reporter explains a scientific discovery for readers. “We don’t cover individual papers or individual discoveries as news,” he says. “It would be more a broad topic.” An example is an article examining what is next for mRNA vaccines. The second bucket is about the scientific research process, and these stories typically cover regulation, funding and legal issues around clinical trials. The third bucket is science and society. “This could be about diversity, equity and inclusion related to health,” Johnson says. “It could be about the lives of scientists and the kinds of challenges they are having.”

The story idea should be new and sufficiently broad to capture the interest of a good number of the journal’s readers. Pitches should be brief, with a single paragraph explaining the story idea. Freelancers who have never written for Nature Medicine should include a link to their professional website. “We tend to go with people who have already written for Scientific American, Nature, National Geographic or Stat, who have experience writing for a specialist audience,” Johnson says. But it is not a hard and fast rule, he adds.

Most common mistakes editors see with pitches: “The most common one is to pitch a single paper or scientific discovery and asking to write a news article on that,” Johnson says. “That is a nonstarter for us. We would invite a scientist to write about this.” Another common mistake is to pitch a story about research in animal models. “The research has got to be about humans.”

Lead time for pitching: Editors meet weekly, typically on Thursdays. “We would aim to get back to the freelancer within a week,” Johnson says. It can be sooner for a timely news story. “For a feature, which is what we mainly publish, we would normally give the writer a month, and once the final version is agreed upon with us and the writer, it is normally a month before it is online.” It can be another week to a month before it appears in print. News moves much quicker. Editors would normally expect the copy within a week, and it could be published online within a couple of days.

Best place for a freelancer to break into Nature Medicine: The journal has a stable of freelancers and doesn’t take that many new people. Johnson recommends first timers pitch a news story about the scientific research process. “We would like to publish more news,” Johnson says.