Prevention Freelance Market Guide

Fees: The print edition pays up to $2 per word. Features run between 1,500 and 2,200 words, and columns are between 600 to 800 words. The digital platform fee is lower, about $250 for a 750 to 1,000-word article. And the fee is higher for a longer, more involved feature running about 1,500 words.

Submit to: For print, contact either Alyssa Jung, ajung@hearst.com or Kaitlyn Phoenix, kphoenix@hearst.com. Both are senior editors in Hearst’s health newsroom. For digital, contact Senior Editor Emily Goldman, emily.goldman@hearst.com.

Website: https://www.prevention.com

Owner: Hearst, a global, diversified media, information, and service company with more than 360 businesses.

Readership demographics: “Our readers are really passionate about health,” Lisa Bain, executive director of Hearst’s health newsroom, said. “We think of them as readers who are willing to take a deep dive. They want to know the what, the why, the how. They want to know the science and the research behind a story.” Prevention readers tend to be women, and they tend to be age 30 plus, Bain said.

Frequency of publication: The print edition comes out 12 times a year. Digital content is updated multiple times a day.

What they look for in a pitch: The magazine has five sections: wellness, health, science, food and family. Freelancers are used most often for wellness, health and science. Those sections run a feature monthly, and the majority are freelanced out, Bain said. Freelancers also write for the “Natural Fixes” column, which explores new wellness treatments, and the “Does It Work” column, which examines various treatments for a particular health problem. A pitch for the magazine should explain why the idea is right for Prevention readers and why now. Pitches should be no more than two paragraphs, and should include a few sentences about the freelancer and links to three clips.

The digital platform is looking for three types of stories from freelancers: evergreen topics that show up frequently in online searches; longer feature stories that are “innovative, forward thinking and really intriguing,” Editor in Chief Sarah Smith said; and personal essays or as-told-to profiles of people living with a particular health condition or of someone who was misdiagnosed. In the pitch, editors want to see “a grabby headline, which we may change or not use, and then no more than a paragraph describing the idea,” Smith said. Freelancers should include the type of sources to be interviewed.

Most common mistakes editors see with pitches: The most common mistake is not looking carefully at the magazine, Bain said. Another common mistake is making a pitch that is too basic, like proposing a story on knee pain without explaining what is new about it, Smith said.

Lead time for pitching: The lead time for pitching print content is four months and about one month for digital.

Best place for a freelancer to break into Prevention: “A feature is really the best way to get in because we always need them,” Bain said. “As-told-to and personal stories can be the hardest for us to source on our own, and that is often the best way to get started” on the digital side, Smith added.