Welcome to PitchFest!
We’ve invited editors from some of the top magazines and newspapers to meet you in Los Angeles for PitchFest at Health Journalism 2025! Bring your best ideas to the AHCJ Freelance PitchFest and discuss your ideas one-on-one.
Attendees can reserve up to THREE appointments with the editors below. PitchFest will be in-person only.
You must be registered to attend HJ25 before you can reserve PitchFest appointments. Once you’ve registered, keep an eye on your inbox — you’ll receive a private sign-up link on the morning of April 17 (or shortly after you register).
New this year: To help ensure a smooth scheduling experience for everyone, we’re introducing a dedicated PitchFest Change Day on May 8. This one-day window gives you the opportunity to adjust your initial schedule — so you can fine-tune your appointments all at once, without the stress of juggling changes over time.
Jump to: PitchFest Editors
Strategies for success
Remember
Five Rules for PitchFest
1. Show up. If you fail to show up for any of your appointments, you will not be allowed to sign up in advance for next year’s PitchFest. Additionally, be aware that the booked editor will have your name, potentially harming your reputation with that publication for years to come.
2. Show up on time. We run on time and we run like clockwork. If you are late, you forfeit your pitch. We also hate to waste the editor’s time, so if you’re late, and we see an empty seat, we will fill it with another writer.
3. Prepare carefully. We’ll post blurbs from editors describing what they want, so read those to customize your pitch to what each editor needs for their publication. For example, news editors won’t want to hear a pitch for a feature. Study the publication to make certain your pitch is a good fit.
4. Respect the time limit. When you hear the one-minute warning, wrap it up. When you hear time called, please get up, thank the editor and tell them that you will follow up with an email.
5. Understand the limits. Please recognize that attending PitchFest does not guarantee you a sale. It does guarantee you an opportunity to pitch face-to-face with editors who are extremely difficult to access, even by email.
PitchFest Editors
Here are the editors waiting to hear your pitches:
Tami Abdollah
Tami Abdollah is a senior editor at Noema Magazine. She was previously a national correspondent at USA TODAY focused on the inequities and disparities of the criminal justice system, among other subjects. A native Angeleno, Abdollah served as a senior reporter who helped launch a tech and business journalism startup called dot.LA, which was co-founded by Zillow founder Spencer Rascoff. Abdollah previously served as a national security/cybersecurity reporter for The Associated Press in its Washington, D.C., bureau. Prior to that, she was AP’s law enforcement reporter in its Los Angeles bureau. She has also worked for the Los Angeles Times and the L.A. NPR affiliate KPCC, and has written for the Wall Street Journal and The Daily Beast while living and traveling abroad.
Noema Magazine is looking for deeply reported narrative features with fresh ideas that tackle some of the 21st-century’s foundational issues. Please check out our website and top 10 pieces from the prior year, to get a sense of our stories.
Betsy Agnvall
Elizabeth “Betsy” Agnvall is the Health and Healthy Living Editor at aarp.org. She has worked as editor of Staying Sharp, AARP’s award-winning brain health platform and as a health editor at the AARP Bulletin. She wrote for the Washington Post Health section for six years has deep subject matter expertise in health and health journalism.
Allison Arieff
MIT Technology Review | Freelance Market Guide
Allison Arieff is Editorial Director of Print for MIT Technology Review. She previously Editorial Director of the urban planning and policy think tank, SPUR and was a regular columnist for the New York Times’ Opinion section from 2007-2020. She was the Editor in Chief of Dwell magazine from 2001-2007.
John Corrigan
John Corrigan is the deputy health, science and environmental editor for the Los Angeles Times. John joined the Times in 2024 after serving as a senior editor in the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal, where he oversaw coverage of business influence and lobbying, the U.S.-China trade war, and technology policy. Before that he was the China business editor for the Journal, based in Beijing, where he spearheaded a groundbreaking series on China’s surveillance state that won the Loeb Award for International Reporting.
John previously held senior editing positions on the business and entertainment desks of the L.A. Times. He was project editor for “The Wal-Mart Effect,” winner of the 2004 Pulitzer in National Reporting, and led the paper’s investigation into Toyota’s sudden acceleration problem, which was a Pulitzer finalist in 2010.
He is a former board member of the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing, and served as a Loeb Award judge for six years.
Earlier in his career, John held reporting and editing positions at the Los Angeles Daily News, the Orange County Register and the Los Angeles Business Journal.
The Los Angeles Times has a large health, science and environmental team, and a limited freelance budget. So when we commission freelance work, we want it to be something special – for example, scoops and stories with an investigative bent. It would also have to be a story that one of our own reporters doesn’t have the time, ability or expertise to do. Virtually any health topic can be a story, but specifics need to be discussed with an editor and a pitch memo is recommended. We pay $800 for a fully reported story, and we have paid up to $1,200 in some instances.
Nichole Currie
WHYY’s The Pulse | Freelance Market Guide
Nichole Currie is a producer for WHYY’s “The Pulse.” She enjoys crafting compelling narrative-style audio and applying community journalism skills to her work. Before her current position, she served as a community reporter who focused on race, education, and social justice within a community journalism project named the Germantown Info Hub. She also served as an assistant producer for the Info Hub and other freelance audio projects.
The Pulse is a one-hour health, science, and technology radio show and podcast produced at WHYY in Philadelphia. The show airs on more than 150 NPR member stations.
If you aren’t sure what we’re looking for, here are our guiding principles:
- Empower people to take control of their health. We aren’t here to market gadgets or push fad diets. We are in the business of giving people the tools to understand their options and their rights.
- Put people first. Our show humanizes complicated issues by allowing reporters and their subjects to be themselves and speak in their authentic voices.
- Answer questions people didn’t even know they had. One of the best sources for great storytelling is our own experience. If you find yourself wondering “why?” odds are our audience is, too…whether or not they know it.
- Surprise. If the audience can predict the next story…we’re failing.
- Celebrate with skepticism. Science and technology are fertile ground for amazing breakthroughs in our understanding of the human condition. We celebrate those moments, but we do so with the caveat that “science is a moving target.”
- Take the audience on a journey. The point of departure is ignorance, the destination is understanding. And, if the choice is between interviewing someone in their office at Pennsylvania Hospital and in a hot-air balloon over the Rio Grande…you know the rest.
- Lastly, keep it weird! The fringe is where the action is.
Eva Emerson
Knowable Magazine | Freelance Market Guide
Eva began her career shooting DNA into plant cells and cloning retinal genes from fish. It just got better from there. A graduate of the UC Santa Cruz science writing program, she has explained science to cartoon writers for “The Magic School Bus” TV show, written articles about the wild corners of Oahu for the Honolulu Weekly, created scavenger hunts for preschoolers at the California Science Center and interviewed Nobel laureates at the University of Southern California. Before joining Knowable, she was editor in chief of Science News Magazine. She loves offering free medical advice.
Renée Fabian
Renée Fabian is currently senior pet health editor for GoodRx Health. She’s worked for more than 10 years as a journalist and editor across a range of health, mental health, well-being, and pet health topics.
In the past, Renée has written for publications such as California Health Report, The Washington Post, Healthline, and GRAMMY.com. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Southern California and a master’s degree in psychology from Antioch University Los Angeles.
Josh Fischman
Scientific American | Freelance Market Guide
Josh Fischman is a senior editor at Scientific American magazine, leading coverage of
medicine and of science policy from Washington DC. He has cohosted the popular
podcast “Your Health Quickly.” Right now, Scientific American is looking for exciting
health stories that showcase advances in science and benefits for patients and families.
Josh’s work has been selected for the Best American Science Writing 2012 anthology,
has won the Blakeslee Award for excellence in medical reporting, and been a finalist
twice for the National Magazine awards. He has written cover stories for National
Geographic, U.S. News & World Report, and features for Time magazine and the Los
Angeles Times. As an editor, Josh has been fortunate to work on many stories that have
won top journalism prizes. Josh has been the editor-in-chief at Earth magazine and
deputy editor-in-chief of Chemical & Engineering News, supervising worldwide
coverage. He has directed technology and science coverage for The Chronicle of Higher
Education, was a senior writer and editor at U.S News &World Report, deputy news
editor at Science, and a senior editor at Discover. Josh has been interviewed about
science and medicine on NPR, CNN, MSNBC, BBC World Service, the Weather Channel,
and he has been a master of ceremonies on stages at the USA Science & Engineering
Festival and the Consumer Electronics Show. Josh is the author of a leading medical
education guidebook, The U.S. News & World Report Ultimate Guide to Medical Schools
(Sourcebooks, 2006).
Joyce Frieden
MedPage Today | Freelance Market Guide
Joyce Frieden oversees MedPage Today’s coverage of Washington and health policy. Her beat includes Congress, the Supreme Court, the White House, and federal agencies and trade associations that are involved in health care.
She began her career in medical journalism 38 years ago at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, working as a news editor for Physician’s Management, Modern Medicine, Hospital Formulary, and several other medical magazines.
She previously served as editor of Clinical Endocrinology News, and her byline has appeared in other physician newspapers including Internal Medicine News, Family Practice News, and ObGyn News. Her freelance clients have included UPI, WebMD, Reuters Health, Drug Topics, the Washington Post, and Washingtonian magazine. She is the recipient of a Jesse H. Neal award for editorial excellence and a Vivian Award from the National Press Club, and is an AHCJ board member.
Tia Ghose
Live Science | Pitch Guidelines
Tia is the managing editor and was previously a senior writer for Live Science. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, Wired.com and other outlets. She holds a master’s degree in bioengineering from the University of Washington, a graduate certificate in science writing from UC Santa Cruz and a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Tia was part of a team at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that published the Empty Cradles series on preterm births, which won multiple awards, including the 2012 Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism.
Anastassia Gliadkovskaya
Fierce Healthcare | Pitching Guidelines
Anastassia Gliadkovskaya is a senior writer at Fierce Healthcare covering health equity. She has covered COVID-19, the opioid epidemic and NYC’s public healthcare system for newsrooms like Fortune, KFF Health News and The CITY. Anastassia holds an M.S. in investigative journalism from Columbia Journalism School and an advanced certificate in public health from CUNY. Her work has been recognized nationally in journalism awards.
Rena Goldman
Everyday Health | Freelance Market Guide
Rena Goldman is a journalist, editor, and content strategist with over a decade of media experience covering health, wellness, mental health, and small business. She has written on a variety of topics, including clinical conditions, lifestyle changes, fitness, new products, food, trends, and sleep.
Curious about what it takes to live your healthiest life in a modern society, Goldman is passionate about empowering readers with the information to make educated decisions about their health. She has spent years interviewing clinicians and working with them to ensure content is medically accurate. This experience has helped her build in-depth knowledge in the health and wellness space.
Goldman’s work has been featured in numerous online health and lifestyle publications, including Everyday Health, Health.com, Healthline, Business Insider, Psych Central, and U.S. News & World Report.She’s based in Los Angeles, where she enjoys good vegan food, trying new workout trends, and hiking with her dachshund, Charlie.
Jessica Goodheart
Capital & Main | Pitch Guidelines
Jessica Goodheart is a senior editor focused on inequality at Capital & Main, a Los Angeles-based publication that also covers climate change. As reporter for Capital & Main, she has covered low-wage work, the housing crisis, business and politics, earning recognition from organizations like the California Journalism Awards, the LA Press Club and the SABEW. Before returning to journalism in 2017, she served as research director for the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, a nonprofit advocacy organization in LA. Goodheart holds a BA in history from Columbia College and an MA in urban planning from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Dan Gorenstein
Dan is the Founder and Executive Editor of Tradeoffs, setting the vision for the organization’s journalism and strategy. Before Tradeoffs, he was the senior health care reporter at Marketplace and spent 11 years at New Hampshire Public Radio. He got his start in journalism at the Chicago Reporter, an investigative journal that examines race and class disparities in the Chicago area. Dan’s work has earned numerous national awards, including the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi investigative reporting award. He is based in Philadelphia. Tradeoffs is interested in developing a pipeline of reporters/producers/editors who are knowledgeable in health policy and experienced in human-focused, narrative storytelling. People who are comfortable with both print and audio format is a plus, but not mandatory.
Miles W. Griffis
The Sick Times | Pitch Guidelines
Miles Griffis is a journalist and writer who covers Long COVID, science, and LGBTQ+ issues, based in Los Angeles. He developed Long COVID at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and has used his lived experience to report on the disease for a variety of publications. He’s written about how Long COVID affects wildland firefighters, the shortcomings of Long COVID Clinics, and the forgotten “magna carta” of HIV/AIDS activism.
Griffis will be accepting pitches along with The Sick Times’ managing editor Betsy Ladyzhets. Please consider wearing a mask while meeting with The Sick Times’ editors.
Liza Gross
Inside Climate News | Pitch Guidelines
Liza Gross is an award-winning reporter for Inside Climate News based in Northern California. She is the author of The Science Writers’ Investigative Reporting Handbook and has long covered science and the environment, conservation, agriculture, public and mental health and environmental justice with a focus on the misuse of science for private gain.
Prior to joining ICN, she was a magazine editor for the open-access journal PLOS Biology, a reporter for the Food & Environment Reporting Network and produced freelance stories for numerous national outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Discover and Mother Jones. Her work has won numerous awards, including an Izzy Award, AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award and awards from the Association of Health Care Journalists, American Society of Journalists and Authors, Society of Professional Journalists NorCal, SF Press Club and Association of Food Journalists.
Rachel Grumman Bender
Rachel Grumman Bender is the health editor for Yahoo Life. Previously, she held health editor positions at YouBeauty.com and Cosmopolitan magazine. She has also contributed to numerous publications including Self, Women’s Health, Prevention, Everyday Health, the New York Post and the New York Times.
Rachel is looking for feature articles, such as compelling personal essays and “as-told-to” stories, as well as bigger picture/cultural zeitgeist-focused health, nutrition, and wellness trend pieces.
Diana Hembree, M.S.
MindSite News | Freelance Market Guide
Diana Hembree, M.S., MindSite News Co-Founding Editor, is a journalist who has won more than two dozen national awards, including a first-place Investigative Reporters and Editors award, a Jesse Neal Award for Magazine Editing, a National Press Club Award for Consumer Reporting, a Folio Gold Award and a shared Polk Award.
She served as a senior editor at Time Inc. Health and its physician’s magazine, Hippocrates, for four years, and as a reporter and news editor at the Center for Investigative Reporting for more than 10 years, where she worked with many national publications and with CBS’s “60 Minutes”and PBS/Frontline, where she served as associate producer of Frontline’s “The Great American Bailout.”
She has written for Forbes Online, Columbia Journalism Review, Southern Exposure, the Washingon Post, the Center for Care Innovations, where she also works, and many other outlets.
Betsy Ladyzhets
The Sick Times | Pitch Guidelines
Betsy Ladyzhets is the co-founder and managing editor of The Sick Times, a nonprofit news site chronicling the Long COVID crisis. Prior to The Sick Times, she ran the COVID-19 Data Dispatch, a newsletter and blog that provided news, resources, and original reporting on COVID-19 data. She was recently a journalism fellow at MuckRock, where she contributed to award-winning and impactful COVID-19 investigations.
Ladyzhets will be accepting pitches along with The Sick Times’ executive editor Miles W. Griffis. Please consider wearing a mask while meeting with The Sick Times’ editors.
Judy Lin
California editor Judy Lin oversees KFF Health News coverage of California and leads ethnic media partnerships in the state. Judy was assistant editor at CalMatters, where she directed the award-winning California Divide project, a collaboration among multiple newsrooms focused on poverty and income inequality. She reported on Sacramento policy and politics for more than a decade for The Associated Press and The Sacramento Bee. Early on, she covered Detroit City Hall for The Detroit News. She’s a long-standing member of the Asian American Journalists Association and graduated from the University of Southern California.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism. We share our content for free with other news organizations and publications, so your work gets amplified. Though our newsroom is headquartered in D.C., we monitor health policymaking at all levels. We like stories about major health programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid, and we’re interested in health costs, patient protections, reproductive health, racial equity, trust in health information, public health, and more. We’re interested in timely and newsy enterprise pieces that capture how health policies affect people’s lives, but we’re also open to Q&As, features, and we always welcome a good scoop. Our freelance rate starts at $1.50 a word.
Justin Madden
Justin Madden is a multimedia journalist with experience in breaking news and covering a variety of topics. He uses social media and video tools on his cellphone — it’s an extension of his arm. A pen and pad is always nearby, though. Justin loves to work with people and roam to find interesting, compelling stories that raises the consciousness of readers, viewers and tweeters. He is fueled by passion and a desire to tell meaningful stories. His experience includes working as a digital content producer for WEWS, the ABC affiliate in Cleveland; an editor for The Associated Press in New York City; and a senior editor for McClatchy.
Rosie Mestel
Knowable Magazine | Freelance Market Guide
Rosie Mestel has been a science journalist since 1991. After completing a Ph.D. and a postdoc in genetics, she abandoned lab work to attend the UC Santa Cruz science communication program. She served as West Coast Correspondent for New Scientist for seven years, then joined the Los Angeles Times, where she wrote and edited for 14 years in a variety of roles. Rosie was Chief Magazine Editor for Nature in London from 2013 to 2016. Shortly after returning to Los Angeles, she was hired by Annual Reviews and worked with Eva Emerson in imagining what Knowable Magazine might be. Rosie is Knowable’s Executive Editor.
Macon Morehouse
Science News | Freelance Market Guide
Macon Morehouse joined Science News in December 2014. As news director, she draws on more than 30 years of journalism experience, from covering Congress at Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report to an eight-year stint in daily newspapers — first at The Charlotte Observer and then at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where she was part of the team covering the 1996 Olympic Games, to working in People magazine’s Washington, D.C. bureau, covering presidential campaigns, celebrity fly-ins, as well as medical breakthroughs as the magazine’s national medical correspondent.
Prior to joining Science News, she was senior editor at National Geographic Explorer, science-focused classroom magazines for elementary and middle school students. Her love of science news stories and drive to bring those stories to a broad, smart, curious audience brought her to Science News.
Ivan Oransky
The Transmitter | Pitch Guidelines
Ivan Oransky is editor in chief of The Transmitter, Distinguished Journalist in Residence at New York University’s Arthur Carter Journalism Institute, and co-founder of Retraction Watch.
Tony Ho Tran
Tony Ho Tran is the senior technology editor at Slate Magazine. He was previously the senior editor of innovation at The Daily Beast and a staff writer at Futurism. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.
Gina Vitale
Chemical & Engineering News | Pitch Guidelines
Gina Vitale is an editor at Chemical & Engineering News and the cohost of the science history podcast Inflection Point. She was previously a reporter covering advances in biotech and pharma, including cancer vaccines, molecular glues, and contraceptives for men. Her work has appeared in C&EN, NOVA Next, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and more.
Rob Waters
MindSite News | Freelance Market Guide
Rob Waters is the founding editor of MindSite News and is an award-winning health and mental health journalist. He previously worked as a staff reporter or editor at Bloomberg News, Time Inc. Health and the Psychotherapy Networker.
He was a contributing writer to Health Affairs and his articles have also appeared in the Washington Post, Kaiser Health News, STAT, the Atlantic.com, Mother Jones and many other outlets. He was a 2005 fellow with the Carter Center for Mental Health Journalism. His reporting has focused on mental health, public health and science. In 2021, his mental health reporting was honored by the Association of Health Care Journalists, the National Institute for Health Care Management, and the Society of Professional Journalists, Northern California.
Pamela Weintraub
Aeon+Psyche | Pitch Guidelines
Pamela Weintraub is the senior editor at Aeon+Psyche and founding co-editor of OpenMind Magazine, as well as occasional editor of print titles in health and psychology for a360 Media.
She was previously editor-in-chief of OMNI, executive editor of Discover, and consulting editor (features) at Psychology Today. Weintraub is also author or co-author of 16 books and have widely published stories on psychology and health across national media. She recently won a Pulitzer Center grant for OpenMind.
She is especially looking for deeply-reported long-form profiles as well as psychologically-themed, shorter-form personal essays and “as-told-to” pieces reflecting life’s turning points and changes.
Sarah Wright-Killinger
WebMD/Medscape | Freelance Market Guides: WebMD & Medscape
Sarah Wright-Killinger is Vice President, U.S. News and Features at WebMD and Medscape. With over 20 years experience in digital media, she has worked at the Los Angeles Times, Yahoo, and Disney. While her heart has always been in editorial, she has also held product and project management roles.
Wright-Killinger is a mentor at WriteGirl, a nonprofit that empowers teen girls through writing. She received her degree in journalism from Ithaca College and her MBA from Pepperdine University.
Carmel Wroth
NPR’s Shots | Freelance Market Guide
Carmel Wroth is a senior health editor for NPR’s Science Desk, where she guides digital strategy for the health team and conceives and edits digital-first, enterprise stories and packages.
Formerly, she founded and managed Side Effects Public Media, a public radio collaborative covering public health in the Midwest. Wroth also served as an editor at Yoga Journal for five years.
