Award winner says no compromise of principles in trade pubs
Freelancer Jan Greene won a second-place award from the Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) for a story looking at options for small hospitals to survive. The article ran in Trustee magazine, a trade publication targeted at boards of directors for hospitals.
The story relays how solutions such as partnerships and mergers worked for other hospitals.
“In reporting, I’m looking to go beyond the standard advice and think about the real questions a board would face, the real political and financial challenges of deciding whether to affiliate with a bigger organization,” Jan says. “It’s a service piece with a to-do list, but you can still raise bigger picture questions in that context.”
Her story says:
“Grinnell [Regional Medical Center] is facing an increasingly common scenario. More than a third of America’s hospitals are rural, but in the past decade, 65 percent of those have chosen to become critical access.
“That leaves much of the rest as tweeners, existing in an increasingly hostile economic climate. It’s hard to borrow; it’s hard to get physicians to live in small towns, and it’s hard to afford staff with the expertise to deal with such complexities as Medicare’s RAC program that will force hospitals to document their billing practices to an unprecedented degree.”
AHCJ judges said, “Rich reporting and lucid writing take this story beyond the specialized realm of its audience and show how hospitals are grappling with a problem that should be of concern to the general public.”
Today’s Tip: You don’t have to compromise your journalistic principles to work for the trades, Jan says.
“As many freelancers know, the trade press is a varied beast. I do straight journalism, and so do the publications I work for,” she says. “There’s plenty of good work being done at sponsored publications; as a freelancer, you just have to keep your eyes open and draw the lines where you need to.”
Here are some tips for breaking into trade magazines as a freelancer.
