mediabistro.com seminar: Health Writing for Journalists

About the Course: Lose weight! Have more energy! Live longer! Just about every magazine has a health and medicine section and you can be in it. Medical and science writer Sally Lehrman will show you how to break into this market with stories tailored to magazine needs. Don't let the technical material keep you away -- Sally'll give you the tools to find the best stories, track down great sources, and translate the jargon into enjoyable, readable prose. In this three-hour seminar, you'll learn: -- How to find cutting-edge health stories --How to identify credible experts and know what to ask them --How to find appropriate patient anecdotes --How to read a medical study and identify weaknesses --How to avoid pitfalls common to novice health reporters --How to pitch health stories and identify markets ........and more! Sally Lehrman is an award-winning independent journalist who covers health policy, health care and medical technology for national consumer magazines, newsletters and on-line media. She has written for a wide range of publications including the journal Nature, Scientific American, Health, Rosie, Ms., Salon.com, the Washington Post, Stanford magazine, Harvard Health Letter, BabyCenter.com, GeneLetter.com, Reader's Digest, San Francisco magazine, SV magazine and Hotwired.com. Before starting her own business, she was a columnist and reporter at the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner. During her 13 years there she covered AIDS, biotechnology, health policy, medical technology and business. She continues to specialize in topics related to genetics, sexuality, and HIV. She also occasionally teaches courses at Stanford University and other colleges on medical reporting and newswriting, and has worked with youth organizations on their writing. Lehrman was a 1995-96 John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford. She was part of a team that received a 2002 Peabody Award for a five-part radio documentary series on the Human Genome Project. The series also won a Peabody/Robert Wood Johnson award for excellence in health and medical programming. The same group was honored by a series of awards, including the 1999 Du Pont/Columbia Silver Baton, for an earlier, nine-part series on related topics. In 2000, Lehrman received a Northern California Society of Professional Journalists feature writing award for a story on intersex births and the medical enforcement of gender. The SPJ President's Award in 2002, the Howard Dubin Outstanding Pro Member award in 1998 and an award for service to the NorCal SPJ chapter in 2001 honored her volunteer work for diversity in the profession. Lehrman serves as national diversity chair for the Society of Professional Journalists. She is a member of the steering committee for the Bay Area Media Diversity Circle, which is dedicated to promoting fair, accurate, and inclusive coverage of women and people of color in the media. She is on the advisory board for the National Center for Disability and Journalism, an organization that fosters fair and accurate portrayals of people with disabilities in the media, and the advisory board for the Independent Press Association "New Voices in Independent Publishing" diversity project. Register for this course now at: www.ersvp.com/reply/sfhealth