Medicine
My first post-college full-time job was Project Editor for a company called Slack inc. (not that Slack). After a few months, I switch roles within the company, becoming a staff writer for one of the brand publications, HemOnc Today. 

Feature:
This story was one of my favorite projects in my entire career. The relationship between survival and financial health/wealth. One month of reporting and data analysis and something I am extremely proud of.
Frequent, effective communication may minimize ‘financial toxicity’ of cancer treatments


Mini feature:
A mid-length feature on HPV vaccination rates. I particularly recall how the best strategy for upping HPV vaccination rate was cost. The public was far more open to listening to HPV vaccination policy once they learned how expensive it was to treat and die of an HPV-related cancer.
Refocusing public narrative necessary to raise ‘alarmingly low’ HPV vaccination rates



Daily Stories:
Two of these types of stories per day

Bedside sitting improves patient-nurse communication

Many patients with terminal cancer receive aggressive end-of-life treatment

Black patients, uninsured less likely to receive chemotherapy for HIV–associated lymphoma
 
In vitro fertilization not associated with increased risk for breast cancer



How medical media works

What I call "Medical Media" consists of news for doctors specifically. This is not to say that it's not also incredibly relevant to other professionals both in and out of patient care. Indeed, nurses, PA's, NP's, Techs, and students often consume the content. It's also quite relevant to policymakers, investors, and regulators. However, the business is supported strictly by pharmaceutical or biotech device advertising. 

Medical media sites are typically free, but they require one to sign up for the content, thus triggering an opt-in from the reader. That opt-in includes very detailed data collection. The pharma companies want to know how many physicians are reading or consuming the content, for how long, and what the publisher thinks they'll consume next. The level of data collection allows the publisher, and thus the pharma company, to know things like age, gender, medical specialty, and even, in many cases, the exact name of the person. It's common for a pharma buyer to have a list of, say, 200 cardiologists that they want to get their message in front of. The media company can confirm how many of those people are subscribers, and thus sell them this incredibly detailed list of people. Why? because they want to get their message in front of those who can write prescriptions, not anyone else. The pharma contracts are so enormous that sales staff don't even consider other ad revenue models. 

However, the journalists writing the news articles are among the most ethical, standardized, and philosophically honest that I've ever been around. They could not take their profession any more seriously and strive to find research published in peer-reviewed journals and turn it into news articles adding commentary, relevance, and historical context. 

What I did
At Slack, my daily assignments were to turn two such journal articles into news stories each day. These ranged between 500 and 1,000 words. I was also to write one feature-length article and one mid-feature length article of about 2,000 words each month. The features included my own research, 5-10+ sources, and academic references. The mid-length features were typicaly multi-faceted with more sources and an additional angle or two. At HemOnc Today we covered Hematology-Oncology (cancer) during the immunotherapy boom. It was an incredibly exciting time to be in oncology as the new miracle discovery was slowly being rolled out and many, many diseases which previously had 0 chance of a cure, finally had a worthy adversary.