Work Samples Using the following links you can read or download various samples of Lee Reeder's freelance writing. All of the links to Lee's samples are on this page, so you can scroll down for all of the links and explanations, or click on the bold titles immediately below if you are only interested in getting to certain types of writing or media. I do not post ghostwriting samples or disclose identities of my ghostwriting clients. However, a few of those clients allow me to provide samples of their work to non-competing prospects, which I will do on request. Hospital Clinical Quality Promotional Report Photography (Note: Some articles are in html format and some are Adobe Acrobat PDFs. To open a PDF, you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader. This application should already be incorporated into your browser software. If it is not, click here to download Acrobat Reader.) Get
a Job! As a freelance writer and editor, I have served as a correspondent for our local newspaper, the Crestline Courier-News. My favorite part of my weekly work for this client was writing A Closer Look, which is a humorous column that looks at life in our unique town. The column has now been picked up by the competing Alpenhorn News. Crestline is in Southern California, but we are surrounded by a national forest and, you may be surprised to know, we can get as much as three feet of snow in 48 hours. The first column details my tongue-in-cheek solution for getting rid of our bark beetle problem (they're killing our pine trees) by eating them instead of poisoning them. The second column explains how I have earned the equivalent of a master's degree in carpentry from moving here--something many can relate to in my town of fixer-uppers. This column has become so popular that excerpts from it were included as a "Best of" feature in the visitor's guide for our town, and it was the largest feature in the publication. The third link, which is not really a sample--the editor's note in that visitor's guide--is a testimonial to the positive public response to this column. I've had a lot of practice at humorous writing--for more than a year I served as the editor in chief of a national political satire magazine. Award Winning Benchmark
for Technology Implementation: Cincinnati Children's Blends Electronic Documentation,
Order Entry and Decision Support Making the
Business Case for Patient Safety Information Technology New Center Seeks to Educate, Stimulate Adoption of Evidence-Based Medicine Into Practice Quality Improvement & Patient Safety (PDF 142 KB) I do three types of journal article writing for clients--staff writing as an editorial manager, ghostwriting and "advertorial" writing. I do not post my ghostwriting samples or disclose the names of authors for whom I serve as a ghostwriter. The first article is a personal account of my efforts to improve hospital marketing using proven concepts of quality management. This article appeared in Healthcare Leadership & Management Report. The second article is a case study from Disease Management & Quality Improvement Report, an American Hospital Association publication for which I serve as editor in chief under contract. The name has now been changed to Quality Improvement & Patient Safety and the last article in the list above is from the newly renamed publication. I do all of the writing, research, layout and printer coordination for this publication. The second article is a sample of an advertorial written for a client. The trick with getting an advertorial published in a journal is to not make it seem like an advertorial. It has to have compelling, valuable content for readers and should not do a hard sell of any particular company. If it does not meet these two criteria, it will never get past the first reviewer to be accepted for publication. This article, which I wrote for a patient safety software client, was so "unadvertorial" that it was featured as the cover article in a prestigious trade journal. The other author on the byline is a member of my client's staff. We helped the client from the query process with the editor, through writing and production with the journal. Loma Prieta Earthquake, 1989 (PDF-4.7MB) I've done a huge amount of on-scene coverage, from reporting on a yearly reunion of 10 sisters, to a report on how worms turn sewage sludge into commercial fertilizer, to eight days of living in my truck bed covering the emergency responses to the Loma Prieta and Northridge earthquakes in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Of course, the sample here is from my earthquake coverage, which is a little more interesting than some of the other coverage I mentioned. In both cases, I heard news of the quakes, immediately called to get permission from either an employer or client, then packed camera gear, notepads, water, food and a sleeping bag and hit the road. In the case of Loma Prieta, I was listening to the World Series on Oct. 17, 1989 at a little after 5 p.m. when I learned of it. By sunrise, I had driven more than 400 miles and was at the site of the I-880 collapse reporting live. In the case of the Northridge Earthquake, I was awakened by it, and only had to drive 80 miles. Note that all of the photographs, except that on the opening spread, were taken by me.I have posted Loma Prieta coverage here, but if you would like to see the Northridge Earthquake coverage article, e-mail me. Physician
(Hospitalist) Recruitment Campaign (PDF-1.3 MB) Recruitment and promotion are the same to us. If you're trying to persuade people to move to your area permanently or temporarily or both, you're doing the same thing. The first sample is a promotion to attract hospitalists--physicians who would work in the hospital setting--to come to live in the Riverside County area of southern California. The pay was O.K., but the stress was very light compared to what most physicians experience, and the location was great. We helped develop a brochure, letters, mailers, and targeted two audiences at the same time--physicians and program directors at medical colleges. Page 1 is the front and back of the brochure, page 2 contains the two inside pages and page 3 contains the two letters that were sent to the physicians and program directors. The second is a series of convention bureau advertisements that we wrote for the Riverside Convention Bureau. Hospital Benchmark
Promotional Report: Benchmarks--Quality Report Card (PDF-6.4 MB) Many times, communication in a written piece takes much more than just writing. Healthcare communications and marketing directors know that effective communication is no longer a simple matter in the competitive, increasingly consumer-savvy environment of health care. That's why this page contains our longest explanation of perhaps our most involved work to date. How do you make arcane medical statistical information understandable and even entertaining to widely ranging educational levels, from elementary to doctorate, in a population that speaks two languages, and then use it to your marketing advantage in a highly competitive healthcare environment? Simple. You use Winning Words. But even I will admit that it's not that simple. The process of getting to the words is the key. This piece speaks for itself, but there is a huge story behind it, and it is one of my prized works. So you can ignore my stumping and just click on the link above and download the PDF if you don't want to hear the whole story. After reading it, come back here if you want the whole story. If you get excited about these things like I do, read below now for the story, which goes far beyond just writing for the services that healthcare organizations need in the increasingly competitive world of health care. First, even though I helped guide this effort, let me give equal credit to the following: Deborah Novellino, my partner in this, who was the marketing and communications director of this hospital; my agency director, Sharon Racz, who eventually got more caught up in all of this than anyone; and our gifted art director, Rhonda Buess. If you ever see one of these names on a proposal or application, grab them up quickly before someone else does. I was working as the marketing director of an advertising agency that specialized in healthcare marketing, and we had a big challenge facing us. The marketing plan we developed for this hospital in a community of 250,000 people (and another half-million nearby) was based on making the most of any opportunity for promotion and differentiation. The hospital was under heavy pressure from Columbia of Nashville, which had moved into town, taken over another hospital a few miles away and wooed away the medical group that was responsible for 40 percent of the hospital's referrals. It was wearing down on their ability to stay afloat and provide quality care. The following is the marketing and communications challenge that we faced when we created this report. The hospital had paid for an HCIA-Sachs report comparing it against several other hospitals in the area for efficiency and effectiveness in several different key diagnosis related groups (DRGs). When the report was studied, management realized, to its delight, that the hospital far outpaced the competing Columbia hospital and several others in the area, one of them the famed Loma Linda University Hospital Medical Center, in all of the measured clinical areas of efficiency and effectiveness. The management had a problem--a good problem to have, but a difficult one to approach from a marketing and communications perspective. The hospital needed to get this information out to media and into the hands of as many citizens as possible. And it had to be created and distributed in a tasteful manner that did not create a backlash in the media from the all of the powerful surrounding hospitals to which this small, community hospital had compared itself. Keep in mind that we would have to create the report from arcane medical statistical information and make it understandable and even entertaining to a wide audience. We had at least three groups that we needed to reach with this important image-building information. We needed to send it to all of the physicians (including the recent defectors) who could potentially refer patients to the hospital, so the piece had to speak to them with quality and at their level. At the same time, the health system had to speak to the eighth-grade reading level of the middle class and lower-middle class readers, who might choose to self-refer based on quality measures. Then it had to reach a large Hispanic population that speaks at least three local dialects, and that accounts for the majority of the births in the main facility. In the end, we accomplished all of these objectives with the same report in two versions--one Spanish and one English. We created a substantial 20-page report (one page blank and two tissue, so your sample is 17 pages) that many people have kept on their bookshelves for years because it was too beautifully designed and interesting to throw away--another goal we had set out to accomplish. As we developed the pieces for this campaign, we extensively wrote and rewrote the copy and used many other eyes and ears, testing it with a wide range of people with different backgrounds and reading levels. Then we went back and rewrote it again, refining each element for the various audiences. We knew that the report had to be much more than graphs and charts and clinical quality information with good explanations. I conducted interviews with hospital employees, and former patients and their families, so that we could add personal stories of triumph, survival and community commitment related to the hospital to add human interest and impact to the piece. Because of our commitment to continuous quality improvement, we expended all of this energy into the front end of the report rather than trying to engineer failure out of the end of it. One of our biggest challenges came in creating the Spanish version of the report. We wanted both reports to look identical so there would be an immediate connection in people's minds (especially in the minds of potential referring physicians) when they saw the report in this different version, and frankly, we wanted the physicians of the community to be impressed that we had gone to such great lengths to serve a big segment of their patient population--a lucrative segment that is largely overlooked in marketing--with this valuable information. We also wanted many people in the community talking intelligently about the report--preferably in more than one language. My job of getting the piece translated was not as simple as calling up translators from the Yellow Pages and giving them the text. In this community there are several old, tightly knit Hispanic neighborhoods. In these places, the older people have stayed put for their entire lives, have their own dialects and are very wary of outsiders bringing themselves or their messages into these communities. Because of these sensitivities, the translated document could not be a straight translation into high Spanish, nor could it be tailored for each community's peculiar communication patterns. Therefore, we had to translate the Spanish version into a conversational speech that explained complex medical concepts in terms that were comfortable to a wide range of Hispanic citizens. I interviewed translators to measure their understanding of the local community and determine their grasp of our particular communication needs with this piece. Once the translators were chosen they created a draft translation. We then held focus groups with Hispanic citizens and presented draft copies of the report for their review. After receiving their input, we went back to our final chosen translators and provided the guidance they needed to polish the final document. This report is an example of the kind of quality that can be achieved when the campaign is developed as part of a plan based on proven quality improvement principles and hard work by marketing professionals. I will end with the ironic statement that, after all of this, the piece just speaks for itself.
Scenic
and Nature Photos of California and Oregon Lee Reeder is also a scenic and nature photographer. Photography Services Photographic
Services in California and Oregon Lee Reeder provide photography services to architects, landscape architects, visitors bureaus and publishers. |
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