I write fiction and narrative nonfiction, and I’ve led content at scale for Yahoo!, LIVESTRONG, Headspace, Hipcamp, and SimplePractice. Most recently, I founded Love at First Pages, a dating app for books.
Jess Barron, Palo Alto, California. Photo: Chris Strimbu
Selected work
Content that moves the numbers
Data journalism, white papers, product campaigns, video programs, and SEO and AEO content for brands like LIVESTRONG, Headspace, and SimplePractice, with the results to show for it.
Flagship editorial anchored to original research: a survey of 550 therapists conducted for World Mental Health Day to quantify and contextualize therapist burnout. I turned the findings into a companion blog piece and the 2023 State of Therapist Well-Being Report, positioning SimplePractice as a brand that takes care of the caregivers and generating earned attention around a mission-critical industry issue.
This consumer health article I researched and wrote with SleepScore Labs data and input from applied sleep scientist Elie Gottlieb, Ph.D. demonstrates my ability to translate complex scientific data into accessible consumer health narratives.
Wild-caught or farm-raised: which fish is actually better for you and the ocean? To find out, I traveled to La Paz, Mexico, and swam inside an open-ocean fish farm in the Sea of Cortez, among kanpachi the locals call “pez fuerte,” or strong fish. The answer surprised me: “wild vs. farmed” turns out to be the wrong question. Originally published on LIVESTRONG in 2018 (over 125,000 views), with a companion documentary (over 25,000 views) that I scripted and narrated.
Researched and co-wrote this data-driven article using proprietary data from partner SleepScore Labs. Became the most-viewed article on Sleep.com in 2021, demonstrating how original data partnerships can drive outsized audience engagement.
250K+
Views in first 8 months
#1
Most-viewed on Sleep.com, 2021
sleep.comArchived
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PERSONAL ESSAY • ANTHOLOGY
“The Money Tree”
During the 2020 lockdown, I started confiding in a digital assistant while seeking advice on how to save my dying money tree, Gatsby. “The Money Tree” is a personal essay about about loneliness, hope, and eventually holding a funeral for a houseplant. It appears in (HER)OICS: Women’s Lived Experience During the Coronavirus Pandemic (Pact Press/Regal House, 2021), which BuzzFeed named one of 18 new small-press books you won’t want to put down.
