Cover Letter to ADA

Dear American Diabetes Association Leadership (those who remain):

I am writing to formally apply for a communications and marketing leadership role at the American Diabetes Association (ADA).

With a clear understanding that you hadn’t specifically posted about this particular opening, it’s clear you need to create and fill this role immediately.

My understanding of the position’s title: Marketing & Communications Leader (With Backbone Included).

Given the absolute masterclass in brand self-destruction currently unfolding at your 2026 Scientific Sessions in New Orleans, it’s obvious that your PR department is either entirely vacant, hiding under a desk, or is still drunk from all the drinking during conference hours on Bourbon Street.

As a veteran journalist, editor, and media leader with more than 25 years of experience, you need what I can offer.

Honestly, you can’t afford to wait.

My CV offers what the ADA is clearing lacking right now: a backbone. More importantly, I operate with an unshakeable commitment to transparency and basic integrity - traits that seem to have been entirely barred from entering the NOLA convention center most recently.

In reading about the debacle you created, I note that it takes a spectacular level of incompetence to alienate your own core community this efficiently. I can only assume your attempt at innovative stakeholder engagement backfired when your decision to deploy private security and local police to physically remove renowned researchers and clinicians, and confiscate printed copies of an editorial written by the editor-in-chief of your own flagship journal.

You claim to be promoting a “non-partisan” atmosphere, but all evidence points to the contrary. Instead, your knee-jerk reaction show shows that you were simply censoring the very people and science you report to be about.

Remarkable way to post your need for a new style of communications leader, by creating a monumentally embarrassing public crisis.

With my 25 years of journalism and media experience, I can immediately start helping to stop the bleeding from your self-inflicted wound. Just count as a bonus my attendance at the SciSessions between 2012 and 2022, and the thousands of hours reading and reporting on everything-diabetes for more than a decade.

My credentials include my PWD degree, now 42 years strong thanks to type 1 diabetes since childhood. That means I live your Standards of Diabetes Care personally, and know what they mean inside and out.

My time as a patient advocate years ago is alap valuable, as I tried to be voice working to teach the ADA about responsible, social media use and two-way communications. Clearly, anything gleaned by the ADA in those years has been forgotten and needs a refresher.

Let's be blunt: you don’t need another robotic corporate spokesperson to draft hollow, weak emails that insult the intelligence of clinicians, researchers, and PWDs.

You need someone who can come in, clean up this catastrophic mess, and act like an actual adult in the room. 👋 

Here is what I bring to an organization currently suffering from a reputational low blood sugar like you are:

•  Crisis Communications: I know how to execute communication strategies grounded in reality, ensuring accountability and damage control, and making sure the ADA isn’t stuck in a defensive, cowardly stonewalling marketing mindset. I’m a media person who understands diabetes and the way it all intersects. You need that more than ever right now.
• Editorial Leadership: I have spent a quarter-century navigating complex media landscapes in diabetes and healthcare. I understand how to balance institutional compliance with an absolute respect for free scientific speech and editorial independence.
• Brand Rebuild: I can oversee internal and external messaging that begins the long process of reintroducing integrity to the ADA and restoring trust among the medical professionals, researchers, PWDs, and donors who are currently questioning why they support you.

It takes a monumental amount of effort to turn a premier scientific conference into a national case study on internal censorship, PR malpractice, and member alienation.

To dig your way out of this, you need an editorial leader and communicator who knows how to tell the truth, face the media, and champion the very science your organization claims to promote.

I am ready to bring that level of integrity and blunt strategic clarity to the ADA immediately. I look forward to discussing how we can begin the necessary work of repairing your fractured brand (shakes head again at your amazing stupefying lack of sense).

With Sincerest Urgency,

This Guy with a Lazy Pancreas