What Does the Nyt Op Ed Say
Op-Ed and You
I often go out and talk to people who are interested in getting Op-Eds published in The Times. I do it because we need you, the reader, the writer. People certainly don't write for us for the money; the payment, frankly, is peanuts. They write for the influence, for the chance to reach an audience, to say something that's been bothering them, driving them crazy, something that no one else seems to be saying.
We appreciate that, and we need you. We need a diversity of voices and opinions about a range of topics. Anything can be an Op-Ed. We're not only interested in policy, politics or government. We're interested in everything, if it's opinionated and we believe our readers will find it worth reading. We are especially interested in finding points of view that are different from those expressed in Times editorials. If you read the editorials, you know that they present a pretty consistent liberal point of view. There are lots of other ways of looking at the world, to the left and right of that position, and we are particularly interested in presenting those points of view.
As we become more international, we need you more than ever. Not long ago, Op-Ed meant just the two or so articles by outside writers that ran each day on the print page. Now, Op-Ed includes Sunday Review, a section with longer reported, opinionated pieces, and Opinionator, one of the most popular blogs at The Times and home to series like The Stone, on philosophy, Disunion, on the Civil War, Draft, on writing, and Private Lives, personal perspectives of universal matters.
We get a flood of submissions, but there's never too much good writing in the world. There is always room for more. So what makes the cut? That's what people always ask me, so I'll try to explain the process. Most pieces we publish are between 400 and 1200 words. They can be longer when they arrive, but not so long that they're traumatizing. Submissions that are reacting to news of the world are of great value to us, especially if they arrive very quickly. Write in your own voice. If you're funny, be funny. Don't write the way you think important people write, or the way you think important pieces should sound. And it's best to focus very specifically on something; if you write about the general problem of prisons in the United States, the odds are that it will seem too familiar. But if you are a prisoner in California and you have just gone on a hunger strike and you want to tell us about it – now, that we would like to read. We are normal humans (relatively speaking). We like to read conversational English that pulls us along. That means that if an article is written with lots of jargon, we probably won't like it.
We don't just wait for articles to arrive. Every day we have a meeting to discuss the news, to toss around ideas, to think about which writers might be good on which subjects. Whether we then reach out to a writer and ask for a piece, or take on something that was submitted to us, all articles are written on spec – no article is guaranteed publication. But once we have accepted a piece, we will do everything we can to make sure it runs on one of our platforms. Sometimes, that happens months after a piece is written, an occurrence that must be absolutely maddening to writers. We wait for what seems like a good peg, the moment when the greatest number of readers are likely to find a piece relevant and interesting.
We have several news assistants who have a variety of duties; their most important one is to read the submissions that go to opinion@nytimes.com. They pull out everything that seems to have potential and send those pieces to several of the editors. Then those editors review the submissions. If they find something interesting, then they send it to an internal group e-mail that goes to the editors in New York, Hong Kong, Paris and London who are responsible for editing the pieces on the daily pages in all our editions, in Opinionator, and in the Sunday Review. We have this internal conversation, and after four or five people weigh in, it's pretty clear whether we should take the article, or not, and if we should, what might strengthen it.
What happens when your article is accepted? First, you'll get a contract giving us the right to publish it and laying out some of your responsibilities. The most important ones have to do with originality and truthfulness. You can't plagiarize yourself, or someone else, and we won't run something that has appeared in another publication, either print or digital. We request that you disclose anything that might be seen as a conflict of interest, financial or otherwise: Did you invest in a company that you praise in passing? Did you once work with a public official you mention in flattering or critical terms? Could you or an organization or company you represent benefit from the stance you take in an Op-Ed? We need to know. That doesn't mean we'll throw out your article on that basis — in most cases it just means disclosing the relationship to the reader. We also need all of the material that supports the facts in your story. That's the biggest surprise to some people. Yes, we do fact check. Do we do it perfectly? Of course not. Everyone makes mistakes, and when we do we correct them. But the facts in a piece must be supported and validated. You can have any opinion you would like, but you can't say that a certain battle began on a certain day if it did not.
Once you have signed the contract, an editor will work with you to make the piece acceptable to both us and you. Sometimes that is complicated. If your piece has the germ of an idea we find fascinating but feels jumbled and out of order, we will probably ask you to revise it. We will never tell you what to think, but we will always try to make your thinking and your writing as clear and orderly as possible. We will try to help you strengthen your argument. We want your thinking to win converts. I have had weeks where I have read Op-Eds that argue opposite positions and I have come away agreeing with both. Invade Syria; Stay far away. They are both valid opinions, and if they are well presented, the reader will end up thinking, "That makes sense."
In the end, you are the author. If you are unhappy with an edit, you can take back the piece. We would never run something over the objections of a writer, and the writer, always gets to see it before we run it. The writer however, never gets to choose the headline, or the art that goes with a piece.
So please, get in touch. Please don't be mad if we don't answer your e-mail. We get so many. But you can be assured we will read it.
Many thanks for being our readers, and our writers.
Trish Hall Editor, Op-Ed and Sunday Review
(I'm also a Deputy Editorial Page Editor, but that's because I report to the Editorial Page Editor, Andy Rosenthal; I don't actually have anything to do with the editorials. If you're interested in who writes those, they're available on the editorial board page.)
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/opinion/op-ed-and-you.html
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