Tuesday, November 27, 2012

How Can an Academic Publish an Op/Ed?

Do you want to publish an Op/Ed? I do! I have a deep yearning to open up the New York Times and find my name next to a provocative headline in the Op/Ed section of their paper. In fact, it is my goal to have one published by the time I am 40. That gives me about thirteen months to achieve this goal.

The New York Times.

I want to publish an Op/Ed because I am aware of lots of things that never make it into the mainstream media. I have an analysis and a viewpoint that I almost never see in mainstream media. As an academic, I want a role in the public discourse. I want people to at least contemplate my point of view and the facts and analysis that I can offer.

Publishing an Op/Ed in the New York Times is a lofty goal – if you think rejection rates are high for journals, consider that the New York Times gets hundreds of Op/Ed submissions daily and can only publish a handful. The acceptance rates are well below 1 percent.

So, how am I going to work towards this goal of publishing an Op/Ed?

Let’s start with what I have already done. I haven’t just sat around and wished for this to happen. I have been working on it.

I submitted my first Op/Ed to the New York Times on March 23, 2009. I have submitted three more to the New York Times since, each of which was rejected. Simply submitting Op/Eds to the New York Times was not paying off. So, I decided to get some help.

I did some online research. I found this amazing website: http://www.theopedproject.org. The Op/Ed Project is dedicated to getting more voices into mainstream media and has lots of information about how to write Op/Eds and where to submit them.

They have a formula on their website for how to write an Op/Ed. Of course everything has a formula, so no surprise Op/Eds do as well. I followed their instructions on how to write an Op/Ed, quoted below:

Lede (Around a news hook) 
Thesis (Statement of argument – either explicit or implied) 
Argument: Based on evidence (such as stats, news, reports from credible organizations, expert quotes, scholarship, history, first-hand experience)

• 1st Point:
◦ evidence
◦ evidence
◦ conclusion

• 2nd Point
◦ evidence
◦ evidence
◦ conclusion 
• 3rd Point
◦ evidence
◦ evidence
◦ conclusion

To Be Sure” paragraph (in which you pre-empt your potential critics by acknowledging any flaws in your argument, and address any obvious counter-arguments.)

Conclusion (often circling back to your lede)
Once I wrote my Op/Ed according to their formula (more or less), I submitted it to the New York Times. No luck.

I decided to get some training. I participated in a teleworkshop put on by the Council on Contemporary Families. After the workshop, the workshop leader, Stephanie Coontz – who has published many pieces in the New York Times – was kind enough to help edit the piece for me. I took my edited piece and submitted it to the New York Times again. No luck.

I decided to try and submit to other places. The Op/Ed Project has a list of places to submit Op/Eds. I used their list of places to submit and slowly made my way down this list: I tried the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Times, and the Washington Post. Then, I tried the Kansas City Star – my local paper. With no luck in the mainstream outlets, I sent the piece to Counterpunch and they published it!

I am very proud to be a contributor to Counterpunch, but I still would like to have a larger audience. So, I signed up for an Op/Ed core seminar.

In the intensive all-day workshop, I learned that I am an expert on criminal deportations to Jamaica, what makes a convincing argument, the importance of ledes, how to marshal convincing evidence, and many other things. I left the workshop confident that I have many, many Op/Eds that I could write. The trick would be to decide which one I would start with, and how I could write one that is timely and relevant.

I am currently drafting an Op/Ed. Once I am finished, I will send it to a Mentor/Editor, courtesy of the Op/Ed Project. Then, I will send it to the New York Times. If they don’t want to publish it, I will send it to other mainstream outlets. If they don’t want it, I will just keep going down my list until I find a place willing to publish it. Then, I will start again, with a new Op/Ed.

What about you? Do you want to get your voice into the mainstream media? Have you been successful? How?

9 comments:

  1. I did the OpEd Project seminar in April and published my first oped on on women's health and contraception on Ms. Magazine Online for Mothers Day. I have done several more since and I appreciate being able to communicate important issues to a large general audience.

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    1. Thanks for sharing your success story, Chloe. I have found that it is often easier to publish with a venue once you have done so once.

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  2. So far I've been solicited and said yes, so not much help. On the other hand, I've done it for free for most of the places that have solicited me.

    I guess now that I have tenure I could do more of this.

    I do tend to get weird crackpot emails from people after.

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    1. Yes, broadening your audience certainly increases the likelihood of crackpots. When I published in the Kansas City Star a reader asked publicly: "How could this person be a professor at KU?" And, colleagues I know with an even wider audience certainly get their share of insults...

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  3. I had never thought of this idea before, but after reading this post almost a week ago, I kept thinking about it.

    In fact, I really think it is important to get expert to speak out/ write for a larger audience, but I never considered op/eds for that purpose - I thought they'd browse to science blogs themselves. After reading your post, I do think this is an additional and certainly most valuable way of broadcasting your message.

    This is food for thought, and something to consider working on in the future (first things first: finishing the dissertation and defending!)

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    1. You are right Eve: There are lots of different venues for our public scholarship. In terms of written material, an OpEd in a major newspaper would have the highest potential readership. But, there are many other ways to get the word out.

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  4. This is brilliant and it is what the country needs. I am used to spending time in countries where academics really do write for the papers and go on tv and it does improve the level of public discourse. It is a good reason for me to become a better expert, so I can write things like this as a real authority.

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