Category: Media Engagement

Partnering with universities is one of the main strategies Informed Opinions is pursuing to support knowledgeable women in contributing their ideas and analysis to the media. So last summer, I pitched an op ed to the editor of University Affairs magazine, published by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, which reaches close to 28,000 university administrators and faculty with every issue. I had just finished analyzing our monitoring data and discovered that scholars constituted the largest single profession represented among op ed contributors in the six daily papers we looked at. But – not surprisingly – women were as under-represented in the scholar category as they were elsewhere.

I wrote a piece that began by comparing my experience writing my master’s thesis (few readers, little short term impact beyond the granting – or not – of my degree) to the simultaneous experience I had writing a weekly column for The Vancouver Sun (potentially 200,000 readers and – depending on the topic – quite possibly an immediate impact).

I submitted my piece in August, and was told that since the magazine only publishes ten times a year, and has only one or two spots for guest commentary, it might not appear till October. Yesterday, two months after that, my piece finally appeared. Although disappointed by the delay, I’m delighted that my words have now been published in a vehicle read by thousands of people who are part of a key audience I’d like to reach.

From the perspective of the editor of University Affairs, although my piece was relevant to the AUCC’s readers, it wasn’t tied to anything that was time-sensitive. As a result, delaying its publication didn’t make it less relevant, and she was able to use it months after I wrote it.

Generally when people are writing for a daily newspaper, timeliness is more of an issue: if there isn’t a good reason for an editor to publish your piece this week or next week, she might not publish it ever. Because every week she gets new submissions that are tied to a recent, current or upcoming story. So timeliness can be both friend and foe, depending on the publication. Something to keep in mind…

You wouldn’t know it from reading this blog, but I get half a dozen notices a day that someone is eager to post a comment on the site. I read every one, hoping against experience that I’ll discover a genuine response to the blog’s content. Instead, I’m more often met with pharma promos,  foreign alphabets or a pathetic attempt by some spammer to convince me that the poorly-written generic comment is inspired by my own posts.

Here’s a classic:

“hello I was luck to approach your Topics in bing your post is quality I get a lot in your website really …”

And here’s the relevance to op ed writing: Editors are as time-strapped and email-inundated as the rest of us. They often decide in under two minutes whether or not your submission is on its way to the reject pile. Accurate spelling, appropriate punctuation and intelligible grammar are the absolute minimum expected. But beyond that, crafting a paragraph or two that succinctly tells the editor what you’ve written about, why you’re qualified to comment and why she should publish it in her pages now, will also set you apart.

Making your pitch as thoughtful, lively and concise as the piece itself, and doing so in a way that tells the editor you’ve written this expressly for her readers — and you pay enough attention to the paper or online content to know what they read — is critical. Editors tell me they get dozens of ill-conceived, long-winded and completely unpublishable rants. Don’t let a small error, generic greeting or poorly worded opening sentence allow someone to mistakenly classify you as spam.

Informed Opinions recently supplied editing support to a workshop graduate who had a well-supported and timely argument about a relevant issue.  After we’d work together to polish the piece and craft an opening paragraph that would engage and provoke (rather than bore and repel), the graduate sent it to a colleague who she’d invited to co-author it with her. (This was a generous impulse, inspired in part by the graduate’s belief that her own credentials were potentially insufficient to gain an editor’s confidence.)

The result, however, was that the newly engaged co-author, who hadn’t taken the workshop and hadn’t heard my exhortations about having to compete for scant attention, and arrest readers with vivid analogies and real life implications, rewrote the first paragraph. And — you’re probably guessing this — not in a good way.

Not only does writing by committee — even a committee of two — take longer, it also often involves negotiating word choice and turn of phrase (and settling on the safest, least interesting options). Keep in mind, too, that comment page editors are looking for strong opinions, and one person’s passion-fed perspective can get seriously diluted when forced to accommodate the biases or reservations of another. The frequent result is an opinion piece devoid of strong personality or (gulp) opinion.

We went back and forth a few more times regarding the piece in question, and in the end, I’m not sure it was ever submitted. And two weeks later, the creative and compelling lede, which was hooked to Hallowe’en, is no longer usable. Tant pis!

Interestingly, I had a very different experience working with two journalists who also happen to be long-standing and very close friends.  Toronto Star columnist Susan Delacourt and former CBC reporter, now Carleton University journalism prof  Susan Harada recently contributed to a collection of essays I’ve edited that’s coming out in April. The satirical essay the two produced about the advantages (and, yes, it must be admitted, occasional humiliations) of returning to university as mature students, is hysterically funny and highly opinionated.

In the course of promoting his newly released album recently, much-celebrated songwriter, Elvis Costello (do you think he ever gets referred to as the spouse of Diana Krall?) was speaking about how he approaches his craft. He said he’d once been inspired to write a song about an “old, now vaguely respectable fascist”, but confessed that in order to do so, he “made up a fantasy” about the guy because it would have been “too tedious and… disgusting” to do otherwise.

“A lot of songs are like that. You make some sort of drama or narrative to walk you past the stuff that’s on your mind. Otherwise, you’d just be writing an op-ed.”

I like Elvis Costello for his unique voice, eclecticism, generosity and insight. But I think he’s unclear about the creative possibilities of writing an op ed. The best commentaries manage to embed a dramatic narrative into their arguments — to engage readers by demonstrating how an issue affects human beings, sometimes calling out the villains or crediting the heroes in the process. It’s true that op ed pages don’t always sport compelling pieces that combine storytelling in the course of arguing their case. But that’s a failure of imagination, not the form itself.

At yesterday’s Informed Opinions workshop for Ottawa-based NGOs, Citizen columnist and editorial writer Kate Heartfield generously took an hour out of her day to share insights into what her paper looks for in op eds. She confirmed much of the advice already available in the resources section of the IO website, but emphasized a few things that are worth repeating:

1.  A good strong thesis that includes proposed solutions makes for a more compelling commentary than one that essentially amounts to “We should pay attention to this issue.”

2. The more news values there are embedded in the proposed op ed’s subject matter, the more likely it is to published. So a commentary dealing with a high-conflict story that is not only timely and of significant consequence to the paper’s readers, but also quirky, is much harder to turn down than a piece that fails to reflect any, or only one of those values.

Workshop participants really appreciated Kate’s advice, and Informed Opinions really appreciates the fact that she’s agreed to continue to volunteer her time to the project as a mentor/editor.

More significant, however, is the seminal role she played in helping to inspire the actual creation of Informed Opinions. Almost two years ago, Kate profiled the US-based Op Ed Project in one of her columns, alerting Media Action to the great work they’re doing south of the border, and giving us some impetus to do something similar in Canada.

…Well, not maybe not everything, but when it comes to getting an op ed published in the print vehicle of your choice, how much advance warning you’re able to give an editor, and how long the window of relevance will be open, can sometimes mean the difference between seeing your words in print, and being confined to the limited audience of your blog.

This week Informed Opinions supported two human rights scholars in submitting a really strong piece they’d written about a topical issue. They sent their well-written analysis into a national daily paper on Friday afternoon, hoping it would appear in advance of a pivotal government decision being made the following Wednesday. But by the time the piece was received, both Saturday’s and Monday’s  pages would already have been made up, leaving only Tuesday and Wednesday as options. Given the competition for limited space, the human rights commentary didn’t make it.

If you’re responding to breaking news, that’s often the reality. On the other hand, if you know well in advance that a significant event will occur on a certain date, and you can provide your op ed 10 days or two weeks before that, your chances of being allocated space are much greater: the editor has more flexibility and the opportunity to plan in advance if she thinks your piece is relevant and insightful.

Recently the public editor of the New York Times, Arthur Brisbane wrote about the complaints he gets from readers concerned about the blurring line between opinion and reporting. I share the view that publications should clearly differentiate between content that is intended to neutrally report on events, and articles that reflect the opinions (hopefully, informed opinions) of their authors.

A dozen years ago, teaching a third year communications course at SFU in critical media skills, I remember being surprised to discover that many of the mid-career teachers in my class – were not familiar with this distinction. They often didn’t notice bylines; didn’t realize that photographs of the journalist generally signified columnist status and permission to opine; didn’t know that the slug at the bottom of some articles describing affiliation or expertise meant the writer was a guest; and were unaware that the page opposite the editorials (hence the term “op ed”) were usually devoted to commentary and analysis, as opposed to straight reporting.

Unless you study journalism, these things aren’t typically covered in school. Although they can be gleaned through careful reading, they’re not necessarily obvious to the casual news consumer. But the distinction between “just the facts” and opinion is important, as is some transparency about where the authority of each commentator comes from: has she just written a book on the subject? does he teach at a reputable institution? did she spend 5 years working in the field or country about which she’s writing?

It’s all important context – media literacy for adults…

A clever and unusual headline… the benefit of an accompanying photo… and placement across the top of the right hand page: you can’t ask for a better alignment of the stars than my op ed in today’s Globe received. (Thank you, Natasha Hassan.) All these factors contribute to how much a commentary gets noticed and read. And the astonishing volume of mail in my inbox today is one indicator of their collective impact.

(Years ago after I’d appeared in front The Vancouver Sun‘s editorial board about an issue I cared a lot about, I was disappointed to see that the next day’s paper devoted 2/3 of the space accorded to the resulting story to a photograph of me. It’s not that it was a bad photo, but I’d really wanted the issue itself to be covered in much more depth. When I complained about this to sympathetic columnist Stephen Hume, he patiently explained that the existence of the photograph guaranteed that many thousands more people would read the story than if they’d devoted all the allotted space to text alone.)

Now I welcome attention grabbing art and even an unflattering picture, all in pursuit of being read.

Here’s how two scholars at Queen’s University began their commentary in yesterday’s Globe and Mail:

“The decision not to reappoint the Veterans Ombudsman to a second term has put the spotlight on the New Veterans Charter, federal legislation that determines the programs and services available to veterans injured in the service of their country. Our financial analysis shows that the charter does not adequately meet the needs of veterans who are seriously disabled.”

Before reading the op ed written by Alice Aiken and Amy Buitenhuis, I hadn’t been aware of any news coverage about the New Veterans Charter. But by offering context to a controversial government decision, they effectively found a way to bring attention to this important, but under-addressed issue, adding value through the sharing of their relevant research.

Yesterday’s Globe and Mail featured a provocative and engaging op ed by Brock historian John Sainsbury asking “What if Dostoyevsky had been an online gambler?” Professor Sainsbury cleverly used the Russian novelist’s addiction to casinos to explore the potential impact of the Ontario government’s recent decision to set up provincially-run online gambling.

In the process of delivering a lively and informative read, the scholar also did a great job of demonstrating the relevance of social sciences such as history and literature to contemporary life and public policy.

At a time when politicians are looking for ways to cut research funding, such reinforcement of the value of university scholarship is important.