How to write an op-ed

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If you work in advocacy communications, at some point you’re going to be asked to write an op-ed. As someone who has written and placed upwards of a hundred op-eds for nonprofits over my career, I want to share my thoughts about how to write them. My op-eds have been published by many of the nation’s leading news outlets: New York Times, Los Angeles Times, CNN, Sacramento Bee, US News and World Report, etc. They were almost never published under my byline, because such is the life of the nonprofit communications pro.

What is an op-ed?

Before I get into how to write an op-ed, let’s talk a bit about what op-eds are, and what kind of role they play in today’s advocacy space. In the simplest terms, an op-ed is an opinion piece submitted to a news outlet by an outside writer. They’re called op-eds because they traditionally appeared on a page opposite the newspaper’s editorial page. They still do, but obviously very few people are reading them in print, which calls the question about what kind of impact they have in an age when the influence of mainstream newspapers has waned tremendously.

Does anyone care about op-eds anymore?

Not too many years ago, the op-ed was one of the cornerstones of any advocacy communications campaign. Most people learned about what was going on in the world from newspapers, and the op-ed page (gave readers perspectives on how they should understand the news, and highlighted issues that newspapers perhaps had overlooked. Now that the news environment has splintered into social media, podcasts, newsletters, and so many other channels, the impact of the op-ed has waned along with the newspaper and mainstream news media. Informed (and uninformed) opinion is everywhere–you don’t need to look inside the back page of a newspaper's first section for it.

I think there’s still a significant place for the op-ed. For starters, appearing on a mainstream news website is still a strong validator–lots of people feel that if it’s in the New York Times, it’s relevant. If you’re trying to influence California legislators, validation from the Sacramento Bee counts. Moreover, once you have an op-ed piece placed, you can use your various communications channels to direct people to it, thus magnifying the impact of your message. Lastly, the writing of an op-ed is an invaluable exercise, requiring you to sharpen and condense your message into something more powerful and actionable.

Writing the op-ed

The basics: Most op-eds these days are between 500-700 words. Most outlets only want one author, two at the most. A lot of nonprofits want to get all the executive directors of every organization in their coalition to sign on–that’s not going to happen. Check the specific outlet you’re targeting for their guidelines before you submit. Your writing should be clean and punchy, constructed to keep readers interested. Keep your paragraphs short. 

Your hook: Every good op-ed needs an opening hook. This can be an anecdote, and image, a personal story. It should be quick, no more than a couple of sentences, but it should immediately draw the reader in. Now isn’t the time for statistics or elaborate arguments. This is merely about drawing the reader in.

The ask: Right after your hook, you need to quickly turn that into a short explanation of what you want: the legislature needs to pass a law, people should make phone calls, whatever it is that you want to have happen. Lots of folks blow their op-ed submission right here by going through too much set-up, thinking that if they build up evidence for their case at the beginning of their op-ed, they will hit their main point at the very end. But that’s not right, you can’t keep the point of your piece a mystery until the end, if for no other reason than if they only read a couple paragraphs, you want them to come away with your key message.

Your edge: Here’s another thing that many op-ed writers get wrong. They try to write “nice” op-eds that don’t offend anyone or draw any hard lines. But that doesn’t work here. In an op-ed, you need to be for something or against something. You’re pointing out what’s right and what’s wrong—frequently who is wrong, specifically. This is very hard for a lot of nonprofits that want to tip-toe around nonpartisanship and consensus-building. That’s all fine, but that’s not what an op-ed does.

Context: At some point you need to back up and give a little history. How did this issue get to where it is? More importantly, if you haven’t already done so, you need to make an argument for why the reader should care about this issue. Everybody loves octopuses. Children need to arrive at school well-fed. Nobody thinks a coal mine should be built in a residential neighborhood.

Your best arguments and facts: A lot of op-eds fall apart because the writer is trying to pile in too many arguments and facts. Truth is, you probably only have space for your top three. Trying to pile on is going to blow your word count, and even if you can squeeze in seven arguments, you’re going to leave your reader confused as to which are the most important.

Debunk the other side: If you’ve been in this for a while, you know what the arguments from the other side are. Your op-ed is a good opportunity to dismantle their message without the he-said/she-said of regular news reporting.

Closing: Really the only thing to do here is to repeat what you want to have happen. If you can find a quick, elegant way to do that, wonderful. But this isn’t a great time to unpack new information or anecdotes.

What happens after submission?

What happens after you submit your op-ed really depends on who you sent it to. Some outlets won’t tell you if your piece has been rejected–if you haven’t heard from them in a week, you should probably submit elsewhere. If you’ve been accepted, they’ll usually tell you and give you a rough idea of when it will run. I’ve actually had it happen where I didn’t hear anything from the editor and the piece just appears in print a couple days later.

Sometimes, the outlet will slap a headline on your piece that seems funny or misleading. Oh well! Sometimes they’ll run it exactly as submitted, others they’ll make some slight edits without telling you. Other outlets will put you into a prolonged editing/fact-checking process that might take a couple of weeks to complete. It varies.

What happens if your piece doesn’t get accepted, even though you’re convinced it’s brilliant? Well, don’t feel too bad. You still have a clean piece of content that you can easily turn into a blog post, social media thread, or press release. Get it out there and start writing another one.