opinion essay new york times

How We Redesigned the New York Times Opinion Essay

When a team of editors, designers and strategists teamed up to talk about how times opinion coverage is presented and packaged to readers, they thought of a dinner party..

The NYT Open Team

By Dalit Shalom

Picture a dinner party. The table is set with a festive meal, glasses full of your favorite drink. A group of your friends gather around to talk and share stories. The conversation swings from topic to topic and everyone is engaged in a lively discussion, excited to share ideas and stories with one another.

This is what we imagined when we — a group of New York Times editors, strategists and designers — teamed up last summer to talk about how to think about how our Opinion coverage is presented and packaged to our readers. We envisioned a forum that facilitated thoughtful discussion and would invite people to participate in vibrant debates.

The team was established after a wave of feedback from our readers showed that many people found it difficult to tell whether a story was an Opinion piece or hard news. This feedback was concerning. The Times publishes fact-based journalism both in our newsroom and on our Opinion desk, but it is very important to our mission that the distinction between the two is clear.

The type of Opinion journalism our group was tasked with rethinking was the Op-Ed, which was first introduced in the Times newspaper in 1970. The Op-Ed was short for “opposite the Editorial Page,” and it contained essays written by both Times columnists and external contributors from across the political, cultural and global spectrum who shared their viewpoints on numerous topics and current events. Because of the Op-Ed’s proximity to the Editorial Page in the printed newspaper, it was clear that published essays were Opinion journalism.

Then The Times began publishing online. Today, most of our readers find our journalism across many different media channels. The Op-Ed lost its clear proximity to the Editorial Page, and the term has been used broadly as a catch-all phrase for Opinion pieces, leaving the definition of what an Op-Ed is unclear.

To learn more about the friction our readership was describing, we held several research sessions with various types of Times readers, including subscribers and non-subscribers. Over the course of these sessions, we learned that readers genuinely crave a diversity of viewpoints. They turn to the Opinion section for a curated conversation that introduces them to ideologies different than their own.

In the divided nature of politics today, many readers are looking for structured arguments that prepare them to converse thoughtfully about complicated topics. Some readers said they want to challenge and interrogate their own beliefs. Others worry that they exist in their own bubbles and they need to understand how the “other side” thinks.

And across the board, readers said they are aware that social media platforms can be echo chambers that help validate their beliefs rather than illuminate different perspectives. They believe The Times can help them look outside those echo chambers.

Considering this feedback, we took a close look at the anatomy of an Op-Ed piece. At a glance, Opinion pieces shared similar, but not necessarily cohesive, properties. They had an “Opinion” label at the top of the page that was sometimes followed by a descriptive sub-label (for example, “The Argument”), as a way to indicate a story belonged to a column. That would be a headline, a summary and a byline, often accompanied by an image or video before the actual text of the story.

By looking at those visual cues, it became clear to us that they could be reconfigured to better communicate the difference between news and opinion.

We created several design provocations and conducted user testing sessions with readers to see how this approach and a new layout might resonate. Some noticeable changes we made include center-aligning the Opinion label and header, labeling the section in red and providing more intentional guidance and art direction for visuals that accommodate Opinion pieces.

While many readers could tell the difference between news and opinion stories, they didn’t understand why certain voices were featured in the Opinion section. They wanted more clarity about the Op-Ed, such as who wrote it and whether the writer was Times staff or an external voice. In the case of external contributors, readers wanted to know why the desk chose to feature their voice.

These questions took our team back to the drawing board. We began to realize that the challenge at hand was not solely a design problem, but a framing issue, as well.

We had long philosophical conversations about the meaning of Op-Ed pieces. We talked about the importance of hosting external voices and how those voices should be presented to our readers. The metaphor of a dinner party figured prominently in our conversations: the Opinion section should be a place where guests gather to engage in an environment that is civil and respectful.

We began to sharpen how we might convey the difference between an endorsement of a particular voice and hosting a guest — one of many who might contribute to a lively debate around a current event.

The more we thought about the Opinion section as a dinner party, the more we felt how crucial it was to communicate this idea to readers.

As we approached the designs, we set out to create an atmosphere for open dialogue and conversation. Two significant editorial changes came out of our group conversations.

After many iterations, we decided to introduce a two-tiered labeling system, so that readers could understand unequivocally the type of Opinion piece they were about to engage with. For external voices, we added the label “ Guest Essay ,” alongside other labels that indicate staff contributors and internal editorials. The label “Guest Essay” not only shifts the tone of a piece — a guest that we are hosting to share their point of view — but it also helps readers distinguish between opinions coming from the voice of The Times and opinions coming from external voices.

The second important editorial change is a more detailed bio about the author whose opinion we are sharing. With the dinner party metaphor in mind, this kind of intentional introduction can be seen as a toast, providing context, clarity and relevance around who someone is and why we chose them to write an essay.

Some of these changes may seem subtle, but sometimes the best dinner conversations are nuanced. This body of work signals an important moment for The New York Times in how we think about expressing opinions on our platform. We believe that one of the things that makes for a healthy society and a functioning democracy is a space for numerous perspectives to be honored and celebrated. We are confident these improvements will help further Times Opinion’s mission of curating debate and discussion around the world’s most pressing issues.

Dalit Shalom is the Design Lead for the Story Formats team at The New York Times, focusing on crafting new storytelling vehicles for Times journalism. Dalit teaches classes on creative thinking and news products at NYU and Columbia, and in her free time you can find her baking tremendous amounts of babka.

Written by The NYT Open Team

We’re New York Times employees writing about workplace culture, and how we design and build digital products for journalism.

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The New York Times

The learning network | student contest | write an editorial on an issue that matters to you.

Student Contest | Write an Editorial on an Issue That Matters to You

How to write an editorial.

The New York Times’s editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal provides seven tips for writing an effective editorial.

Update | Feb. 5, 2015: We have announced our Second Annual Student Editorial Contest .

Update | May 20, 2014: All of the Top 10 winners have now been published. You can find them here .

Update | April 23, 2014: We have announced the winners of the Student Editorial Contest here .

Update | March 19: This contest — which we’re delighted to announce set a Learning Network record for submissions — is now closed. Thank you to all who participated. Here is more information about when we will announce winners.

• Is It Ethical to Eat Meat?
• Should Students Be Able to Grade Their Teachers?
• Do Violent Video Games Make People More Violent in Real Life?

Every day during the school year we invite teenagers to share their opinions about questions like these — on topics from hip-hop to climate change — and hundreds do, posting arguments, reflections and anecdotes to our Student Opinion feature.

With this, our first-ever Student Editorial Contest, we’re asking you to channel that enthusiasm into something a little more formal: short, evidence-based persuasive essays like the editorials The New York Times publishes every day.

The challenge is pretty straightforward. Choose a topic you care about, gather evidence from both New York Times and non-New York Times sources, and write a concise editorial (450 words or fewer) to convince readers of your point of view.

Because editorial writing at newspapers is a collaborative process , you can write your entry as a team effort, or by yourself. When you’re done, post it in the comments section below by March 17, 2014.

With our contest partner, the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University, we will then use this rubric to select winners to publish on The Learning Network.

As teachers know, the persuasive essay has long been a staple of high school education, but the Common Core standards seem to have put evidence-based argumentative writing on everybody’s agenda. You couldn’t ask for a more real-world example of the genre than the classic newspaper editorial — and The Times publishes, on average, four of them a day.

To help with this challenge, Andrew Rosenthal, The Times’s editorial page editor, made the video above, in which he details seven pointers. We have also culled 200 prompts for argumentative writing from our Student Opinion feature to help inspire you, though, of course, you are not limited to those topics. Update | Feb. 7: We have just published a lesson plan, “For the Sake of Argument: Writing Persuasively to Craft Short, Evidence-Based Editorials,” that offers additional ideas for teaching the steps in the process.

So what issue do you care about? Gun violence? School lunch? Reality TV? You decide. Then use the facts to convince us that you’re right.

Contest Rules

1. Use at least one Times source. You can write your editorial about any topic, as long as you use at least one source from The New York Times. That should pretty much open the whole world to you since you may be surprised how much you can find in The Times .

Update | Feb. 24: NYTimes.com has a digital subscription system in which readers have free access to 10 articles each month. If you exceed that limit, you will be asked to become a digital subscriber.

One thing you should know, however, is that The Learning Network and all its posts, as well as all Times articles linked from them, are accessible without a digital subscription. That means you can use any of the articles we have linked to on this blog for the editorial contest without exceeding the 10-article limit.

2. Use at least one non-Times source. Make sure, however, that the source you use is a reliable one.

3. Always cite your sources. If you found evidence in an article on the Internet, link to it. If you used a print source, state the title and author, linking to additional information about it if possible. If you interviewed an expert, state his or her name and position. Readers (and judges) should always know where you got your evidence.

4. Be concise. The editorial must be no more than 450 words. (Update: Your list of sources is separate and does not count as part of your 450-word limit.)

5. Have an opinion. Editorials are different from news articles because they try to persuade readers to share your point of view. Don’t be afraid to take a stand.

6. Write your editorial by yourself or with a group. If you are working as a team, just remember to submit all of your first names and last initials when you post your entry. Update | Feb. 12: One submission per student, please. If you’re submitting as part of a team, you should not also submit as an individual.

7. Be original and use appropriate language. Write for a well-informed audience, but include enough background information to give context. Be careful not to plagiarize: use quotation marks around lines you use verbatim from another source, or rephrase and cite your source.

8. Submissions must be from students who are 13 to 19 years old, though students can come from anywhere in the world. No last names please, but an initial is fine, as is a school or class code of some type. (For example, “Ethan G. CHS112.”)

9. All entries must be submitted by March 17, 2014 at 5 p.m. Eastern time, as comments on this post . If you have questions about the contest, please feel free to post them in the comments section as well, and we’ll answer you there.

10. We will use this rubric (PDF) to judge editorials. The top editorials, as judged by The Times and the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University using this rubric, will be featured on The Learning Network. (As with all our contests, if you win, you can then follow these steps to make sure we can use your last name.)

Good luck and have fun. As always with a first-time contest, we welcome your questions and comments in case we have somehow omitted details that might be useful. Let us know how we can help, below.

Comments are no longer being accepted.

Our world is filled with different life forms and species. We are at the top of it all. We control the rest of the species population along with that. Animals like wolves are becoming endagered due to pointless hunting. An example of this is in YellowStone National Park. In the 1920’s the population of wolves was virtually wiped out, until being reintroduced in the 1990’s. Scientists noted that an unexpected change happened in the ecosystem upon their return. The ecosystems vegetation had begun to improve, and so did the life of some of the other animals, even some prey to wolves, because of the return of wolves, animals became more vigilant and ate quicker and slightly less, rather than eating plants to the soil they would take a few bites and move to the next plant, staying active. This also meant the plants would live longer aswell, and would reproduce. This also improved the lives of beavers dispite the fact they were on the menu of the wolf. The beaver could now hide in the plants and would have more food for itself. The wolf is needed in ecosystems like this. The protection of them should be reinstituted. I am aware that they are hunted to keep the population under control, but you dont see other species brutally slaughtering humans to keep our population under control, and we are the most overpopulated species on the planet. Without the laws against hunting them, wolves are toast. They are already on the road to mass extinction. For those of you who are dog lovers, and may be reading this article you should know that your pet dog gets its genes from the wolf. All dogs have the same ancestors. The wolf. Where do you think the dog gets its traits and behaviour? Its from the wolf! The first dogs were just domesticated wolves, which adapted when wolves were originally tamed! Keep in mind that everyone has a favorite animal, and loves that animal, and would probably lose their mind if they were going extinct, that is my opinion on wolves, and I am against the hunting of wolves, and hypothetically speaking, if i were in the situation where someone was going to kill a wolf, and I were given the chance to stop them, I would take that chance in a split second. I know anyone else who loves wolves or any other animal would probably do the same thing for that animal. Wolves are also an extremely intelligent species. They live in packs most of the time, a rare thing seen in nature. Wolves are very strong, especially when in packs, and like humans, also hunt for pleasure. Wolves and humans have more in common with wolves than you might realize. Their packs are actually ranked from Omega, to Alpha. The Alpha is the leader of the pack. There is an Alpha Female, and an Alpha Male. The rest of the pack is usually the offspring of the Alphas. The omegas mostly consist of cubs and elderly wolves. The betas are the second lowest rank in the pack. The betas are basically your average wolves, in some instances, the betas and omegas may challenge the alphas, as they occasionally become interested in taking their place as leader. Wolves deserve to not have to worry about somoene trying to shoot them and mount their heads on a wall, and wear their hides. They deserve the freedom nature gave them in the first place.

Sources of Information: The World Needs Wolves, on NYTimes.com //www.nytimes.com/2012/09/29/opinion/the-world-needs-wolves.html

I was thrilled to come across this! This activity encompasses everything we are working on in my 7th grade English class! I am planning on having the students work through this editorial creation process. I was hoping at the end of the unit I could encourage the students to enter their editorials into your contest, however; not all of my students have turned 13 yet. Would you be willing to make any kind of exception to the age requirement for entry?

Hi Alex — I’m so sorry, but I’m afraid we can’t. It’s not our rule, it’s the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act , which applies to The New York Times as a whole. Feel free to have those who are 13 post, however, if that’s not too awkward. –Katherine

Many students today drop out of school or don’t have parents who support their schoolwork. LaShanda Henry lived in Brooklyn but her parents moved from Jamaica for a better education for their child. Being someone who was born and partially raised in Philadelphia, my parents moved to North Carolina for a better education for their children; they felt that their children would be more successful and have better opportunities. Children should have support from their parents as well as their parents being involved in their schoolwork. If a child realizes that their parent(s) care for what they do inside of school then the child will be more likely to succeed. ¨By interacting with teachers, administrators, and other parents on a regular basis, you’ll gain a firsthand understanding of your child’s daily activities (kidshealth.org). Parents do not realize the affect that they have on what a child is does. If the parent is more involved in schools the teacher won’t only contact the parent when the child is in trouble. I am aware and ashamed to say that many parents don’t have the time to be involved in their child’s ¨School life¨ because of work and other children you may have to focus on but think about the impact it would make on the child’s school work and life . If you show your child you are interested in what they are doing it will be more likely for them to become interested as well. Many parents get their children’s report cards, look at them, and tell them to do better. Instead of being that parent why not actually get involved and look over their work after they do it. Figure out what they need to work on and how they can help them improve. Many parents have no idea of what goes in inside the classroom. As a teenager in high school, I feel as if my father is not as involved as I would like for him to be when it comes to his children´s school. Some things he just isn’t caught up with. Things have changed since they became adults with children.¨We’ve got social campaigns for anti-bullying and child obesity; I think we need more campaigns encouraging proactive parenting specifically with respect to education (nytimes.com).¨ Parents should take education more seriously, even if they believe they already been through it; times have changed and if more parents were involved in more students/childrens lives the school board would be more effective and children would do a lot better in school.

Sources of Information: //www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/02/09/blaming-parents-for-poor-schools/parents-need-to-set-standards-for-children //kidshealth.org/parent/positive/learning/school.html

Do our sources count as a part of the four-hundred-fifty word limit? Thanks.

Oh, good question, Julia! No, and I’ll go back and add that note to the post. –Katherine

I do NOT believe that playing violent video games make people more violent. However, I do believe that growing up around all of those violent video games does impact your life. If children grow up thinking that it is okay to play those games or even think that it is okay to kill someone they will start playing with their friends like that. I honestly think that children’s eyes should be kept protected until a certain age. In the New York Times post, “Shooting In The Dark,” it talks about these main topics. It backs it up with actual statistics. Grand Theft Auto V, is up for one of the most violent video games ever to reach a stores shelf. It has everything from doing drugs, killing random civilians, to stealing weapons and cars. Since the game came out of September 17, 2013 it has sold more than 32.5 million copies. Does that mean that there are going to be 32.5 million murderers? I hope not. So obviously there has to be something else that factors in on weather someone is going to be a violent person when they are older. Maybe a past experience, or maybe just because they are mentally ill. Brad Bushman from CNN gave his opinion on this with his entry called, “Do Violent Video Games Play a Role In Violence?” Bushman is a science professor at The University Of Ohio State. In his article you will see how his colleagues and him run many tests to try and figure this matter out. Weather these video games do make people violent or not it is not our choice on weather a kid plays them or not. It is simply their parents. So as parents you need to know whether you want your kid exposed to this stuff, if not do not let them play it. Just know that some kids get very mad at their parents if they hide these games and other stuff from them for much longer than needed. On the last not, just be careful.

How many editorials can one student submit? Hi Aparna, Only one submission per student, please. If you’re submitting as part of a team, you should not also submit as an individual. We’ll go ahead and update the rules to make sure it’s clear for everyone. Thanks for asking. — Michael

//www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/international/americas/20water.html good link to NY times article for water privatization

So we can do any topic we want right? Anything at all? Can we do something with schools?

Hi Johanna, Yes, you can write about any topic, including schools, as long as you use at least one Times source and one non-Times source, and follow the Learning Network commenting standards . – Michael

Annie G Mrs. Clayville AP Lang.&Comp. 13 February 2014 Music And A Miracle “Nothing activates as many areas of the brain as music does”, explains University of North Carolina’s director of Music Research Institute Donald Hodges. In a world becoming evermore materialistic, music education has become a point of interest in researching if music really does make one smarter. It has been of interest to officials and executives for years on end, and the data has gone from supporting that music can up one’s IQ and cognitive skills to concluding that music is only a factor in a series multiple skills that can cause these statistic growths. In many studies conducted results have been far from conclusive, though the they have often pointed towards the point that music can make one smarter. In discussing music in relation to one’s IQ and academic abilities, many merely point to music at a young age. Though many studies prove that those who are trained in music from the start of their lifetimes benefit over the span of their whole lives, there are also numerous studies dealing with the older population of the world as well. It has been proven that in addition to children benefiting from music in their academic studies, elderly also benefit in their anatomy and function of the brain. The studies are intriguing; those exposed to music in their lifetimes are prone to higher standardized test scores, better cognitive functions, and overall more active brain functions. Music exercises numerous parts of the brain aiding in ones ability to memorize, analyze, and socialize. Though, many of theses benefits can be pointed towards other factors, too. Parents who can afford music are more likely to read and spend time with their children one on one; more likely to spend time and money bettering their child’s life. But music is not simply dependent on the study privately. Studies have shown that music even in the public schools yields nearly the same benefits. It is a question addressed daily in society today: can music really make someone smarter? The answer is quite simple: yes. Music, along with multiple other factors proves to be helpful in the development of cognitive skills, academic progress, and personality skills. Children who study music are more likely to carry and present themselves better as adults, they are more likely to carry higher standardized test scores, and a more impressive academic record. Therefore, many would urge teachers and parents to get children involved in music. Music has proven to aid many exposed figures in society today, and according to studies can make all children of the world today more well rounded: a goal society has had from the start.

Sources used: //www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/opinion/sunday/music-and-success.html //www.wwbw.com/The-Woodwind—Brasswind—Music-Makes-You-Smarter-g26057t0.wwbw

I work with adult learners, in a pre-GED class (ages 19-50). We are currently working on argumentative and persuasive writing. I consider this contest an excellent way for all learners to share the topics they are passionate about and the writing they are working hard to craft. I noticed, however, that the age cut-off limits this contest to 13-19 year olds. I was wondering if there is anyway to include non-traditional learners in this contest. Thank you for your response.

Hi Danielle — I’m so glad you like the contest, and I wish we could, but if we opened the challenge to anyone of any age, it would be almost impossible to judge fairly: the work of most 50-year-olds would be far different from that of most 13-year-olds, for one thing, and the volume of submissions might overwhelm our tiny staff for another. But if you’re interested in writing about how you used the contest with non-traditional learners, and including some of the best student samples in your writing, we’d be delighted to consider it for our Reader Ideas column . We love hearing from teachers like you! –Katherine

For the People Abortion is the process of killing an unborn child. According to surveys by author Michael Synder, every day in America, three thousand babies do not get a chance to experience the joy of life. Everyone deserves a chance to live, so abortion should be illegal. Abortion can injure the mother. According to Option Line, a company that works in educating expecting mothers of their options, says that abortion can have serious side effects. Infection can occur when metal instruments are inserted in the uterus, and they can cause irritation or can leave parts of the unborn child in the women’s body. Sometimes the medical instruments damage the uterus or cervix. If the uterus is punctured, you can suffer internal bleeding. If an infection, damage to an organ, or bleeding are severe, the person can die. According to The Global Dispatch, Tonya Reaves bleed to death after an abortion. Women have reported to Control Line that after abortion they have had suicide, depression, eating disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, drug abuse, anger, and anxiety. David C. Reardon, P.h D. says an eighteen year old committed suicide after a suction abortion. Abortion has adverse health effects, so it should be banned. Abortion is incorrect in many ways. There is no society that allows a person to kill another. Abortion is murdering a person who cannot defend themselves. When a woman is raped and impregnated, abortion is an acceptable option. Author Michael Synder writes that a partial birth abortion involves delivering a baby except for the head, scissors being jammed in the skull to enlarge it, a catheter is inserted in the head to remove the brains, and the corpse is delivered. We cannot let this immoral process march on. Most people want to put a stop to abortion. The Catholic Church has announced that they are against abortion. Members of The Catholic Church are one of the biggest group that push for a ban against abortion. According to Gallop Politics, 51% of Americans are pro-life, meaning they oppose abortion. People rally to gain the support for the pro-life. ABC news reports that on January 25, 2014 the annual Walk for Life was held in Washington, D.C. The Walk for Life featured thousands of anti-abortion protestors. These protestors have persuaded the government to make regulations on abortion. According to the New York Times on February eight, 22 states have passed seventy regulations on abortion, and twelve have banned abortion after twenty weeks of pregnancy. We should do what the majority wants. Abortion should be outlawed. The process is dangerous, immoral, and disliked. If we have enough support, America will be pro-life.

She Was Asking For It: On the way home from a business party, a woman struts down the sidewalk with six-inch stilettos and a body-accentuating pencil skirt. As she passes a dark alleyway, a man steals the woman from the night, raping her. Well, with the way she was dressed, she was asking for it. Shame on you for dressing provocatively. Shame on you for attracting perverts. Shame on you for being a woman. We teach our children that womanhood translates to foregone innocence. We attack the victim, not the perpetrator. Fostering a rape culture, society develops ingrained beliefs of misogyny, whether through obvious slang such as “hoe” and “skank,” or subtlety objectifying the female body. Rape is such a taboo subject that we would rather blame the victim than target the deep-rooted causes. As of 2009, the RAINN organization — Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network — reported that in America a sexual assault occurred every 2 minutes, averaging 237,868 Americans a year. However, a colossal 97% of rapists are not convicted. Rape victims rarely acquire justice, securing only a lifetime worth of trauma. Rape is a global issue, prompted by different societal factors and circumstances. For instance, in Nairobi, Kenya, reported rape cases have gone unnoticed. New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof followed the story of four-year-old Ida, a rape victim without justice. Through bribery, the rapist successfully escaped from a flawed system in which money trumps integrity. In America, media outlets and societal expectations perpetuate a cryptic rape culture, shrouded by corrupt moral standards. Normalizing the perception of women as submissive and sexually vulnerable, the media delivers a variety of misogynistic messages. In the Billboard hit “Blurred Lines,” Robin Thicke’s vulgar lyrics undermine the importance of consensual sex. Throughout the chorus Thicke repeats, “You’re a good girl. I hate these blurred lines. I know you want it.” Asserting a dominant role in the interaction, Thicke assumes the woman will have sex with him because she is a “good girl.” Further degrading the female existence, he classifies women as sex objects, not human beings entitled to natural rights. Of course, a song did not inspire the 237,868 reported cases of rape. However, the misogynistic principles radiating through the media and everyday life place blame on women, not the rapists committing the crime. That’s not to say all men are rapists or guilty of objectifying women, but the gender roles assigned to each sex formulate a twisted cultural dynamic. Men must be tough, assuming the role of the aggressor, while women must be submissive to the aggressor’s demands. We must deconstruct rape’s taboo, rendering victims guilt-free and trusting of help centers. If we, as educators, parents, and mentors, can teach young women that intelligence is more valuable than a sexual impression and that sex is an option, not an obligation, only then can we minimize the influence of rape culture.

Sources of Information: //www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/opinion/sunday/kristof-in-this-rape-case-the-victim-was-4.html?ref=nicholasdkristof https://www.rainn.org/statistics

Football is one of America’s most popular sports. If it is not the most physical sport in the world, it is one of them. There have been questions about the morality of the sport; men are hitting each other, full speed head to head with only plastic and padding protecting them. There have been several times where players have broken bones or have lost blood on live television. Football is graphic, but there are much more immoral things that can be seen in today’s world.

One of the most controversial things seen in the media today is the Hunger Games. It can be seen as a romantic action movie, but on the and more realistic side, it can be seen as a movie glorifying children murdering each other for fame and glory with hints of negative racial suggestion. Is it a coincidence that the only farm and agriculture district is made primarily of African Americans? This movie contains graphic content such as a child’s neck being snapped, but the fact that two survivors turned out to be lovers in the end made it okay, right? There is so much talk about children being influenced by today’s media, but no one has a problem with letting ten-year-olds reading this book or seeing the movie? The Hunger Games is not the only immoral movies that we have seen within todays media. Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game is a movie about a child who beat a fellow peer to death twice before the age of 18 and also happens to commit Genocide. All of this is made okay because he didn’t mean to do it. He was hailed as a hero and held as a role model for all young minds, but heaven forbid a teen is walking home from a convenience store is portrayed as a thug and when he killed unlawfully, his killer get off without being charged. But today parents don’t let them play football because it will Be a bad influence.

If football is something that is considered dangerous, why aren’t all other physical contact sports dangerous? Why isn’t dancing or cheerleading dangerous? If this was the case, the Olympics wouldn’t even exist. At any moment and time those people are risking their lives to entertain us, but we enjoy every second of it. If football and all other things that are dangerous to us as human beings were taken off the air, we would have nothing but animated television. Why is football put under fire, but all other things are ignored?

//learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/13/if-football-is-so-dangerous-to-players-should-we-be-watching-it/

John Kessel’s Essay on Enders Game

Grouping students based on their academic ability is absolutely acceptable. As a GT student, and having being put in a separate English and Reading Class with it, I have learned that being around students that are similar to your academic field is beneficial when working with other students. In these classes, you have the chance to work with students that can understand what you are saying as well as fix a problem you may have or add on to a good idea. There are several benefits to having students separated by their ability. Students with a higher academic ability, when separated, can be with students who understand and comprehend their peers, as I stated before. Also, in higher ability classrooms, students can learn at a harder level and move at a faster pace. This way, some students aren’t held back in lessons when their lower level peers are having trouble and the teacher doesn’t have to concentrate on helping the students who don’t understand, but instead teach at the speed that the rest of the classroom needs to be taught at. Most research that has been conducted has been focused on elementary schools in the United States. Students are starting to be separated in first grade to be placed in advanced programs and GT classes. Depending on the student, he/she can be placed in a class based on their strengths or their weaknesses. This way, students who need help in a specific subject have the opportunity to get more help with a more focused and attentive teacher. Also, if the student is strong in another subject, they can be placed in an advanced class to be able to learn more in that subject with their advanced peers. Another benefit that is brought up between the separation of abilities is the confidence booster. Students who aren’t as advanced can feel left in the dust by their peers who exceed them and are at a much higher level than they are. With the separation, the students who struggle won’t have to be compared with the students who exceed them everyday and dread that they aren’t as strong as them in academics, but can be up to speed with the class they are divided into with an easier work load. When you think of the advantages of placing students in different classrooms based on ability, for all academic levels, they outweigh the disadvantages. Faster pace, extra help, and a confidence booster are several things that we benefit from with the separation of gifted and nongifted children. For these reasons, I believe that students should be separated by ability rather than being in mixed ability classrooms.

Sources: //www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/03/18/elementary-teachers-grouping-reading-ability/1990917/ //learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/what-do-you-think-of-grouping-students-by-ability-in-schools/ //www.teach-nology.com/currenttrends/equity_excellence/tracking/

These days, a lot of kids are falling behind in the classroom. They don’t “get it” and that isn’t their fault. However, there are quite a few kids who are bored in the classroom because they already know everything that the teacher is saying. This is holding the brighter kids back and not letting them show their full potential. This is also lowering the less bright kids’ self esteem. Kids are failing classes and that is lowering their self esteem. It is like how Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can, or whether you think you can’t – you’re right.” They think that can’t do it. Their grades are telling them that they are not intelligent, so they do not try in school. If they are put in a class with people that are at their level, they will not feel bad about themselves and will try harder and succeed. The other side of the story is that some kids are getting bored in the classroom because they already know everything that is being taught. Their self-esteem is getting so high that they do not even try. They think they are super smart because they know something that someone else does not. Then they will get cocky and think they can compliance anything. Because of this they do not try hard and slack off at times. This will lead to their failure in the end. There is only one logical answer to these problems. We should separate kids based on their intelligence instead of age. Then, kids that are not as smart can learn without being humiliated by having to ask extra questions or not getting it. Kids with a higher intelligence can have a challenge. This will make them start trying in class. Hopefully this will get all students to try harder and succeed in their life. A lot of kids are not trying hard in class. They are getting bullied because they are not as smart as the rest of the kids in the class. They are getting their self-esteem shot down constantly. The solution that will help the most is to separate classes by intelligence instead of age. They will be learning stuff that challenges them, but is still possible for them to accomplish. I ask you to help out the next generation by challenging them to set new boundaries in their education and set the bar higher for future generations. You should keep in mind that they are the future of the world.

Sources used //learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/what-do-you-think-of-grouping-students-by-ability-in-schools/ //www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/03/18/elementary-teachers-grouping-reading-ability/1990917/

Sources //learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/should-stores-sell-violent-video-games-to-minors/

//www.esrb.org/ratings/ratings_guide.jsp

A common sight today would be younger children playing mature video games. This is a sad thing, because kids at this age shouldn’t be playing these games. I believe that stores should refrain from selling mature games to minors, for this would lead to mental immaturity is some more mature topics. The stores should still sell them to minors if the parents are absolutely okay with them playing the game, and if the game contains anything like nudity or sex then the game should not be rated mature but should be rated explicit or adult. The main reason that stores should not be allowed to sell mature games to minors is if a nine year old child would be exposed to mature content earlier in their lives (this is also why they should put nudity into an explicit rating) so they may not be able to mentally mature on some of those topics or not be that scared of going to jail. The child may also get addicted to drugs because if their favorite video game character smokes then it cannot possibly hurt him in real life anyway, but a common misconception is that you may think that these games will also lead to violent behavior in children because they think their friends will just respawn, but that would only happen if say a two year old played the games. Because at least a nine year old should have the common knowledge to know that death is permanent. That argument is completely absurd that kids will kill people thinking they will come back just think about it if they did drugs that would be one thing, but playing games a lot no if you were to get obsessed with a game do you think that it would change your look on reality? No it wouldn’t, but mature games still have bad influences to kids, so until they are at least fifteen they shouldn’t be allowed to play mature games. Because of the current age limit for mature games at seventeen, a lot more kids at younger ages play these mature games, and these games contain more mature content like functions where you can have kids in games and get STD’s. I know that from personal experience that some people make a goal of getting the most STD’s which can cause immaturity in kids in their early teens. This might cause kids to think that it is just something that won’t affect them later in their lives other themes like this would be drinking and other drug problems that might affect them, but this does not affect every kid that plays games that doesn’t mean it wont happen to your child.

Rachel Johnson, a young woman from England, was wearing shirts made for nine year olds when she was 17. She shared that she was buying hundreds of celebrity magazines per week. Doctors said she was two days from death because of anorexia. She said her eating disorder was made worse because of celebrities’ photoshopped pictures in magazines. If girls, such as Rachel, can’t look at pictures of “beautiful” women in magazines without wanting to starve themselves, something is wrong. There are millions of aspiring musicians, but virtually none will reach Paul McCartney’s success. There may be a million youth baseball players in the United States, but only a thousand get to reach the Major Leagues. How many young writers, including me, dream about achieving what Stephen King has? So what is success? Is it being the best, or is it being the best that one can be? We can’t consider ourselves failures just because we didn’t become elite. Christie Brinkley, at 60 years old, is in a bathing suit on the cover of People magazine. I looked at it. She’s still an attractive woman, and her cover shot was clearly airbrushed. Does Christie care? No, because none of it’s real. She knows that airbrushing is part of magazine modeling. Unfortunately, too many young girls, like Rachel, don’t know. In a video called “Body Evolution – Model Before and After”, you can watch a woman being photographed and edited. In the editing, her legs were lengthened, her stomach sculpted, her eyes enlarged, her calf muscles’ shaped. Even her hair was given a glow that the sunniest day in Florida couldn’t provide. If all of the editing was taken away, we would see a girl probably not much different than Rachel. Watch the Dove Evolution video. When the video opens we see the girl next door. Pretty, but blemished skin, flat hair and a shadow under her eyes. Like all of us most days. By the end, we see one of the most “beautiful” women ever. They do her makeup, they fix her hair, they transform her complexion, sculpt her neck and cheekbones. She becomes no one and the model girls like Rachel aspire to be all at once. However, most of the fixes are done on photoshop or an editing program. Jennifer Lawrence, star of The Hunger Games, known for her athletic figure, often says that it’s “dumb to be hungry to make people happy.” Enjoy the greatness in those gifted. Admire it, aspire to it. And know who you are and be secure working to be your best. No one should be intimidated by an airbrushed model any more than Superman’s strength.

//learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/do-photoshopped-images-make-you-feel-bad-about-your-own-looks/ //sandaretreats.com/blog/anorexia-sufferer-aimed-at-banning-airbrushing/

Football is becoming, if it already isn’t, the most popular sport in the United States. People will reserve a whole day just to watch football. This beloved activity is enjoyed by everybody everywhere of all genders and ages. Kids are quickly becoming fans of the sport, but the occasional injury leads some to believe that children should not be able to enjoy this wonderful sport. Contrary to certain beliefs, kids should be able to play football.

The NFL is where the best of the best football players go to play football for a career. Most of the current NFL players started as kids. If a player cannot get their career started until they’re fourteen, what are they going to do? This would result in overall less people playing college football, another widely watched football program. If there were less people playing college football, there would be less people to watch it. This would result in multiple jobs that people had to be lost, a big financial problem.

Football also teaches children valuable life lessons and team skills. It teaches them how to win humbly and lose graciously. Football also teaches children how to play as a team and cooperate with others. It teaches kids how to communicate with the people around them. It teaches kids perseverance, how to work hard and never give up. These are all extremely vital skills that children will need later on in their life. Football works you out like no other sport. It pushes your body and mind to limits it thought it didn’t know.

When people play physically demanding sports, pain is unavoidable. The same can be said for injuries. A twisted ankle or a broken wrist can and will happen, but it doesn’t affect the child for more than a few days or weeks. The media and the world today portrays concussions as a horrible thing that should be prevented at all costs. The truth is, an average concussion does not affect the person in the future. My uncle received several concussions in his days as an athlete and his life is no different from anyone elses. He still has a job and a normal income, and no disabilities of any kind. My brother also has received a concussion before. He got it a few years ago, but he still plays sports like a normal student.

When the sport of football was made, it was made for purposes of entertainment, and not much has changed since then. Football is still one of America’s most available and valuable sources of entertainment for everyone of any age. Playing football is one of the most valuable and helpful experiences a child can have.

Guskiewicz, Kevin. “Should Kids Play Football.” The Opinion Pages. The NY Times, 14 Dec. 2012. Web. 12 Feb. 2014. < //www.nytimes.com/2012/12/15/opinion/should-kids-play-football.html>.

“Concussions.” Teens Health. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Feb. 2014. < //kidshealth.org/teen/safety/first_aid/concussions.html>.

May we have people like Teachers check over and edit our editorials or does the rule of writing the editorial by ourselves exclude suggestions and editorials from experienced adults?

Alice, The ideas and writing in your editorial must be your own or your team’s – but you can have a teacher or adult proofread or offer advice, just as you might when writing a college essay. — Michael

The word “graffiti” usually has negative connotations. A connecting line could be drawn between graffiti and criminals. The stereotype of graffiti is that people sneak out at night to a wall or train and quickly spray messages on them. Although graffiti might seem bad on the surface, when investigated deeper, it can be considered a fascinating art. According to the New York Times, art is defined as “something that shows mastery, has stood the test of time, speaks for the era in which it was created, is valued by the masses.” Art in the past was very formal, as in they would work on a piece of art for a period of time in their studio and then present it to the public. Today, art has diffused into many different categories with different art mediums. Graffiti uses spray paint and is less formal. It speaks for the fast paced style of the modern era. Graffiti expresses and portrays a myriad of things. It shows diversities in culture in a certain area. It can also show people’s opinions on certain topics. A popular graffiti artist, Banksy, has many works where political symbolism is present. Sometimes all graffiti shows is beautiful contrasting colors and designs that pop out. Isn’t this considered art? An argument for graffiti not being art would be that sometimes private properties are vandalized. I understand that it is illegal to do this, but think about all the other things art has portrayed. Art expresses both good and bad messages. Art is a way of expressing one’s personal feelings and culture, not what the world thinks is right. Some people choose to promptly paint together a picture and then flee from the police. They paint their moral beliefs, not what the public wants. George C. Stowers bases his criteria of what art really is on aesthetics. Graffiti definitely catches the passerby’s eye. It requires extensive planning, imagination, and knowledge of artistic elements like shape, color, and composition. Stowers gives the example of wildstyle, or words written with different letter fonts that interlock with each other. This requires the knowledge of composition and color to catch the pedestrian’s eye. Graffiti is a revolutionary art form and continues to grow popular with the crowd. It draws “oohs” and “aahs” from all age groups. It definitely is an art form that is one of a kind. The messages and symbolism in the graffiti are definetely vivid. Graffiti is not only an art, it is a messenger of diverse cultures, a mastered skill, a meaningful practice, a way of life.

//iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/fall07/Sanchez/art.html //learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/can-graffiti-ever-be-considered-art/

Applications are very useful in many ways to people around the world. An application is a program that performs tasks. They are excellent ways of discovering news or being entertained. Some people can’t afford televisions or computers. They can just buy a cheap app using device and download the apps needed for it to have the abilities of a TV or computer. Smart TVs and computers use plenty of apps but they are not as dependent on apps as tablets, iPods, and phones. Still, computers are full of apps, even the internet is an app. Phones of course are full of apps, the App Store itself is an app. There are plenty of applications that are great to use. People say games are useless. The truth is that they are a useful form of entertainment. Usually games will get boring at a point and we will delete it. If you have a younger child, games like Temple Run, Angry Birds, and Subway Surfers are great to keep them busy. In fact, Angry Birds teaches physics! Minecraft is a game that can teach a bit of geology, geometry, problem solving skills, and survival. I know of a class that has it’s own Minecraft server and the students can play Minecraft at home with their class. Many games like Chess use strategy which is useful to learn. Different age groups have different choices for games, but they are always there to keep you entertained! We can get different kinds of literature and music using apps. The difference is that now instead of having to purchase a book, newspaper, or magazine from a shop, we can just touch or click on something and we will get it. You don’t have to go to concerts or buy CDs to listen to music. You can just find it on the internet or buy it on the device using the store application. You can follow sports teams with ESPN or the app of any league. Apps can broaden your knowledge on many subjects. There are applications that test your skill in subjects. As I mentioned before, there are games that teach you things. If you are using apps for school, note taking apps such as Notability or Goodnotes are great. Applications make things easier for teachers and students with apps such as Edmodo and Skyward. You can keep up with the assignments due and grades. Applications help make things easier for everybody. Overall, applications are great ways to keep up with what’s going on in the world today. We can be entertained whenever we want. Applications are everywhere and we use it during our spare time. Every generation has their own way of spending spare time. This generation’s are applications. //fluency21.com/blog/2013/10/29/now-teachers-encourage-computer-games-in-class/ //learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/do-apps-help-you-or-just-waste-your-time/

Technology is advancing quickly in this age, and robots are already starting to have a role in today’s society. Robots will be used in many ways, some for entertainment, some for assistance, and some for more severe reasons, such as defense and overseas deployment. Personal robots can be used to help the elderly, entertain and keep children while the parents are at work, etc. Government bots could be used for military purposes and things that are too dangerous for humans. Robots, in today’s society, would be much more than just helpful; they would most likely become some of the most valuable items on the market. People complain that using robots is morally unacceptable, that we would just use them as slaves, giving them little to no respect, making them do all the work for us at the lift of a finger, but that is just an opinion. If you don’t want one, don’t get one! Robots have been used in media for a long time, and when people see something amazing that a robot can do, they would want one, and then may even go out and buy one. Also, people could purchase things to customize/upgrade their personal unit, and if things got out of hand, there could be a built in kill-switch to put the robot down peacefully. While on the topic of robot malfunctions and issues, I should talk about people growing to fear the robots, or the robots taking control of the human population, like in The Matrix. People have given robots a bad rap due in movies and video games, due to them not being human, so no harm is done when they are destroyed. People have been using robots, as tools of marketing towards younger audiences who are satisfied by violence, testosterone, and explosions, which in the long run has made these helpful machines look evil, and undesirable. The modern world of technology has been about bringing the world to you, making everything easily accessible. Think, mobile phones, computers, cars and motorbikes have all been created to make everything closer and easier to use. With a robot, you could possibly send one to check on Grandma, or guide you through a place you’ve never been, or act as an assistant when you go shopping and the like. Some businesses may allow employees or common people to rent a robot for a set amount of time, so you can try a robot, risk-free without purchasing one for yourself. The industry of robotics would help the economy. In a world of advancement, bots would be a great help for many people, from being used as a friend, to being used to defend your country.

Engineers, architects, and professions that have to do with any sort of science are in high demand in the job industry. This is due to the quickly advancing science and technology markets that need educated students to help keep up with the demand. Employers and universities alike are trying to solve the problem of a shrinking expertise in the open fields, and the government can’t do anything to help students during their studies as the STEM research field is very expensive. In fact, college courses in English and philosophy are significantly less expensive. The result is more than one-fifth of students taking STEM courses dropping out, which means the students taking english majors instead are attempting to fill the already full job market. The STEM courses, while more challenging to complete, give students an ideal skill set when looking for a job, but the five years it takes to complete your major and receive your diploma scares away students every year. Not that English and history aren’t interesting fields to enter, but the amount of recently graduated students that get jobs with those majors is not as high as those with a STEM strength. The available market of new openings in the English-based fields is steadily decreasing, while the demand for STEM market jobs is steadily increasing. This has attracted the attention of the Florida government, who suggests that universities lower the course costs of STEM to help attract more students. This is a good plan, but universities fail to act upon it because the government doesn’t have the power to make them lower the fees. A solution to this situation, regardless of the already debated cost, would be increasing STEM engagement at the middle and high school level. This will increase the likeliness of students completing college as a STEM major. This would help in the engineering field, where there is a large availability of openings and not enough engineers to fill the demand. The same effect is happening in the healthcare market. Software engineers are dwindling in the marketplace, yet these people design the next great thing in the world of technology. These fields can very easily be seen as wanted positions and a position that pays well. In fact, STEM job markets tend to have a higher work to profit ratio, meaning bigger paychecks every month, rather than a market in history where revenue can sometimes be hard to come by. The choice should be clear for any student considering their course selection for college applications; choose a difficult course in science or engineering, and your life after college will be easier and more enjoyable for the years to come.

Sources: //www.cnn.com/2011/US/05/17/education.stem.graduation/ //learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/04/200-prompts-for-argumentative-writing/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=1& //www.foxbusiness.com/personal-finance/2012/12/12/why-english-majors-are-just-as-important-as-engineers/

As a teenager I have been faced with many situations that have not gone my way. For example, I was in Sam’s Club the other day and asked for a meatball sample, and the lady working the meatball stand refused my request. She stated that I needed a parent’s permission to try one. Parental permission–to try a meatball? I’m 16; I think I know my allergies and can monitor my food intake. This “rule” describes an unjust culture: one that asks teenagers to prepare for adulthood but doesn’t allow them to try a meatball by themselves. Because we, as teenagers, are generally seen as irresponsible, rules have been set to limit our freedoms. It is true that, due to our general lack of experience, we should be limited reasonably, but this oppression has surpassed reason. We, the teenagers of the United States, are becoming pressed, stressed, and depressed due to restrictive expectations and rules; therefore, we should agree to halt this increasing amount of mandates. The reasoning for restrictions is short-sighted. One person messes up; everyone suffers. The Sandy Hook and Colorado Springs incidents caused massive outrage and increased security throughout the US. However, this doesn’t decrease the amount of shootings (Hefling). Our school requires faculty members to be present for us to enter or exit school; non-faculty members could get punished if they let someone inside–even a trusted friend freezing in the cold. Yes, schools should be safe in an emergency, but too much caution affects freedom. The overall trust of teenagers is tarnished by a few irresponsible teens. It is illegal to be under 18 and drive between 11:00 pm and 5:00 am in Ohio on weekdays. The reasoning for this law? Some teenagers cause mischief at night; it should be noted that illegal mischief in teens has been decreasing in the last decade (Parker-Pope). Should it be illegal if a student has athletic practice and has to drive there before 5:00 am? That teen may lose his or her license–even if they have not broken a law. Perhaps a teen watched a late-night movie and needed to drive home. Should he have been there on a school night? Maybe not, but should it be illegal to drive after going to a movie? The law denies us teenagers to have relaxation and entertainment at night. Curfew should instead be up to parents to decide. When the world is becoming so stringent on rules and regulations that I can’t eat a meatball, something needs to be done. Since every teenager is different, rules should be, for the most part, regulated by parents. Stringent laws have gone too far.

Sources: Parker-Pope: //well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/02/the-kids-are-more-than-all-right/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

Hefling: //www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/02/school-shootings-security_n_4712407.html

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Learn how to express an opinion with clarity and style by examining New York Times Op-Ed Section best practices and techniques.

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News from the Columbia Climate School

Writing and Submitting an Opinion Piece

Kevin Krajick

The opinion pages are one of the best-read sections of any publication, in print or online—often on par with front-page news. And, some of the most attentive readers are decision makers: top people in government, corporations and nonprofit institutions. Appearing there is a prime way for the nonprofessional writer to get a valuable perspective into the public eye. Here is a how-to guide.

What kind of piece?

There are two basic forms: the essay (often referred to as op-ed), and letter to the editor. (“Op-ed” comes from when all newspapers were actually printed on paper, and outside writers customarily appeared on the page OPposite staff-written EDitorials. The New York Times recently traded this old-fashioned term for “guest essay.”)

Opinion essays don’t normally come from just anyone; the writer usually has some special expertise or credibility on the topic. This might include lawyers, ex-government officials or scientists. A piece may also come from someone with an especially telling or powerful personal experience relating to the topic—for example, an essay on homelessness by someone who has been homeless. They can run 400-1,200 words. Some generate a small fee.

Letters to the editor generally run just 100 to 150 words (or edited, even shorter). They are welcome from pretty much anyone. But those with credentials often stand a better chance of getting published. Whoever you are, don’t expect payment.

What are my chances?

Most publications want only pieces that play off the news of the last few days, or the week. After that, your letter is a dead one. So, in most cases, is your op-ed. Act fast.

That said, something may be going on below the public radar that should be in the news, but has not surfaced. If you know something, you say something; an op-ed can help to break the news. Maybe an invisible threat to public safety, or an unnoticed scientific discovery. Ideally, your topic will be timely, but at the same time have a long shelf life (i.e., the issue won’t be solved in a day or a month). Occasionally, you may find a “peg” for your piece: a holiday, anniversary, election, upcoming conference, report, a pending vote in Congress.

In all cases, depending on where you submit, calibrate expectations accordingly. Major publications, especially big dailies like The New York Times , may receive hundreds of op-eds each day, and even more letters to the editor. They will use only a few. In publications with less competition, your odds increase.

What makes a good op-ed?

It’s not just your opinion. It begins with facts, and makes an argument based on facts. It is informed by logic—not emotion or ideology. You can educate without preaching. And it’s not just a complaint; you must almost always offer next steps or possible solutions for the matter at hand.

Editors want pieces that don’t just wow you with expertise; they want pieces that are colorful, fast-moving and provocative—hallmarks of any good writing. A good op-ed is concise. It hits hard. It marshals vivid images, analogies and, when appropriate, anecdotes. E ditors see the opinion page as a place for advocacy, denunciations, controversy and astonishment. They want to stimulate community discussion and drive public debate. They want people to say, “Wow! Did you see that op-ed today?”

What makes a good letter to the editor?

Same stuff basically, except in a nutshell. OK, maybe a little more pure outrage is acceptable. Just make your case, and make it fast.

How to write it ?

Whether op-ed or letter, your piece must unfold quickly. Focus on a single issue or idea. State what the issue is, and let us know where you stand. That should happen in the first short paragraph or two. Following paragraphs—the meat in the sandwich, so to speak—should back your viewpoint with factual or first-hand information. Near the end, clearly restate your position and issue a call to action.

Some specifics to keep in mind:

• Grab the reader’s attention in the first line. End with a strong, thought-provoking line.
• Come down hard on one side of the argument. Never equivocate.
• Identify and acknowledge the counterargument; then refute it with facts.
• Use active verbs; g o easy on adjectives and adverbs.
• Avoid clichés.
• Avoid acronyms.
• A void technical jargon.
• Cite specific references and easy-to-understand data.

 Next step: All writers need editors. You might show your piece to a colleague or two in your field to see if they can poke holes in it. Or, if you know a good writer, ask them how the piece might be strengthened. You can also contact your institution’s communications staff; helping out is often part of their job. (But ghostwriting is not.) No guarantee someone can turn your junky screed into an influential masterpiece—but editing almost always helps.

Finally, include a catchy headline that conveys your message. This will help the editor grasp the idea quickly, and help sell your contribution. (However, expect the publication to write its own headline; that’s just how it works.)

Must someone sign off?

In most workplaces, there is no requirement that you submit a piece to management— especially in academia. It is understood that you’re speaking for yourself, not the institution. That said: your title and affiliation will usually appear with your byline. So in that sense, you indirectly represent the honor and credibility of your institution. A controversial piece that is well articulated, well read and respectful raises the profile of your institution. This is rarely viewed as bad.    

Where and how to submit?

Everyone wants their piece in The New York Times . Few will ever see it there. Unless you have something super-strong, consider other options. Some national general-interest outlets with a big demand for copy include The Hill , CNN Opinion , Huffington Post, The Daily Beast and Slate . The Conversation specializes in op-ed-type pieces from academics. Is your piece more regional or specialized? Check regional or specialized media. Local papers are always looking for a local angle on wider issues. Publications that cover energy, law or other topics are of course looking for that kind of piece.

If you or someone you know happens to know the opinion editor, you can send directly to him or her. Otherwise, most publications have a web page telling you where to send, and their particular requirements. Don’t fret if you don’t have an inside line; editors really do read those over-the-transom submissions.

Letters to the editor can often be sent in the body of an email. Most op-ed submissions are made in an emailed Word document. For the subject line in either case, that catchy title mentioned earlier will come in handy. If it’s an op-ed, write the editor a short note in the email body telling her/him what the piece gets at, and why you’re the person to get at it. Include your contact info and, if you want, a brief bio. 

In general, submit to one publication at a time. Unfortunately, editors may take days or weeks to get back—and if it’s a rejection, you may not hear at all. ( New York Times policy: if you don’t hear in 3 days, you’re rejected.) If you feel you must submit to more than one, let the editors know. But avoid submitting the same piece to two publications in the same geographical or readership market. Higher-prestige places will require that you offer to them exclusively.

Where can I find more guidance?

Below, some good resources. The OpEd Project in particular has not only advice, but a list of specific contacts and guidelines for submitting pieces. Good luck!

The OpEd Project website  

How to Write an Op-ed, Step by Step   The Learning Agency

Writing Effective Op-eds   Duke University

Writing Letters to the Editor     Community Toolbox

Writing Effective Letters to the Editor     National Education Association

Tips for Aspiring Op-Ed Writers   New York Times

And Now a Word From Op-Ed   New York Times

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Celebrate over 50 years of Earth Day with us all month long! Visit our Earth Day website for ideas, resources, and inspiration.

              NO MORE BLOOD FOR OIL

       While war rages in Eastern Europe, life goes on elsewhere.  Yet it is marked by fear and

       resentment, especially in the United States, already torn apart by political strife and the

       dread of yet another election cycle, with all that it entails.  Understandably, the average

       person (however one defines that abstraction) is worried about inflation.  At the moment,

       Americans are complaining vehemently about the high price of gasoline. Yet very little has

       been said or written about how high (or low) those fuel prices are. When we compare the

       current price at the pump to that in several other countries, including our North American

       neighbors, Great Britain, the European Union, and the three nations most affected by the

      war in Ukraine, the enormous disparity between our own situation and that facing people

      elsewhere becomes apparent.  Extrapolating from accurate and up-to-date data available 

      on the web, here is a table (adjusted for currency values, units of measurement and annual

      household income) that makes those differences as precise as they are unmistakable:*

                                   Gas Price    Unit Cost       Annual Income         Relative Cost    Purchase Power   

           U.S.               $4.84       1.00           $79,400              1/16,405           (100.00)                                                                                     U.K.               $3.70       0.76            $40,040               1/10,822            65.96                

           E.U.               $4.46        0.92            $44,091                1/9,886            60.26                        Canada            $6.20       1.28            $54,652                1/8,815            53.73        

              Poland            $22.22       4.59             $5,906               1/265.80             1.62                      Mexico          $103.17      21.32             $7,652                1/74.17             0.45        

           Ukraine         $145.17      29.99              $2,145                1/14.78            0.09        

           Russia          $672.79      139.00              $6,493                1/9.65             0.06       

            *Currency Rates: 1 USD = $0.92 EU, $0.76 £, $1.28 CAN, $22.80 złoty, $20.92 pesos, $29.66 UAH, $133 roubles     Sources: globalpetrolprices.com; worldpopulationreview.com; statista.com; CNNbusiness.com (March 12, 2022)  

       By a sublime yet tragic irony, Russia, whose proven oil and natural gas reserves are three times                larger than those of the United States, has by far the highest petroleum prices in the world. As

      Ukraine is suffering from the Russian onslaught, Russians are suffering from the actions of their

      government on a scale we can scarcely imagine.  Adjusted for income levels, the gap between

      both countries and their more affluent counterparts becomes astronomical.  Mexico, although

      still classed as a developing nation, is much better off than either one; Poland, though besieged

      by refugees and threatened by invasion, is downright wealthy compared to the other three.  As 

     the purchasing power index shows, America enjoys a standard of living that (in crude oil terms)

     is 1,667 times higher than Russia, 1,111 times that of Ukraine, and 222 times that of Mexico, an

     oil producing nation in its own right.  That does not imply that we have no right to object to an

    increase in gas prices, or that we should be grateful for what we have, and not make noise about

    the conditions we face, both as individuals and as a society.  It does mean that we must put such

    matters in global perspective, and that it is not becoming for us to act beleaguered, put upon, or

   oppressed, when our situation is not so much a major hardship as it is a minor inconvenience, or

   a mere side effect of an underlying economic disease, caused by the unholy alliance between oil

   cartels and political operatives, East and West.  The pandemic started two years ago; but OPEC

   is nearly half a century old, and shows no signs of abating, despite the routine lip service paid to

   alternative energy sources, environmental regulations, and an end to domestic drilling, both on

   land and off-shore.  “Energy independence” is neither an unattainable ideal nor an inducement

  to promote the use of fossil fuels.  But if Europe relies on Russian oil, what does Russia rely on? 

  And for how long can it withstand the misery and suffering that it has inflicted on itself, let alone

  those whom it failed to bully into submission?  Who will die first—the oligarch, the imperialist,

  or the global monopolist?  And who will pay the steep price, let alone, clean up the whole mess?

  Meanwhile. the U.S. imports nearly half (48%) of its oil, not from Venezuela or the Middle East

  but from Canada, which accounts for over 90% of their oil exports.  How long can we continue

  deceiving ourselves about why trucker convoys swarmed upon Ottawa?  Or about the role that

  Athabascan sands (in the province of Alberta) play in fiscal diplomacy, never mind the Alaska 

  pipeline? And how long can either Russia or the United States remain superpowers, while mired

  in myths, misconceptions and militarism, while everyone on the ground is caught in a vise, even

  as they struggle to survive?  Blaming the villain (Putin) is easy; rooting out economic causes 

  and human consequences of what passes for domestic as well as foreign policy is much harder.

 [cf. Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization: A History (Cambridge, MA, 2017); Richard Rhodes, 

 Energy: A Human History (New York, 2018); R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path (New York,

  1981).  Fuller’s warnings are as apt now as they were four decades ago, only far more urgent].

  Yet it must be done, or the world will perish in flames, losing its grip while clinging to illusions.

  As Adam Smith prophesied on the eve of the American Revolution, “this empire [Great Britain]

  . . . has hitherto existed in imagination only . . . it is surely now time that our rulers should either

 realize this golden dream . . . or that they should awake from it themselves, and endeavour to

 awaken the people.  If the project cannot be completed, it ought to be given up” (The Wealth

 of Nations [1776], “Of Public Debts,” V.3. ad fin.; ed. Edwin Cannan [1904], new pref. George J. 

 Stigler (Chicago, 1976), Vol, II, 486).  If we don’t change our ways, extinction will be our lot—

 our fossils will tell the tarry tale, as it did for all the dinosaurs who once ruled the earth.

I think Putin will go down in history as a waster of young russian lives also a barbarian and for nothing he must not like the russian people ether as thay also suffer mothers losing sons wives losing husband children losing father’s what an a*%*#h##&£#_

That goes without saying, yet it does nothing to change the situation. It also ignores the fact that neither his friends nor his foes among the nations of the world are any less guilty of creating and perpetuating the misery and suffering which you rightly condemn. Invective is neither helpful nor illuminating. As Sam Rayburn used to say, “you can always tell a man to go to hell, but making him go there is another story entirely.” When you find the words to make that happen, let me know.

Get the Columbia Climate School Newsletter →

Vanessa Mobley Joins Opinion to Lead Op-Ed Team

Opinion announces Vanessa Mobley will join Times Opinion as head of Op-Ed team.

We have exciting news to announce about one of Opinion’s leadership positions vital to shaping our daily report and some of our most influential work.

Starting Feb. 7, Vanessa Mobley will join the Times as Op-Ed editor, overseeing our stellar team of editors in charge of guest essays and contributing writers on politics, culture, international affairs, business, health, climate and much more. She will work with the vertical leaders and our Op-Ed staff to pursue our goals of ever-higher quality in writing, originality in argument, and ambition in the swings we take at the biggest ideas and challenges facing society and the world today.

Having worked with many accomplished writers, including a few of our own, Vanessa brings a fiercely creative mind, an insightful collaborative style, deep editing experience and a competitive hunger for exciting and smart pieces to Times Opinion. She is a clear thinker who loves crystalizing an idea and pairing it with a great author, and she is a thoughtful listener and empathetic colleague who wants the work on her team to be great — but also be a thrill to do.

Most recently, Vanessa was vice president, executive editor at Little, Brown and Co., where she published Clint Smith’s “How the Word Is Passed,” Ronan Farrow’s “Catch and Kill” and Beth Macy’s “Dopesick,” among other acclaimed books. She is widely respected in the publishing industry for her instinct for talent, narrative and excellence in writing, and prized by her authors for her incisive feedback and edits.

Previously, Vanessa worked at Crown, Penguin Press, Henry Holt and Basic Books. She has edited best-selling and prize-winning books from a diverse group of journalists and academics including Pulitzer Prize winners Samantha Power (“A Problem From Hell”), Caroline Elkins (“Imperial Reckoning”) and Liaquat Ahamed (“Lords of Finance”); scholars Peniel Joseph (“Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour”), Moustafa Bayoumi (“How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?”), Dorothy Roberts (“Shattered Bonds”), Matthew Crawford (“Shop Class as Soulcraft”), Reuben Jonathan Miller (“Halfway Home”); and journalists Chris Hayes (“Twilight of the Elites”), Sheri Fink (“Five Days at Memorial”), Rebecca Mead (“My Life in Middlemarch”), Binyamin Appelbaum (“The Economists’ Hour”), Wesley Lowery (“They Can’t Kill Us All”), Scott Shane (“Objective Troy”), Josh Levin (“The Queen”), Reeves Wiedeman (“Billion Dollar Loser”), Michelle Goldberg (“The Means of Reproduction”), Seyward Darby (“Sisters in Hate”), Bridgett M. Davis (“The World According to Fannie Davis”) and Kate Fagan (“What Made Maddy Run” and “All the Colors Came Out”).

Vanessa is a graduate of Williams College and did graduate coursework in English at the University of California, Berkeley.

The Op-Ed team will also soon enjoy the talents of one of our strongest and most trusted editors: Brian Zittel . In recognition of a job well done launching Opinion’s newsletter portfolio, Brian’s role is expanding to become managing editor for both Op-Ed and newsletters. As an experienced planner and problem solver, Brian will work closely with Vanessa and Patrick to focus on coordinating our daily line-up of guest essays and newsletters to ensure smooth workflow and execution, and help support the Op-Ed team while continuing to oversee our newsletters.

We are looking forward to what’s to come.

— Kathleen Kingsbury and Patrick Healy

Explore Further

Jyoti thottam named editorials editor, more opinion announcements, opinion’s newest team members.

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I Was a Heretic at The New York Times

I did what I was hired to do, and I paid for it.

Listen to this article

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

Updated at 5 p.m. ET on March 5, 2024

O n one of my first days at The New York Times , I went to an orientation with more than a dozen other new hires. We had to do an icebreaker: Pick a Starburst out of a jar and then answer a question. My Starburst was pink, I believe, and so I had to answer the pink prompt, which had me respond with my favorite sandwich. Russ & Daughters’ Super Heebster came to mind, but I figured mentioning a $19 sandwich wasn’t a great way to win new friends. So I blurted out, “The spicy chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A,” and considered the ice broken.

The HR representative leading the orientation chided me: “We don’t do that here. They hate gay people.” People started snapping their fingers in acclamation. I hadn’t been thinking about the fact that Chick-fil-A was transgressive in liberal circles for its chairman’s opposition to gay marriage. “Not the politics, the chicken,” I quickly said, but it was too late. I sat down, ashamed.

As far back as I can remember, my parents have subscribed to the Times . As a kid, I’d run out to grab the newspaper from the driveway most mornings, and we’d do the crossword puzzle together on the weekends. When I got a job in the Times Opinion section in 2019, they were thrilled—the last time someone in my family had had anything to do with the paper, it was for my grandmother’s run-in with the law in 1986. In an act of civil disobedience, she had chained herself to her hot-dog cart in Houston after city officials refused to give her a food-vendor license. (She ultimately beat the ticket .)

Graeme Wood: The move to eradicate disagreement

I was glad that someone like me—with a background writing for right-of-center publications—was welcome at the paper of record. After college, I’d landed a fellowship on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal , and then a writing job at The Weekly Standard . The Standard was conservative yet unrelentingly anti–Donald Trump, and happy to pick fights with Republicans. The story I’m most proud of writing there was one exposing the racist remarks of then-Representative Steve King of Iowa.

James Bennet, the Times ’ editorial-page editor, and James Dao, the op-ed editor, were committed to publishing heterodox views. From my time at the Standard , I had contacts on the political right and a good sense of its ideological terrain. The Times had hired me to provide research for columnists and to solicit and edit newsy, against-the-grain op-eds. I brushed off my discomfort about the office politics and focused on work. Our mandate was to present readers with “intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion,” as the founder of the modern New York Times , Adolph Ochs, put it in 1896. This meant publishing arguments that would challenge readers’ assumptions, and perspectives that they may not otherwise encounter in their daily news diet. I edited essays by the mayor of a small city in Kentucky, a New York City subway conductor on her work during COVID , a military mother on improving life on bases . I also sought out expressly conservative views.

Ochs was not, of course, calling for publishing just any opinion. An op-ed had to be smart and written in good faith, and not used to settle scores, derive personal benefit, or engineer some desired outcome. It had to be authentic. In other words, our goal was supposed to be journalistic, rather than activist.

This, I learned in my two years at the Times , was not a goal that everyone shared.

B eing a conservative —or at least being considered one—at the Times was a strange experience. I often found myself asking questions like “Doesn’t all of this talk of ‘voter suppression’ on the left sound similar to charges of ‘voter fraud’ on the right?” only to realize how unwelcome such questions were. By asking, I’d revealed that I wasn’t on the same team as my colleagues, that I didn’t accept as an article of faith the liberal premise that voter suppression was a grave threat to liberal democracy while voter fraud was entirely fake news.

Or take the Hunter Biden laptop story: Was it truly “ unsubstantiated ,” as the paper kept saying? At the time, it had been substantiated, however unusually, by Rudy Giuliani. Many of my colleagues were clearly worried that lending credence to the laptop story could hurt the electoral prospects of Joe Biden and the Democrats. But starting from a place of party politics and assessing how a particular story could affect an election isn’t journalism. Nor is a vague unease with difficult subjects. “The state of Israel makes me very uncomfortable,” a colleague once told me. This was something I was used to hearing from young progressives on college campuses, but not at work.

There was a sense that publishing the occasional conservative voice made the paper look centrist. But I soon realized that the conservative voices we published tended to be ones agreeing with the liberal line. It was also clear that right-of-center submissions were treated differently. They faced a higher bar for entry, more layers of editing, and greater involvement of higher-ups. Standard practice held that when a writer submitted an essay to an editor, the editor would share that draft with colleagues via an email distribution list. Then we would all discuss it. But many of my colleagues didn’t want their name attached to op-eds advancing conservative arguments, and early-to-mid-career staffers would routinely oppose their publication. After senior leaders in the Opinion section realized that these articles were not getting a fair shake, the process evolved. Articles that were potentially “controversial” (read: conservative) were sent directly to the most senior editors on the page, to be scrutinized by the leadership rather than the whole department.

The tension between journalistic and activist impulses existed in newsrooms before the spring of 2020. But it deepened after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the protests and riots that gripped America in the subsequent weeks. The account of how the Times came to publish an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton calling for the military to quell riots, and of the controversy that followed, has been told in many places, most recently by Bennet, my former boss, in a lengthy essay for 1843 , The Economist ’s magazine . I was the primary editor of that op-ed, under the direction of my more senior colleagues.

I was working remotely from Los Angeles at the time and remember walking down Fairfax Avenue a few days earlier. Everything was trashed. Gang signs had been scrawled on the walls of stores; graffiti on a bank branch read hang bankers ; stores with Black Lives Matter signs had been ransacked. Police cars and some stores had been burned nearby, and I could smell the ash in the air. Notably, 1,000 National Guardsmen had been called in to Los Angeles to restore calm.

The Times editorial board weighed in on the Black Lives Matter protests, articulating complete support for their mission:

In too many police departments there is a culture of impunity. Until that culture is changed, there will continue to be rightful rage at its existence. Rather than just condemning or applauding protesters, Americans should listen closely to what they’re demanding.

Not all of the demonstrations were peaceful. Police stations in Minneapolis and Portland, Oregon , were set on fire. Police cars were firebombed in New York City, and officers were shot in St. Louis. Many people felt that things were spiraling out of control.

On June 1, Tom Cotton, a former Army officer and the junior senator from Arkansas, was advancing the argument—in exchanges with President Trump and on his Twitter feed —that the president should invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to deploy, “if necessary, the 10th Mountain, 82nd Airborne, 1st Cav, 3rd Infantry—whatever it takes to restore order. No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.” The “no quarter” element caused alarm—did Cotton mean “leave no survivor,” as the phrase’s use in a military context could suggest? “A no quarter order is a war crime,” the conservative commentator and former Army lawyer David French responded . Cotton clarified, tweeting : “If you say that someone was given no quarter, you mean that they were not treated kindly by someone who had power or control over them,” with a link to that definition in a dictionary. Not everyone was convinced.

The next day, Cotton’s office pitched me an op-ed about Twitter threatening to lock his account if he didn’t delete the original tweet. I sent the pitch to Dao, the op-ed editor. Rather than focus on the side issue of Twitter’s content-moderation policies, Dao replied, Cotton’s essay should be about the actual substance of his argument: In this case, does the president have the authority to invoke the Insurrection Act? Should he? Other editors who were consulted on the pitch found that argument worthwhile. I conveyed the reformulated idea to Cotton’s office, and his staff filed a draft early the next morning. We also had plans, as was our custom, to run arguments against Cotton’s view. And we already had .

I was given the job of fact-checking and line-editing. Among other edits, I inserted a line making clear the distinction between peaceful protesters and law-breaking looters. I deleted several objectionable sentences and cleared up factual questions: all pretty standard in the work of an op-ed editor. In addition to my own edits, I incorporated edits conveyed by Bennet, Dao, and the deputy op-ed editor, Clay Risen; then a copy editor went over the essay. Over the course of this process, I went back and forth with Cotton’s staff several times, and we exchanged multiple drafts.

I had one more task to take care of. Cotton’s office had emailed me several photos that they wanted to see published alongside the op-ed, showing times when the same legal doctrine had been invoked in the past. One was of U.S. troops enforcing the desegregation of the University of Mississippi in 1962. I sent these to a photo editor, Jeffrey Henson Scales, and asked him to “consider” them. He wrote me back to say, “A false equivalence, but historical images are there now,” meaning he’d added them to the story file in the system. I thanked him and added a “confusion” emoji, in case he wanted to expand on what he meant. He replied by sending me the emoji of a black box, representing solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.

At about 2 p.m. on Wednesday, June 3, Cotton’s office signed off on the article. Risen and Dao then approved publication.

Immediately, the op-ed caused an outcry within the Times . Dozens of the paper’s employees retweeted an identical, or near-identical, statement, workshopped on Slack and rubber-stamped by the NewsGuild of New York, which represents the newspaper’s union (I was a member), claiming that “ running this put Black @nytimes staff in danger .”

It was an outlandish claim but next to impossible to rebut—how can you tell someone who says they’re not safe that, in fact, they’re fine? Did they know that in some states, troops had already been deployed to protect public safety? Were we reading the same op-ed? Were they serious?

Leadership at the paper seemed to think so; the claim had the trappings of a workplace-safety and racial-justice issue. The Times Guild immediately started organizing against the op-ed and those responsible for it. “Is there something else we can do? I am behind whatever action we might take,” wrote Susan Hopkins, a newsroom editor who now helps run the front page, in the Guild Slack channel. By the end of the week, the Guild had a letter with more than 1,000 signatures demanding changes to the Opinion section. (When I pointed out to a Guild representative that its activism was in effect calling for one of its own members to face repercussions, he seemed surprised, and apologized, though the Guild did not meaningfully change its public tack.)

A diplomatic correspondent, Edward Wong, wrote in an email to colleagues that he typically chose not to quote Cotton in his own stories because his comments “often represent neither a widely held majority opinion nor a well-thought-out minority opinion.” This message was revealing. A Times reporter saying that he avoids quoting a U.S. senator? What if the senator is saying something important? What sorts of minority opinions met this correspondent’s standards for being well thought-out? In any event, the opinion Cotton was expressing in his op-ed, whatever one thinks of it, had, according to polling cited in the essay, the support of more than half of American voters. It was not a minority opinion.

Soon a new channel was created on Slack to discuss the op-ed. In a matter of hours, more than 1,500 employees had joined it, and there were thousands of messages plotting next steps and calling for a retraction, an editors’ note, firings.

Many colleagues wrote to me directly to express their anger. A few offered support. “Hey fwiw I disagree with Cotton but I think that piece was a traditional op-ed from the other side. Hope you’re OK,” a senior staff editor told me.

One columnist suggested that I “take notes.” I did.

O n Thursday , June 4, a reporter on the business desk named Edmund Lee contacted me. “So, we’re reporting out the Cotton Op-Ed,” he wrote. “We know from sources you were the principal writer.” I reached out to Dao for advice on how to handle this ludicrous claim, and did as he suggested. “I’ll have to send you to corp comms,” I wrote to Lee. “Off the record: I can categorically tell you that I did not write the Op-Ed.”

Later that day, the Times published a story by Lee and two other reporters. “The Op-Ed was edited by Adam Rubenstein,” the article said. It devoted five paragraphs to my interaction with the photo editor, who had, against company policy, shared with the reporters some of our Slack messages.

Mr. Scales raised an objection. “A false equivalence, but historical images are there now,” he wrote to Mr. Rubenstein on Slack, the internal messaging software used by Times employees. “Yeah, there are a few in there,” Mr. Rubenstein responded.

The full exchange made clear that I had been talking about the photos; presented this way, many read it as a confession that I believed the article was drawing false equivalences. Indeed, after this account came out, The Washington Post described me as having “shrugged off accuracy issues.”

That wasn’t the only issue with Lee’s story. As Bennet noted in his essay for 1843 , the article claimed that Cotton advocated suppressing “protests against police violence.” The op-ed didn’t argue that. If it had, we would not have published it. In fact, Cotton’s essay was explicit in distinguishing between protests and the undeniable violence and looting: “A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants.” (When asked for comment by The Atlantic , Danielle Rhoades Ha, a Times spokesperson, pointed to the op-ed’s language calling for a show of force to “deter lawbreakers.” She wrote, “‘Lawbreakers’ would have included people marching without permits, refusing to disperse and blocking the streets. A fair reading of that suggests that he was in favor of military intervention against those breaking curfew or refusing to disperse as well as looters and rioters.” At the time, police cars were burning in glass-strewn streets. I assure you, when Cotton wrote “lawbreakers,” he wasn’t talking about curfews.)

At first the paper’s publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, had defended the choice to publish Cotton’s op-ed, though he added that he was listening to everyone’s concerns “with an open mind.” By that night, he’d caved and was claiming that a review had been conducted that found that “a rushed editorial process” was responsible for an op-ed that “did not meet our standards.” For the record, I—the editor on whom the paper had pinned responsibility—was never interviewed as part of any formal review.

Later, after poring over the Slack channels, I realized something more surprising: Rachel Abrams, one of Lee’s co-authors on the article, had been a vocal internal critic of Cotton’s op-ed. “How can they be sending us emails telling us they’re keeping us safe and care about our physical and mental well-being and then publish this,” she had posted on Slack, later adding, “I think it’s good that a lot of us will put our names on a strong condemnation.” (She later stated that, as a media reporter, she should not have said this, but that there was no issue with her factual reporting for the story.)

I watched as factitious accounts of the publication process and the op-ed itself made their way into the paper’s own coverage and beyond. A narrative had emerged on Slack: that I had gone rogue and published the article without any involvement of higher-ups. Of course this was false, but that untruth nevertheless became central to the story. I had followed all the rules, but I had the sinking feeling that not all of my colleagues felt similarly constrained.

T he debate on Slack seemed interminable. Stephanie Saul, a Pulitzer Prize–winning education reporter, was one of the few people who expressed support for publishing a range of views on the op-ed page. Margaret Lyons, a television critic, countered: “We don’t run pieces where serial killers tell us murdering is actually fun and great.”

On the morning of June 5, the company assembled for a virtual town hall. As Bennet wrote in 1843 , this was an opportunity for him to apologize (he didn’t), and for Sulzberger and Dean Baquet, then the Times ’ executive editor, to get ahold of the ship (they didn’t). Afterward, one reporter, Liam Stack, wrote to colleagues, “This rhetoric of ‘a moment of deep reflection and listening’ is just making people more angry.” The pressure on management would not relent.

That night, an editors’ note was appended to the op-ed. The note contains many errors, among them that the editorial process had been “rushed,” that “senior editors were not sufficiently involved,” and that facts in the article weren’t quite right. Never mind, of course, that it wasn’t rushed, that senior editors were deeply involved, and that there were no correctable errors. The note criticized Cotton’s claim that “radicals like antifa are infiltrating protest marches,” alleging that it had “not been substantiated.” But the attorney general was on the record saying that antifa had done just that—a fact the Times eventually confirmed for itself.

“A more pathetic collection of 317 words would be difficult to assemble,” Erik Wemple, the media critic of The Washington Post , wrote a few years later about the editor’s note.

The next morning I got a call from Sulzberger. I warned him that every action he was taking—the town halls, the public statements, the editors’ note, and the Times ’ own erroneous reporting—was putting me, my colleagues, and Sulzberger himself in a worse position. He apologized for the mess, and for my being caught in the middle of it, and said he’d “stew on” what he could do.

I never heard from him again.

The same day, Sulzberger asked Bennet to resign. “Wow,” Meghan Louttit, who is now a deputy editor in the newsroom, wrote on Slack. “James’s resignation makes me somewhat … Hopeful?” and added that the firing, in her view, represented “a first step.”

But a first step toward what? During an Opinion all-hands meeting, a liberal columnist asked Sulzberger about the precedent that firing Bennet set: Will you stand by me if people around here and on Twitter don’t like one of my columns?

Every now and then, the group that handles security for the Times would check in on me to make sure I was safe. Ever since the paper had named me as the person responsible for publishing Cotton’s op-ed, I had been receiving alarming threats.

I felt in those days like I was in a foreign country where I didn’t speak the language and was on trial for a manufactured offense. I still thought that if I could only explain that the regular process had been followed, that the op-ed had called for protesters not to be harmed but instead protected, the situation could still be resolved.

Maybe I should have seen this all coming. A few months earlier, my former colleague Bari Weiss had predicted that Bennet wouldn’t last long: “He is doing what they claim to want but they don’t want it,” she told me. Once Bennet resigned, a new regime came into Opinion. Dao was reassigned to the national desk. Clay Risen moved to Politics, then to Obituaries. New policies were enacted. A “See something, say something” rule was affirmed, and a Slack channel called “op-sensitivity” was created, in which editors were encouraged to raise concerns about one another’s stories. By December, I had decided to leave the paper. It had been made clear to me, in a variety of ways, that I had no future there.

Caitlin Flanagan: Colleges are lying to their students

In the years preceding the Cotton op-ed, the Times had published op-eds by authoritarians including Muammar Qaddafi , Recep Tayyip Erdoğan , and Vladimir Putin . The year of the Cotton op-ed, it also published the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece Regina Ip’s defense of China’s murderous crackdown on prodemocracy protests in Hong Kong, Moustafa Bayoumi’s seeming apologia of cultural and ethnic resentments of Jews, and an article by a leader of the Taliban, Sirajuddin Haqqani . None of those caused an uproar. Last year, the page published an essay by the Hamas-appointed mayor of Gaza City , and few seemed to mind. But whether the paper is willing to publish conservative views on divisive political issues, such as abortion rights and the Second Amendment, remains an open question.

I’m not sure the relative calm can be attributed to the new leadership or new policies; more likely the cause was enough blood having been let, and Donald Trump having left office (however unwillingly). On January 6, 2021, few people at The New York Times remarked on the fact that liberals were cheering on the deployment of National Guardsmen to stop rioting at the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., the very thing Tom Cotton had advocated.

(In a statement, Rhoades Ha, the Times spokesperson, told The Atlantic that the Opinion section’s “commitment to publishing diverse views—including those that are unpopular, controversial or heterodox—is unwavering.” She doubled down on the Times ’ claims that the Cotton op-ed “did not hold up to scrutiny” and that senior leaders weren’t involved enough. “None of that,” she added at the end, “was Adam’s fault. As a junior member of the team, he deserved better editorial support and oversight.” Please. What I and others really deserved were leaders who didn’t buckle under pressure and sacrifice their own to placate a loud and insurgent group at the paper.)

All of this happened in the first five years of my career. In the worst of those days, I was attacked not only by colleagues, but also by acquaintances and friends. One friend contacted my girlfriend of seven years, asking whether she would take a stand against “Adam’s role in promoting fascism.” She—the tough-as-nails daughter of Peruvian immigrants who grew up hearing stories of her parents fleeing the Shining Path—ignored it, and some eight weeks later, we were engaged.

As painful as it was in my mid-20s to think that my journalistic career would end as a result of this episode, it’s even more painful to think that newsrooms haven’t learned the right lessons from it. If the Times or any other outlet aims to cover America as it is and not simply how they want it to be, they should recruit more editors and reporters with conservative backgrounds, and then support them in their work. They should hire journalists, not activists. And they should remember that heterodoxy isn’t heresy.

By telling the story the Times told about Cotton’s op-ed, the paper seemed to avoid confronting the tough reality that despite many staffers’ objections, the article was well within the bounds of reasonable discourse. What did it mean for the paper and its coverage that Times employees were so violently opposed to publishing a mainstream American view?

It was clear to me then and it’s clear to me now that the fight over Cotton’s op-ed was never about safety, or the facts, or the editing, or even the argument, but control of the paper and who had it. In the end, all that mattered was that an example had been made.

This article originally misidentified Adolph Ochs as the founder of The Times.

Journalism professors call on New York Times to review Oct. 7 report

More than 50 tenured journalism professors from top universities have signed a letter calling on the New York Times to address questions about a major investigative report that described a “pattern of gender-based violence” in the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel.

The letter follows months of criticism and concerns raised by outside critics as well as some Times staffers about the credibility of its sourcing and the editorial process for the story.

The letter, signed by professors at colleges including New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, Emory and the University of Texas, asks the Times to “immediately commission a group of journalism experts to conduct a thorough and full independent review of the reporting, editing and publishing processes for this story and release a report of the findings.”

It was sent Monday morning to Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, executive editor Joe Kahn and international editor Philip Pan.

In a statement, a spokeswoman for the Times said that the paper has “reviewed the work that was done on this piece of journalism and [we] are satisfied that it met our editorial standards.”

The letter, obtained by The Washington Post, acknowledged the impossibility of “writing perfectly accurate drafts of history in real time” but emphasized that news organizations must be willing to interrogate their own work.

It notes that the Times and many other publications have reassessed stories in the manner the professors suggest. In 2004, the Times reviewed its coverage of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq; in a note to readers , editors later acknowledged they identified “problematic” stories that had been based on the accounts of Iraqi sources “whose credibility has come under increasing public debate.”

Signers include Robert McChesney of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Victor Pickard of the University of Pennsylvania, Maggy Zanger of the University of Arizona and Diane Winston of the University of Southern California.

Questions began to emerge shortly after the Times published its December investigation headlined “‘Screams Without Words’: Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.”

Relatives of a woman slain in the attack, whose story became a central focus of the Times report, cast doubts on reporting suggesting that she was raped, while other critics pointed to discrepancies in various accounts offered by an eyewitness cited in the story.

The Intercept reported that the Times’ flagship podcast, “The Daily,” had shelved a planned episode about the report due to these questions. In response, the Times launched an intensive internal investigation to determine who had leaked newsroom information, a campaign the paper’s Guild called a “ racially targeted witch hunt .” The Times firmly denied the Guild’s claim.

The Intercept also reported that the Times relied heavily on two relatively inexperienced freelancers in Israel — Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella — to report the story, while Times correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman was responsible for weaving it together.

The professors’ letters raised concerns about “such reporting arrangements,” noting that Pulitzer-winning reporter Rick Bragg resigned from the Times in 2003 after it was revealed that he had relied heavily on a less-experienced freelancer for reporting.

The letter also makes reference to comments made by Gettleman in an interview after the story was published, in which he said he did not want to use the word “evidence” to describe certain details in the story because it “suggests you’re trying to prove an allegation or prove a case in court.”

“This language is in stark contrast to the story itself which uses the word ‘evidence’ in the sub headline referring to the same information Gettleman was apparently discussing on stage,” the letter said.

In March, the Times reported that new video evidence “undercut” some of the details in its initial investigation. But the paper did not issue a correction or a retraction of the December report, which the journalism professors called an “unusual decision.”

Shahan Mufti, a professor at the University of Richmond, said in an interview that the unusual circumstances called for response from journalism educators.

“We in journalism education are not typically in the business of telling people in the profession how to do their job,” he said. “This required serious consideration and deliberation, and we came to the conclusion that this is necessary.”

Sandy Tolan, a professor at the University of Southern California, said that the timing of the story — as public opinion in the United States was shifting toward a more critical understanding of the devastation of Israel’s bombing of civilian areas in Gaza — is also relevant.

“As the death toll mounted in Gaza, and criticism was beginning to focus more on Israel, the New York Times released this story, which seems to have been published prematurely,” he said. “Being cognizant of the potential damages of and consequences of the timing, given that it didn’t appear to be as well-reported as it should have been, there’s all the more reason why an external review is appropriate.”

An independent review could find the Times did nothing wrong, the letter says, or find errors in the way the newsroom operated. Either way, the letter concludes, an immediate review “is the only responsible and credible thing to do.”

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Editorial: The attack on the UCLA protest encampment was unacceptable

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It is never OK to use physical violence against people with whom you disagree. This should be obvious, but the events that unfolded on the UCLA campus early Wednesday show the consequences when that message is lost.

Late Tuesday night , a large group of people attacked the anti-war encampment on the Westwood campus. They weren’t campus authorities acting on the university’s order that the camp was “unlawful,” but rather people who disagreed with the pro-Palestinian protesters and decided to clear the camp themselves. It turned ugly quickly.

Editorial: Sending armed troops to quash peaceful campus protests is a dangerous idea

The U.S. military shouldn’t squash antiwar protests on college campuses, no matter what House Speaker Mike Johnson and other Republican politicians say.

April 26, 2024

In this era of a video camera in every pocket, we can watch it all in jarring clarity through the many clips posted on social media. It’s shocking to view people rush the barricades, trying to remove the metal and wood barriers and attack one another with fists and sticks and pepper spray.

It’s disheartening to hear the vile slurs hurled by counterprotesters and the screams from protesters after a firework launched into the middle of the encampment explodes. This violence continued over the course of hours, although campus officials knew it was going on, and had summoned law enforcement to the campus. Student journalists covering the incident were attacked .

Looking back it should have been easy to see this clash coming. Tension had been brewing since the pro-Palestinian protesters set up an encampment last week and it escalated after Israel supporters set up a protest space nearby, as has been documented by the Daily Bruin.

Goldberg: What we keep getting wrong about protests like those at USC, Columbia and other campuses

It’s a mistake to regard youth demonstrations such as those over Israel’s war in Gaza through a lens of ‘60s nostalgia. Crowds can be a force for ill as well as good.

April 30, 2024

University of California President Michael V. Drake was right to call for a review of the campus administration’s actions. We hope it can determine whether the university could have done more to prevent this from blowing up Tuesday night, why campus security stood by as the violence escalated and why it took about three hours for officers from the Los Angeles Police Department and California Highway Patrol to control the situation. UC leaders have a responsibility to maintain safety and the melee made the campus unsafe for students and personnel.

Several faculty have criticized the response as a failure by university, city and state authorities. “Why didn’t the police, UCPD and LAPD, show up? Those in the encampment were defenseless in the face of a violent band of thugs. And no one, wherever they stand politically, is safer today,” David Myers, a professor of Jewish history at UCLA, said.

Anyone who is found to have participated in the violence should be held accountable, as Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday, o therwise such attacks are bound to continue as the campus protest movement grows nationwide.

Protesters in encampments on college campuses know they could face arrest over trespassing or failure to disperse, which is what happened Thursday morning as police cleared the UCLA encampment and arrested more than 200 people . That’s part of the deal when undertaking acts of civil disobedience. But protesters should not be subject to physical attacks from people who disagree with them.

Free speech and protest are foundations of the United States — and it’s been a cornerstone of American university life for decades. It’s unacceptable for anyone to try to silence an opinion they don’t agree with through intimidation and violence.

More to Read

A staggering two weeks at UCLA: Protest, violence, division marks ‘dark chapter’

May 7, 2024

Photos: Clashes at pro-Palestinian demonstrations on California campuses

May 2, 2024

UCLA struggles to recover after 200 arrested, pro-Palestinian camp torn down

May 3, 2024

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