For our latest conversation for the Runway pod we (or in this case, Mauro) had the privilege of speaking with Jake Meth, founder of op-ed writing and strategy firm Opinioned. Jake started Opinioned to support business leaders with thought leadership, with a laser focus on op-eds. Previously, Jake had spent five years as Fortune Magazine’s opinion editor.
In the episode, Jake shares his journey from living in Egypt during the Arab Spring to becoming an editor at Fortune, before we begin unpacking all the goodies on how to write the perfect op-ed.
What you’re getting here is a breakdown on how to write the perfect op-ed as well as the full transcript (with some edits for clarity) so that you can discover the nuances of creating compelling opinion pieces that can captivate and inform readers. Enjoy!
Full transcript of the chat with Jake
Mauro Battellini: Jake, welcome. It’s great to have you here. How are you?
Jake Meth: I’m good. Thanks for having me on the podcast.
Mauro Battellini: Thanks for joining us Jake. You founded Opinioned which is a firm that helps other firms earn top tier media coverage with op-eds. But you’re also a former journalist. So you built an edited Fortune Magazine’s opinion section, right? But you’ve also had some interesting experiences before that. You lived in Egypt for a while?
Jake Meth: Yeah that’s right. Yeah I lived in Egypt for two years. I moved there in the summer following when their anti-government protests had started in January of 2011.
Mauro Battellini: So what’s the story here? How did you end up in Egypt?
Jake Meth: At the outset of going to Egypt my goal was to be a journalist. And when I graduated college in 2010 the job market was not very good. And that also carried over to what was going on in journalism. And I wanted to get a job covering international affairs and writing about what was going on around the world. And I couldn’t get any kind of job in the US. And so I got advice from a couple of people that I talked to, because I had studied the Middle East already, to just go out and try to start writing about what was happening in one of those countries. And that spurred me to move to Egypt which felt like a good option at the time, because at that time journalism was opening up. Before 2011 it had been pretty much run by government affiliated outlets and now there was an independent media blossoming and I actually got a job at one of those outlets which was called the Egypt Independent.
So that was the genesis of me moving to Egypt to try to form a career in journalism. I can make the long story short of how I went from there all the way over to becoming an editor at Fortune when I moved back from Egypt in 2013. I also found it again hard to get a job in journalism which was more surprising to me at that point because I thought that the publications were going to be champing at the bit to hire me because I had been abroad and working in an interesting time.
Mauro Battellini: What was it like to be there in Egypt and witness the Arab Spring unravelling?
Jake Meth: By and large I lived a normal life there. When you get to a new location you get your bearings. And so I don’t like to over dramatise what was going on. Because most of the time there I was buying groceries or watching TV or walking around with a friend or something like that. But certainly there were times when I was there, especially when I would go to a protest or if I would be trying to write a story about something interesting that was going on.
I ended up in a lot of unpredictable situations. And at times it could be a little bit scary because when kids are throwing things at police and police are firing tear gas these are situations that are dangerous. And I think I realised that actually wasn’t something that I really enjoyed. There are a lot of journalists who like to be on the edge of danger like that and I think that I’m way too much of a little too protective of my personal health. But what I found more interesting was just the stories of everyday people living their lives amid this political turmoil that was going on.
And that was often very interesting because there were a lot of meta narratives about what was happening there was the people rising up against this corrupt repressive government. But the reality was that there was a lot of complexity to how people felt about what was happening. And by and large people wanted their lives to go back to normal. There certainly was a moment where there was a lot of energy toward deposing the authoritarian President Hosni Mubarak. And that was before I got there. But after that I think that most people I spoke to were more interested in just living stable lives where they can provide for their families and have just some stability. And I think that seeing that upfront has informed a lot of the way I look at the world and have looked at the world since. Which is that I think that there are a lot of people who get very caught up in big ideas and in philosophies and movements. But most people have a more simple kind of “I just want to have life, and I don’t want too much going on and I want to just be able to be with the people I love and enjoy my time here”. And I think that that is very important thing that often gets missed in journalism because journalists like to characterise so much.
Mauro Battellini: You arrived to New York. You were looking for a journalism job. As we all know from the stats there’s less and less journalists every year. Yeah so not surprised that you couldn’t find something immediately. So what happened between Egypt then Fortune?
Jake Meth: I tried a bunch of things to support myself. I was SAT tutoring for a while which wasn’t bad honestly. But I didn’t really have a very good business plan for it. And also I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did with writing with journalism. So I kept pursuing a way to get back into the journalism world, did some side work and eventually got a job at the Council on Foreign Relations in Media Relations and Communications. And I worked there with their senior fellows and also with Foreign Affairs magazine which they published.
So that was a good position for me. And I learned a lot about communications. And I learned a lot about how to take a specific expertise and translate that to a broader audience. That was very helpful. And I think it was just my first big boy job, which was probably a good thing for me to get used to. Working in a more professional buttoned up world I used to wear a suit to work and ties. And look at what we’re both wearing right now [namely hoodies]! But that was the vibe. And through that job I started to pitch op-eds.
I worked with some of the fellows on op-eds. And one of the places I started to pitch a lot was Fortune. And I formed a relationship with the editor there at the time of working relationship with her. And when I saw a job opened up I wasn’t looking for scouring job boards. So the job opened up, I applied and eventually got that job through that connection.
Mauro Battellini: What goes on through the mind of an op-eds editor. What are the logics behind all this? Why do outlets do op-eds? What are outlets or media brands trying to get out of it?
Jake Meth: I don’t want to presume to say that I know exactly what outlets are looking for with op-eds. But I can say, because I do think that they have different goals, that depending on the outlet and what their overall big picture goals are. I’ll say a couple of things though that I’ve noticed. One thing is that I actually don’t think many outlets really know what their goal is. But that’s until it’s distinct from other verticals in a newspaper or a magazine. Because by and large the content that you’re receiving is free. And obviously you have to pay the salaries of an editor. But you already have to do with the other sections too. But the other sections you have to pay a reporter, with an op-ed you don’t want to pay a reporter. So you would think okay why don’t they just have a lot that’s just all free content.
But of course and I’m sure you’ve seen this that the rub is that you because you have you don’t have a writer writing this content, and because you’re not controlling what the output is, it’s a much more difficult process of both finding and then refining the article into shape that is publishable and interesting and what you’re looking for. Whereas with a reported piece you basically are deciding what they’re looking for it before they even go out and report. So I think that there’s this tension of something that’s free content, which is good, but we don’t know what it’s going to be. And so we don’t know what quality it’s going to be.
Now if you’re the New York Times you’re getting op-eds every day from world leaders and from sought-after people who are professors who are at the top of their field. And also you’re getting just interesting ideas for people who aren’t even at the top of any field but just have really good and interesting ideas. So if you’re in that position it makes a lot of sense because you can publish really interesting pieces that are thought provoking and that are going to get good readership and keep subscribers.
And they do pay. Only a couple outlets do but The Times, and I think there are a couple other sort of the very top tier outlets, do pay. But it’s probably a worthy investment because they know that the quality of those pieces is going to come back to them in terms of increasing their prestige and their income. But I think for outlets like a little bit lower on the totem pole in terms of their prestige I don’t always know what the strategy is.
I do think that part of it is relationship building with people in their space. So if you look at like business publications like Fast Company or Fortune or Forbes they run a lot of events, conferences, they have membership programmes now and in a lot of these cases the opinion or contributed sections are good for them to deepen their relationships with the people that are already in their orbit, and also to become known as a forum for those people to be distributing their ideas. But the reality is that especially when you’re looking in the business world, and this is a problem that I encounter a lot in my own work with clients, is it’s very difficult to get them to say something thought provoking. Because often the incentives don’t line up they don’t really see a reason why. Even if they have a really fun idea or an interesting take or something counterintuitive, often either the principal is unwilling to put that on paper, or even if they are willing to, someone on their team is not going to let them because they’re looking out for the broader interests of the organisation.
So because I run a business that is around this I’ve made a decision to define an op-ed broadly. But that’s just because it’s easier for me to talk about it that way than to have to get into the differences between these different terms. So like the traditional term op-ed was coined from what I understand to describe the New York Times section. That was opposite the editorial page. And the editorial page expressed the opinion of the publisher and that these were opinions that were not the publishers opinion and they were physically opposite that page. But even the New York Times doesn’t even use the term op-ed anymore. They now call them guest essays because they have correctly realised that the term op-ed is an anachronism. But other major outlets like the LA Times and Washington Post still refer to these as op-eds. It’s hard to define what not it is because now you have magazines that have gotten into it like where I worked, Fortune. The Atlantic runs ideas but you could call maybe those op-eds because it’s almost like the term nowadays means more like opinion or opinion article more than anything. Now it gets even further muddled when you think about the content. And then because classically the op-ed was like ‘this is what I think this is a policy that I think should change’ or ‘this is what the government should do’ is very much like in that realm. But nowadays an op-ed can be defined as a personal essay and you often see in the New York Times that people write about personal mental health experiences that they’ve had. They don’t always have really a recommendation at the end. It’s more of just here’s something that I saw and witnessed that you might find interesting.
And then the other form that they often take nowadays is like more straight advice pieces. And this often happens in the business press, ‘right here are different ways to maximise your startups value’ or pieces like that. Put all of those under the umbrella of op-ed and you would just define it as a contributed article that explores just an opinion in a major news outlet. And I’ll say this is a more classic definition that’s a contributing piece. And it just seems that through me being in this space for a long time, because these terms are used interchangeably, it’s probably as simple as just pick one overarching sort of umbrella term and go with that. And then if you want to get more specific underneath and say ‘Okay this is a personal essay’, that’s fine. But to me when I’m working with a leader and they want to get their name somewhere in a big publication, and they want to get their opinion out there, it’s easier to not have to get into the intricacies of what their current suits are.
Mauro Battellini: Right. So it’s almost like it doesn’t matter what the term itself is, but rather about understanding the guest contribution sought on a publication by publication basis.
Jake Meth: Yeah you have to look at that section and understand what they’re publishing. But in general, especially when you’re talking about high tier media, there is a lot of similarity between the types of pieces that they put out. And so it’s not as complicated as I think it might look at first glance.
Mauro Battellini: When it comes to that media that you mentioned is higher up in the totem pole, even before you start pitching it. And if you have a great idea for a piece, but idea aside, what ingredients does a company or a person need to be able to provide to even be considered?
Jake Meth: So there’s almost two scales. You have the scale of how much of a big shot you are and how big is the company you work at? Right? So if you’re the CEO of Walmart you are at a big company and you’re the head of that company. So on this scale you’re at the top right. And if you’re like an engineer and are at an entry-level job at a startup that just launched, you’re down here. No offence to you, but just in terms of like where you are on the scale of what an editor is going to treat as someone who is notable right? So that’s that scale. And then over on this scale is like how original is this idea? How thought provoking? How much does the outlet anticipate that they’re going to bring in terms of reader interest. And so if you’re up here on the prestige of your job scale but your ideas down here you can probably make it work at a high level outlet.
Jake Meth: If you’re on the flip side, you can maybe make it work if you have a really quality idea but are not in an impressive job. Usually, I would say it’s somewhere around the middle, right? For both your ideas, you have a lot of people who are like, say, a large company that’s not quite in the Fortune 500. I’m talking about business media, which is where I mostly operate. Your idea might be talking about something in the news, but you’re not slaying any sacred cows or shocking anyone. That’s usually where I encounter clients, and that’s where the most work has to be done.
What I have to do, obviously, is I can’t do anything about their status. But I do have to work with them on how to make the idea more interesting. Often, we start from square one to dig in and find something they didn’t realize was interesting, educate people about it, or draw attention to it. Maybe you can advocate for a different way of doing things that others aren’t doing. Digging in and finding that can help someone’s concept qualify for a larger, prestigious news outlet with their op-ed.
Mauro Battellini: You must get interesting people through the door if they come to you because you can imagine that they already have that intent [of pitching an interesting idea as a significant company] in mind. Do you have any examples of maximizing the potential of a company that maybe wasn’t what an editor would normally consider?
Jake Meth: My experience at Fortune was that agencies struggled to do this in a way that was sufficient for high-level publication in most cases. This isn’t a knock on agencies; it’s just like in any field. If you have advanced cancer, you go to a specialist rather than a family doctor. There’s nothing wrong with family doctors; this is a specific thing that’s very difficult to solve.
I saw variances in the pitches that were coming in. These firms often work for clients on retainer, making it hard to dig in and find that idea without upsetting the client. I have a baseline for who I would work with. If someone comes to me with an idea I don’t think will work, I tell them and offer to brainstorm to figure out what will work. If we don’t find anything, I won’t continue the engagement. It’s just that I need a certain baseline to work with.
Sometimes, someone comes with nothing but a lot of knowledge and wants to publish an op-ed. We’ll work together to find something, but if we don’t reach a baseline, I won’t pursue it. One example is a client who came with an idea I didn’t think would work. Six months later, they came back with a different idea. We worked on it, spent a lot of time, and eventually got it published in USA Today. The lesson is that if you want to get into the top tier, the approach should be about producing a quality piece, not just fulfilling a client’s request.
Mauro Battellini: That’s the age-old issue where people let clients push them around and don’t push back enough. Let’s talk about what goes inside a piece. Apart from an interesting opinion, how rich in stats or case studies should it be? Do they matter that much? How do you build your thesis?
Jake Meth: That’s the gold standard right? Especially if you have original research there’s kind of two levels like if you have your own original research and you’ve done and you want to now take that and spin it into something where you’re expressing an opinion you’re already way ahead of the game.
Because 95% of the pieces that people are pitching are not original research. It’s just an opinion based on their experience. And there’s nothing wrong with those but it’s just to say you have your own data and that data is validated. That’s like the editor’s dream. Like when I would get pieces like that at Fortune. Sometimes they were written a little bit blandly but that was fine. Because as the editor that’s my job. Right? Sprucing it up, make it a little more exciting, maybe throw a story in there but if you have nothing at the core, it’s hard to, like they say, that expression, put lipstick on a pig right? So having that original research is great.
The second level is if you have someone who’s really good at curating research and then presenting. And so there was a woman I think she still does write for Fortune, Carolyn Barber who is really good at looking at new medical research. And she started doing this when COVID started and I was still working at Fortune. And she started to look at these very early studies coming out. And she would then interpret that for readers in a way that was more accessible because no one wants to go read and study. And so that is great. And that was a huge public service that she was doing and made her extremely valuable as an opinion writer or the contributor writer because they want even so much opinion pieces but contributed by so that’s really valuable.
And then the other very valuable thing that you come in with this personal experience right? So if you’re someone who has led a lot of companies so you’ve led a bunch of startups over your career that have failed and you want to write a piece about what makes a startup fail or what are the signs of failure before they happen I would love that right? Because you’re gonna give them first gen impressions of what happened. And things that you saw in conversations that you had and a lot of colour that just makes for usually a great piece.
And that can happen with kind of any type of experience or field that you’re in if you’re willing to write about it. So I’d say those components are very important. Now if you have none of those things the lowest starting point, but it’s not impossible, if you just have a strong opinion on something now you have to have some relation to that. You can’t just have a strong opinion on something completely irrelevant to you. That often happens with CEOs and they’re just like ‘hey I want to opine on this thing’. Sometimes that works if you’re a big name but often it doesn’t look great. Because it’s like, why are you writing about this but if you have some relation to it but you’re not you don’t have any sort of original research or insight that still can be a starting point. But that is a very difficult starting point. And if you’re starting from there you really need to have a lot of meat to your argument, like need to have good advice. You need to have good examples. You need to really build out that argument as robustly as you can. Because otherwise it’s not going to be a piece that’s going to stand out from others.
Mauro Battellini: Do you think there’s any way to understand whether you have enough meat to fire off a pitch?
Jake Meth: It’s hard for me to answer. It’s like asking Patrick Mahomes how he throws a touchdown pass. I’m immersed in this field, so it’s easier for me to sense what’s going to work—that’s the value I bring. There’s a sixth sense element to it that’s not easily replicable. However, there are a couple of things you can do to help.
One thing is to run the idea by someone with no association to it at all, like a family member or an honest friend. You don’t even need to tell them you’re working on it; maybe you can say it’s something you read the other day and see their reaction. If they’re an honest person, you can gauge if they find it interesting or not.
You can also try it on yourself. Clear your mind and ask, “If someone just approached me and told me this at a party, would I find it interesting? Or am I just finding it interesting because of some financial or professional incentive?” Being really honest with yourself can help.
Another thing you can try is to look at the target publication. Read a few pieces from their op-ed page or just scan through them. Ask yourself, “Does this fit in? Does it look like something that could be a headline on that page?” If it doesn’t, maybe it’s not a good fit.
At the end of the day, you won’t really know for sure. This is why op-eds are tough for many agencies; they want to take a shot, but it’s hard to get it right. You have to put it together, work with the expert, and if you fail, the client isn’t happy. Plus, you’ve used the opportunity to pitch to a publication, which might make it harder in the future. There’s a lot of calculus involved, which I recognize is difficult.
Mauro Battellini: What you mentioned about the sixth sense. Try everything you can, make sure you’re up to the level, and take it from there. And then testing and developing that sixth sense.
What I’ve been saying to people recently is that, unlike chat GPT, I can make decisions more easily because I’ve been fed so much data. I’ve read countless pitches during my time at Fortune. No one has time for that unless they’ve been in my position. So, the best way to approximate that sixth sense is to read up on comparable pieces and get a feel for where you stand in relation to them.
Mauro Battellini: You brought up chat GPT. What do you think of using generative AI for pitching or writing articles?
Jake Meth: Actually, last year, I wrote my first self-published op-ed for Business Insider about this. The headline was “I’m a professional writer and I’m not afraid of chat GPT.” This was one of those rare instances where I could see the interaction between what I know and what people care about. It’s rare for me to write about my own experience for a broad audience. The premise was that writers who turn a lot of information into something interesting and understandable might be concerned about AI.
AI will get to a point where it can handle that, but I don’t think it’s quite there yet. I can still tell when articles are written by AI because they tend to be very uniform. There will be a point where absorbing a ton of info and putting it out in a readable format won’t be seen as a specialized skill but something that can be automated. That’s concerning for writers who have built careers on that.
What I’ve been telling people is that if you specialize, it’s harder to be replaced. Specializing means not just writing, but also being part of the communications strategy world. It’s about relationships with people, getting them to open up, thinking of original ideas, and being approachable. Some people say AI can replicate this someday, but I’m not worried about it in the near term.
If I were coming out of college right now, I wouldn’t brand myself just as a writer but more as a strategist or thought partner—someone who knows how to handle higher-level functions. Writing is part of that. I’ve tried putting outlines into chat GPT out of curiosity to see if they could write an op-ed. At this point, they just can’t do it well. Even if AI gets to that point, there’s still value in the upfront work that AI can’t do. That’s what’s important—to be able to do all the upfront work before the machine spits out the copy.
Mauro Battellini: I think you described it really well. If you zoom out, even if AI could do everything perfectly, you still need the strategy and to manage the big picture. Right? Yeah.
So moving on to the pitching part. And we’re completing our overview of producing an interesting thought piece and getting it landed. How is it different pitching an op-ed or a thought piece? What should be observed? Yeah
Jake Meth: I haven’t done a lot of straight news pitching or feature pitching, but I have some familiarity with it. I can speak to what’s unique about pitching an op-ed. I’ll give a little plug for my newsletter here because this is what I do in “Pitches Get Stitches.” In that newsletter, I evaluate pitches from the position of an op-ed editor. By doing that, I’ve noticed a lot of patterns and things unique to op-eds.
One thing is that often, when an agency pitches a feature, much of it is about the author and their credentials. With pitching an op-ed, that’s less valuable. The focus is more on the quality of the article itself—do I want to publish this article? The author’s identity is secondary to the idea. At the start of the pitch, unless I was pitching a piece by someone very high-profile like Mark Cuban, I start with the idea, not the executive I’m working with. The idea is more interesting.
Another thing is that with an op-ed pitch, you’re not offering different possibilities of coverage. When pitching an executive, people often say, “Hey, do you want to cover these different aspects of who they are and what they can talk about?” But with an op-ed, it’s just one thing: the idea and the argument.
This means you have to build the pitch out more. You need a good, concise explanation of what the article is about. Make it really easy for the editor to understand the entire argument from the email body, which comes before the pitch. The pitch itself should be at the top of the email. The pitch should be long enough to explain the article without being so long that it loses the editor’s attention.
Mauro Battellini: What’s your take on pitching the idea first? I’ve seen some outlets ask to get a pitch just for the idea first. But even if they do that, would you recommend just writing out the piece not showing the entire piece? How would you see the logistics here?
Jake Meth: My experience working on the client side for the last few years is that almost always the outlet wants the full piece. There are a couple of cases where you can pitch the idea first, like with trade outlets, which I don’t really work with, but they tend to be more open to it.
The reality is that, in my experience, you don’t have much time in the day to do much more than read the idea and decide if the article is worth it. Then you have the article right there in front of you. Sometimes, I would have someone send me an idea, and early on, I would say, “Okay, great. Sounds interesting.” I’d read their idea, spend some time on it, and then never hear back from them. I don’t know if they were just looking for advice or wanted to send it to another outlet. I don’t know their purpose in doing that, or maybe something prevented them from writing it.
Because of that and because I often had aggressive publication targets, I realized I didn’t have time to evaluate ideas that needed just the full piece. The only exception might be places like The Atlantic or The New York Times, where you’re pitching a longer piece. Some of these outlets now run 3000-word-plus pieces because space is no longer an issue, and they’ve experimented with the contributed content form. If you’re pitching something that long and you think it’s a strong idea with original research or you’ve written a book, you could pitch the idea before writing it. That can work in those instances.
One last thing: once you’ve gotten the outline, which will form your pitch, writing the article is just another step. You’ve already outlined the piece and know what it’s about. Now you need to put it down on paper or on the screen. Unless you’re only pitching to one outlet and won’t pitch anywhere else if they don’t accept it, which isn’t a good strategy anyway, if they don’t accept it, you can send it somewhere else. So it usually makes sense to just write the draft.
Mauro Battellini: That was going to be my next question. You’ve written the whole thing, spent hours on it, and your target publication says “no.” What would you say to do in that scenario?
Jake Meth: Just keep pitching. One thing I’ve noticed is that agencies often stop after a couple of pitches. I had a piece last year that I placed on the 18th pitch, and it was in The Hill, which is a great publication. Persistence is important because you have no idea what these editors have on their plates. You don’t know if you’re going to get a response, and there’s so much uncertainty.
The problem is that clients often don’t want to wait that long. That’s why educating them upfront about the process is crucial. When people ask me how long it will take, I say anywhere from three days to three months. It can take that long. Even if an outlet accepts it, they may hold it for a while and publish it when it’s advantageous for them. Patience is essential.
At the end of the day, if it doesn’t get accepted and you still want to publish it, there’s nothing wrong with putting it on LinkedIn or a company website. Those are great platforms for getting your message out. In some cases, they might even be better than contributed content on traditional outlets. A lot of energy is now going towards self-publishing because it’s much easier, and sometimes you can reach a similar audience. I believe there’s still an appetite for op-eds because of the value that comes with external validation.
Mauro Battellini: Just to clarify in terms of the pitch, as to how many publications did you approach, was it 18 publications or less? How much did you persist with each publication?
Jake Meth: Oh I see. You’re saying, following up with them? And yeah yeah I got answers from all of the previous ones. Yeah sometimes that took a while. And it took a while. But eventually it got published.
Mauro Battellini: So what I mean is how many times would you follow up? If you believe that your pitch is really strong but they might have not seen it. They’re super busy. But how many pitches is too much? If you hear nothing back?
Jake Meth: You’re asking about how many follow-up emails. I usually follow up until it becomes very obvious that either they are not going to see it or they’re just not going to answer me. I make it clear to clients upfront that this process can take a while, and I need time. Not everyone has the luxury of taking this approach, but that’s my strategy. If I’m pitching to a place, I want to get an answer from them.
There have definitely been times where on the third or fourth follow-up, I’ve gotten a response and they wanted the piece. I know what it’s like for them. I’ve been on their end of things, and I know that sometimes they can get overwhelmed or disorganized, or things slip through the cracks. I think it’s important to try to get an answer as best you can, so you can tell yourself you really did it.
What I also found interesting is that because I’m pitching more now than ever, higher-level publications, like the top ones, are better at getting back to you than mid-tier ones. My guess is that they have better staff and processes.
I think it’s worth following up, and I don’t think I’ve said this enough to people in PR: Don’t worry about annoying someone. If someone gets annoyed that you followed up, that’s on them. Their job is to field pitches. If they don’t want to, they don’t have to answer you, but they’re not going to answer you no matter what. It’s your job to send the pitch and get an answer. I don’t understand getting mad unless you didn’t give them at least 24 hours to respond, which would be unreasonable. I did have that happen a couple of times.
Other than that, I think it’s totally fine to follow up quickly and try to get an answer. If it’s a no, just move on and don’t get too upset. That’s the hard part. I’ve experienced this: getting rejected by three places and thinking maybe the piece isn’t good. But sometimes, you just need to try more. If at a certain point, no one is taking it, then maybe it’s not as good as you thought it was.
Mauro Battellini: I guess that’s the importance of developing that sense of how strong a piece could be. Because then you can more confidently follow up or attempt different publications without getting negative about it. Speaking about that, locations that are understaffed. Obviously, there are layoffs like in no other industry. A lot of people say that because of this, op-eds are better received than they used to be. Publications are opening up more spaces for op-eds. It’s quite cost-effective for them since it could be quality content and doesn’t really cost them. How do you see that moving forward? Is that going to continue like that?
Jake Meth: I don’t know. It’s so hard to say what the trend is. For instance, years ago, there was a big trend towards anyone publishing anything without much curation. If you remember, HuffPost used to have their contributed content section, and they shut that down. So why didn’t they continue if it was free content? There are questions about whether the quality is good enough and its impact on readership. Even Forbes, which mastered the contributed model, went through a process of figuring out they needed to be more selective. I listened to a podcast where a strategy officer talked about how they had to vet writers more carefully and even charge a fee to write for Forbes because it had become the Wild West. That wasn’t good for them, even though they built a massive audience.
There’s also the question of consolidation among media outlets, which is likely to continue. No one can pay for this many subscriptions, similar to what’s starting to happen in streaming media with Disney Plus and Hulu. So, I don’t think the trend is clearly toward just getting free content and publishing as much as possible because it’s free. Especially because editors only have so much capacity, and if they have to edit the piece, they can’t handle too much free content.
Forbes no longer lets anyone publish freely; they used to but not anymore because owning the content comes with legal questions. I’m not an expert on this, but I think there’s a chance that it could lead to more op-ed sections happening. However, I don’t actually see that trend. One more data point: NBC had a vertical shutdown about a year and a half ago. Why did that happen? I don’t really understand what’s going on on the business side, but I don’t see a clear trend.
Another problem is that starting a new section means starting from zero. Even if your publication has credibility, you don’t have the prestige of places like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, or Time Magazine. It’s hard to get people to write for you without that prestige. You have to invest a lot in building up that section and making it known. I just thought US News was doing this, but it’s tough because you need those contributions to build up the publication’s credibility.
Mauro Battellini: That’s interesting that you describe it in that way. Because when we look at the appetite of clients to ‘earn’ contributed pieces, it could be basically infinite, right? But that’s where that mismatch comes in terms of what editors actually want versus what kind of pitches they are actually getting.
Jake Meth: Yeah absolutely.
Mauro Battellini: I feel like we could keep going on for another hour. I guess we could do a round two at some point. But I think, for now, whoever’s listening will probably have a much better overview of what op-eds are and how they work. So thanks a lot Jake for joining us and for everyone listening, please subscribe to Pitches Get Stitches!
Jake Meth: Yeah please do. Thank you, Mauro, good talking about this. Happy to do it again.
Mauro Battellini: Thanks a lot Jake!
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