On newspaper opinion sections and op-eds
What do opinions mean when they are everywhere?
This has been a ~year~ for the national newspaper opinion and op-ed pages, playing a role in America’s discourse (even if that discourse is louder online than at the dinner table). Which, if we want to take a dispassionate view, is exactly the point of the opinion section. But how much of a role, well, that’s a different question.
Here’s a top 5:
The New York Times lets Sen. Tom Cotton use the page as a blueprint to “restore order to our streets.”
The Wall Street Journal gives Vice President Pence inches to make the case in June that “there isn’t a coronavirus second wave.”
USA Today lets Peter Navarro all but slander Dr. Fauci, telling readers during a pandemic that Dr. Fauci is not to be trusted.
The New York Times publishes an opinion column arguing with itself on whether to go visit family during Thanksgiving.
The Wall Street Journal runs a piece saying that a person earning a doctorate should only be called ‘doctor’ if they deliver babies.
(Image via Richard Drew/Associated Press)
A little history lesson:
Opinion pages are both an old form of journalism, and a relatively recent one.
Early newspapers in the U.S. were essentially opinion pages, written by intellectual heavyweights who aired out their grievances in the public sphere. Alexander Hamilton, for instance, started the New York Post in 1801 as a vehicle for Federalists to rip into Thomas Jefferson’s Anti-Federalist philosophy.
Throughout the 19th century, people like Benjamin Day (The New York Sun) and James Gordon Bennett (The New York Herald) pushed opinion journalism through the penny press; newspapers that cost a penny for readers meant three related things: more readership (because it was cheap), leading to loose guidelines as to what was publishable (i.e., trading gossip), ultimately leading to an advertising model based on eyeballs.
Day, for example, figured out that with more readership, he could charge advertisers to run ads in The Sun, which led to a non-partisan style of journalism. Another mid-19th century journalism colossus, Horace Greeley (The New York Tribune), divided ‘news’ from ‘opinion,’ labeling the latter “the editorial page.’
One other penny press: The New York Daily Times, founded by Henry Raymond and George Jones. You might know this paper by a different name today, The New York Times, which, incidentally, didn’t start its op-ed page until 1970. Why? As Michael Socolow, a media historian at the University of Maine, wrote in 2010 in the academic journal Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly:
The Times designed the page to be both profitable and intellectually stimulating. Although these objectives could be in conflict, newsroom managers worked to make their project viable and vibrant. The Times' effort synthesized various antecedents and editorial visions. Journalistic innovation is usually complex, and typically involves multiple external factors. The Times op-ed page appeared in an era of democratizing cultural and political discourse and of economic distress for the company itself. The newspaper's executives developed a place for outside contributors with space reserved for sale at a premium rate for additional commentaries and other purposes.
(Quick note: Op-Ed is short for ‘opposite editorial,’ which is different than the opinion section.)
As the New York Times wrote on Sept. 21, 1970:
“The purpose of the Op. Ed. page is neither to reinforce nor to counterbalance The Times’s own editorial position. The objective is rather to afford greater opportunity for exploration of issues and presentation of new insights and new ideas by writers and thinkers who have no institutional connection with The Times and whose views will very frequently be completely divergent from our own.”
And today...
Fifty years later, perhaps it’s time to revisit the efficacy, if not the purpose of the opinion section, as two notable trends continue to push both the exchange of ideas and the media business model.
First, the town square is no longer reliant on a handful of newspapers and TV outlets telling the citizenry what to think, or what to think about. (Agenda Setting Theory.) You can log onto any corner of the internet and be presented with all sorts of points of view, and, apparently different sets of facts. Spend a few moments in an anti-vax Facebook group or go down #resistance Twitter and you will be presented with various universes.
The democratization of media has meant not just shifting business models, but shifting cultural debate using multiple distribution vehicles. You are reading this in a newsletter, for instance; a decade ago, this would have a blog. Two decades ago, you would have no idea who I was.
And now with a bevy of platforms for “thought leaders” to espouse their thoughts, from LinkedIn to Medium, are opinion sections necessary? When a former president (Barack Obama) can write a post (paywalled!) about how he made hard decisions and post it on Medium instead of the pages of Very Serious Outlets like the New York Times or Washington Post, perhaps we need to think about the role of the opinion section in shaping our views.
However, as paywalls go up, the opinion pages can become a main reason why people pay for an outlet. News stories are generally a commodity. Strip the byline of a reporter covering a White House event or a Google/Facebook news story, and odds are you couldn’t place which outlet that reporter worked for. But the voices of the opinion pages, if not the general bent of the opinion section (through the frame of its pieces) collect like-minded subscribers.
In May, the Reuters Institute and Oxford put out a report that looked at “how and why people are paying for news” and this section caught my eye:
Subscribers in the US are also more likely to say they want to help fund good journalism (52% compared with 39% in the UK). We know from our earlier surveys that much of the recent surge in subscriptions in the United States has come from those wanting to support liberal publications critical of Donald Trump – but there’s also a more fundamental desire for quality journalism.
Notice the conflation of news and opinion; “support liberal publications critical of Donald Trump.” This is outside the purview of the classic “objective” journalist, isn’t it?
Tie this to the rise of the newsletter, where big name journalists are leaving their outlets. Some have even said the reason they’re leaving their cushy jobs is because they want to be untethered from the rigorous editing they undergo; they don’t want their, um, opinion, to be stifled. Five of the top Six paying Substacks are basically opinion writers.
The double-edged sword for publications, then, is that while great opinion writing can generate subscriptions and traffic (clicks don’t care if you hate-read a page; they get counted for ad impressions whether you agree or disagree with the content), it can also push an outlet to cater to that particular train of thought.
In a digital age, when it’s pretty good odds that a reader lands on an outlet via a social link, having an opinion page can also be trouble.
In 2018, the American Press Institute found that
Only 43 percent of people said they could easily sort news from opinion in online-only news or social media.
As the last 20 years of media has been a tug-of-war between reporting and gossip, the debate of which is winning continues. The New York Times reports today that Apple+, the tech company’s TV arm, is spiking a TV series about Gawker because Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, who Gawker outed in 2008.
The NYT writes about Gawker:
Gawker was always a canary in the cultural coal mine, mostly because of its mission of heading farther along the coal face than others wanted or dared to. It crossed lines that needed to be crossed — pushing stories about sexually abusive figures like Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby — and ones that didn’t, exposing the personal lives and frailties of minor figures. And its ethos put the company, which published the tech blog Gizmodo and the pioneering feminist blog Jezebel, among others, into America’s new culture wars.
Regardless of your thoughts on Gawker, it elevated writing with a point of view; in other words, an opinion.
This weekend, the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages were taken to the woodshed for saying in as sexist and misogynistic way as possible that Dr. Jill Biden, the coming First Lady and a college professor, should drop her honorific because she’s not a medical doctor. From that original post, the WSJ has published at least two more pieces of content—a defense from the page’s editor and a page for a ‘letter to the editor.’
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The Band (with Eric Clapton), “The Weight”
Some interesting links:
For P.R. watchers:
PR Firms Are Being Shamed For Helping Fossil Fuel Companies ‘Green’ Their Image (HuffPost)
For brand safety:
DoubleVerify Expands Partnership with Twitter to Provide Brand Safety and Suitability Verification (Double Verify)
For platforms:
Reddit to Buy TikTok Rival Dubsmash in New Video Push (The Information)
For destroying language:
ANA Pivots On Marketing 'Word of the Year' (MediaPost)