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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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New York Times Submission Guidelines

The New York Times provides several submission opportunities for readers. Opinion, travel and general article submissions are just a few of the items accepted by the popular magazine. Following the guidelines set by the New York Times is important when submitting an item for potential publication. Failing to follow the submission guidelines could result in your item being discarded without even being considered.

Write opinion article on any topic that is no more than 750 words in length that has not already been published in print or online.

Copy and paste text of article, along with contact information, in the body of an email.

Email article submission to [email protected]. Opinion article submissions also can be mailed or faxed to the New York Times.

Write a proposal or story that is or will be no more than 1,500 words in length and has not been published elsewhere. An article will not be considered if it is in relation to a trip paid for by an airline, tourist board or other organization with an interest in the subject of an article.

Write the date of the trip on a separate line on top of the article.

Email the travel article or proposal submission, along with brief resume, to [email protected]. Do not include pictures.

Write a proposal or article that is or will be no more than 1,500 words in length and has not been published elsewhere.

Determine which section of the New York Times would be the most appropriate for the article or proposal submission. Possible sections include news, sports, fashion, politics, business and technology.

Send proposal or article by regular mail directly to department that is appropriate. For example, address it to News Editor or Sports Editor.

The New York Times 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018

• The New York Times will generally respond within three days if the article will be published for opinion article submissions and within two weeks for other submissions.
• Due to volume of submissions received, the newspaper does not send rejections or return submissions.
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How to successfully pitch The New York Times (or, well, anyone else)

Freelancing is tough! It can be an unpredictable, unreliable grind, and sometimes things fall through even if you’ve done everything right.

As Smarter Living editor at The New York Times, the bulk of my job is working with freelancers. On the slowest days, I’ll get around a dozen cold pitches in my inbox; on busy days, almost 200 . (Lol sorry if I owe you an email, promise I’m working on it.)

The thousands of pitches I’ve read over the last few years usually fall into one of three categories: great (very few), something we can work with (a small, but decent, amount) and bad (everything else).

But most bad pitches are bad for the same few reasons, and they’re often salvageable with some tweaking. After consulting with about a dozen editors who commission stories at publications ranging from small, niche blogs to national magazines and newspapers, I’ve pulled together the six most common mistakes freelancers make when pitching — and what you can do to impress an editor.

You don’t know what your story is.

Most editors are willing to take a chance on a great story idea, even from a new writer — 75 percent of the stories I commissioned last year were from first-time New York Times writers. But we can’t help you if you don’t know what you’re pitching.

The most common variant is this: “Hi, I’m a freelance writer and I’m interested in covering [x topic] for your section.” I’m glad you’re interested, but…what’s the story?

Another version is the super-lengthy email pitching a meandering, unfocused “look,” “exploration,” or “deep dive” into a topic. I’m glad you’ve thought so much about your topic, but don’t forget to think of the actual story you’re telling.

Even worse: You want me to tell you what your story is.

“Freelancers should always come with story ideas,” said Sarah Kessler , deputy editor of Quartz at Work . “I get a lot of emails that just say, ‘I’d like to be a contributor for Quartz at Work.’ That isn’t much help.”

A good safeguard against this is to write a solid, clear, powerful nut graf. It’ll be just a draft — after all, you won’t have done all the reporting for the story yet — but knowing exactly what your story is about is crucial to piquing an editor’s interest.

You didn’t check the archives.

Even if you think you have the most original idea in the world, and you’re 100 percent sure the outlet you’re pitching has never done it, check to see if the outlet has already done it. Then check again. Skipping this step shows you’re either blindly shooting off pitches en masse, or you just don’t care enough to look.

Meet your new best friend: Google site search . Just type “site:[newsoutlet.com] [your keywords]” and you’re set. ( Do not rely on a news outlet’s built-in search engine .)

“Pitching a version of something I’ve already published, or a version of something the writer has already published but for a different pub” never works out, said Lisa Bonos , editor of Solo-ish at The Washington Post. “This latter one REALLY gets me. You don’t get to sell the same personal essay more than once. If you’re writing a variation on a story you’ve told before, be upfront about how this new story is different.”

You pitched the wrong editor or section.

It’s sloppy and it shows you didn’t do the basic research required to get your story published. Be absolutely sure that your idea fits within the section or outlet you’re pitching, and that you’re emailing the right editor.

“Pitching me something that doesn’t make any sense for the publication, subject-wise or tonally, shows me you haven’t read through the site,” said Gina Vaynshteyn , editor-in-chief at First Media . “If you haven’t done your homework, I wonder how diligent you’ll be about your story.”

You’re too aggressive with following up.

“It’s O.K. to follow up on unanswered pitches, but wait a week, not 24 hours,” said Kristin Iversen , executive editor of Nylon . “When a freelancer’s pitches are turned down, they should not follow up with more pitches a day or two later; please don’t pitch me more than once a month, unless it’s something very timely.”

Your story is too low-stakes or narrow.

This mistake is a little hard to define, but it probably accounts for at least half of the stories I decline. If you’re going to ask an editor to pay you for your idea, make sure it’s an idea worth paying for. Think scope, reach, and impact.

This problem emerges in a lot of ways, but the most common issues I see are: Your story requires very little — or no — reporting; it could be written by anyone; it applies to a very small demographic (caveat: this isn’t a problem if that’s intentional and the publication is interested in that audience); your story has a very limited shelf-life (again, not a problem if that’s intentional and you know the outlet would be interested); or it just doesn’t have any sweep or scope. Editors want important, substantive stories.

Ask yourself: If an editor responded and said, “So what? Who cares?” — would you have a real answer?

You don’t disclose conflicts of interest.

Most publications have codes of ethics and/or guidelines around conflict-of-interest disclosures. They can vary widely, so always — always! — err on the side of over-disclosure. The worst-case scenario is that outlet finds out you had a conflict after publication (and they will find out), which usually results in a correction with the disclosure and that writer possibly being blacklisted from the publication.

A travel editor at an international outlet shared this story:

I’m not allowed to accept press trips, and same goes for people who write for us. I can usually tell when someone went on a press junket even if they don’t disclose it, because multiple writers all pitch me the same story about the same destination all at once. Often, it was a trip I was invited on myself and had to decline. A writer pitched me one of these stories, and I wrote her back politely giving her a heads-up about the no-press-trips rule. Her response: “You must have figured out I was on a press trip because YOU’RE STALKING ME.” Good tip: Don’t accuse editors of stalking you. And also be honest about stuff.

So now you know what not to do — here’s what you should do. It boils down to basically three things:

Be concise yet informative.

Very few cold pitches need to be more than, say, 10 sentences, and the best ones are often less.

Explain why anyone should care.

Get me interested to learn more, but more important, make me want to tell this story to the readers of my publication.

Show that you can pull it off.

If you want to pitch the huge, ambitious, weighty feature you’ve been mulling over months, go for it. But make sure you’ve laid out how you’re going to put it together, along with the clips to demonstrate that a story like this is within your range.

“The best freelancers use their pitches to showcase their writing skills — especially when pitching an editor for the first time,” said Nick Baumann , an editor at HuffPost. “A pitch gives me a better sense of your raw copy than your edited clips do. If your pitch has a fascinating, beautifully written lede, your story probably will, too. If the pitch is confusing, the filed story is likely to be, too.”

To end, here’s one of the best cold pitches I’ve ever gotten. This was my first interaction with this writer — Anna Goldfarb — and she’s since become a regular New York Times contributor :

Hello! I saw your call for pitches so I figured I’d toss my hat in the ring. Let me know if any of these ideas resonate! [She had sent three different ideas, but I’m including only the one I accepted and later published.] (Essay) What I wish I’d known before moving in with my boyfriend — I’d always pictured moving in with a guy like diving into a pool; a graceful, swift action. It turns out I was absolutely wrong. Instead of a dive, it was like doing the Macarena, in that there’s a series of steps that need to be executed in a certain order for it to be considered a success. A little bit about me: I’m a culture and food writer based in Philly. I’m currently a contributor to Elle , The Kitchn , Refinery29 , Thrillist and more. You can see my full list of writing clips here . Thanks for your consideration!

Why’s this so good? Four simple reasons: There’s no filler; she told me everything I need to know about the idea without getting bogged down in irrelevant details; she knows exactly the story she’s pitching and how to execute it ; and she sent clips with a link to more.

Yes, it’s that simple. Don’t overthink it.

Tim Herrera is Smarter Living editor at The New York Times.

Cite this article Hide citations

Herrera, Tim. "How to successfully pitch The New York Times (or, well, anyone else)." Nieman Journalism Lab . Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, 22 Oct. 2018. Web. 27 Mar. 2024.

Herrera, T. (2018, Oct. 22). How to successfully pitch The New York Times (or, well, anyone else). Nieman Journalism Lab . Retrieved March 27, 2024, from https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/10/how-to-successfully-pitch-the-new-york-times-or-well-anyone-else/

Herrera, Tim. "How to successfully pitch The New York Times (or, well, anyone else)." Nieman Journalism Lab . Last modified October 22, 2018. Accessed March 27, 2024. https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/10/how-to-successfully-pitch-the-new-york-times-or-well-anyone-else/.

{{cite web     | url = https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/10/how-to-successfully-pitch-the-new-york-times-or-well-anyone-else/     | title = How to successfully pitch The New York Times (or, well, anyone else)     | last = Herrera     | first = Tim     | work = [[Nieman Journalism Lab]]     | date = 22 October 2018     | accessdate = 27 March 2024     | ref = {{harvid|Herrera|2018}} }}

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Opinion Welcomes New Deputy Editors for Guest Essays

The opinion team announces two new deputies to help guide the report. Read more in this note from Vanessa Mobley.

For the guest essay operation in Opinion, I’m excited to announce two new deputies to help lead our team. Lauren Kelley , who is now our Op-Ed editor leading reproductive rights coverage, will become Deputy, News, and Ariel Kaminer , rejoining The Times from BuzzFeed, will be Deputy, Ideas & Investigations.

Starting Sept. 26, Lauren will be Deputy, News. Lauren, who led Op-Ed’s coverage of the Dobbs decision and has worked in Opinion for almost five years, has approached the biggest questions about reproductive rights and restrictions in America, and their impact on the country , with rigor and probity . She will bring her incisive editing and astute judgment, as well as her empathic and generous leadership, to this new position. She is committed to producing a timely and relevant report that reflects the core conflicts that drive the news, from a range of political and ideological perspectives.

Originally from Dallas, Lauren has a B.A. in English from Texas Christian University. Before joining The Times’s editorial board in 2018, she was the politics editor at Rolling Stone, where she led coverage of the 2016 elections.

Starting Sept. 19, Ariel Kaminer returns to the Times in the role of Deputy, Ideas & Investigations, after seven years at BuzzFeed News, most recently as executive editor for investigations. Her 16-person team punched above its weight, with projects such as the FinCEN files investigation and a deep dive into the alleged kidnapping plot against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Their award-winning work captured international attention, shook up corporate policies, challenged conventional wisdom and resulted in laws being changed. Ariel is an exceptional editor, experienced in both politics and culture, investigations and personal essays. Her previous positions at The Times included story editor at the Magazine, where she edited an investigation into sexual abuse at the Horace Mann School; Arts & Leisure editor; digital deputy of the Culture desk; and Metro reporter covering higher education, where she explored complicated campus politics and revealed the brutal working conditions at N.Y.U.’s glittering Abu Dhabi campus. She also wrote the City Critic and Ethicist columns. Her role in Opinion will be as a catalyst for the deep and satisfying conversations that Opinion convenes around ideas.

Originally from Tenafly, N.J., Ariel is a graduate of Princeton University.

Please join us in congratulating Lauren and offering a warm welcome to Ariel.

Explore Further

Vanessa mobley joins opinion to lead op-ed team, adrienne shih and adam westbrook join opinion, eleanor barkhorn joining opinion.

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New York Times dumps "op-eds" for "guest essays": A great start, but not nearly enough

The op-ed is dead, and good riddance. but "guest essays" will only work if editors open the doors to new voices, by dan froomkin.

This article was co-produced with Press Watch , an independent site that monitors and critiques American political coverage. Please consider supporting Press Watch by making a donation .

Changing a label, in and of itself, never solves anything. But the New York Times opinion section's big announcement last week that what we've described for decades as "op-eds" will henceforth be known as "guest essays" is a fantastic and important move — if editors there are bold enough to take the next logical steps.

The result could be a brilliant reinvention of the intellectual public square, full of wonderfully diverse voices where the only barrier to entry is a willingness to argue in good faith. 

A space currently bounded by conventional establishment wisdom — occasionally breached by  trolling — could instead expose the Times audience to the full range of national discourse, with all interesting, relevant and honestly argued viewpoints welcome.

This of course is a best-case scenario. It depends on Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury and her new deputy Patrick Healy (fresh from overseeing the Times's deeply flawed politics coverage ) openly recognizing the error of their previous ways. 

While that might seem almost inconceivable, they do take their marching orders from publisher A.G. Sulzberger, who, at an all-hands staff meeting after he fired Kingsbury's predecessor James Bennet back in June, bluntly expressed his view that the op-ed format was broken. "I think there's a structural problem with the form itself," he said. 

So how does this reinvention begin with a label change? Let me explain.

The term "op-ed" was antiquated, opaque and, most importantly, ambiguous. Although the "op-ed" designation was ostensibly intended (since its coinage 50 years ago) to provide views distinct from those of the Times itself — with its essays placed "opposite" the editorial page — the presence of the Times's own staff "op-ed columnists" muddled the message, effectively giving anything that ran there the imprimatur of the Times.

As University of Maine journalism professor Michael Socolow , who has traced the history of the Time op-ed page, explains: "For many Times   readers (and even employees), the page looks like a unified platform or singularly powerful megaphone, and therefore anyone given access must be pre-approved and judged endorsement-worthy."

So while the Times opinion section was publicly committed to a tolerance for "different views," it was effectively a space defined by its columnists, who ranged all the way from center-left to center-right. Of late, center-right extended to include climate skepticism and anti-Arab racism but not Trumpism. Center-left stopped well short of anti-capitalism. And the voices of the marginalized were off the page almost entirely. 

Now, with the "guest essays" label putting non-staff writing clearly at arm's length, the original mission of the op-ed feels attainable. 

Quality control, not opinion control

That would mean an actual diversity of views, not just from across the traditional political spectrum, but across other spectra as well. Kingsbury vowed precisely that in an interview on CNN's "Reliable Sources" on Sunday, saying: "We want to publish a wide range of opinions, arguments, ideas, whether it's across the left-right spectrum, but as most Americans, you know, really looking far beyond that spectrum."

She also said, "We can't be afraid to hear out and interrogate all ideas, especially bad ones, because in my opinion, that's the most effective way to knock them down."

CNN's Brian Stelter recognized that as a powerful principle: "So, read it, challenge it, rebut it. That's the opposite of cancel culture, isn't it?"

"Exactly," Kingsbury said.

There are still some things that guest essayists shouldn't be allowed to do on the pages of the New York Times — chief among them inciting violence and advocating genocide. But beyond that, if a view is held by a politically significant portion of the American electorate, it deserves to be part of the mix.

That means explicitly welcoming anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and pro-Arab arguments that have historically been shunned, as well as writers who are younger, more diverse, less credentialed and less fortunate. 

And especially now, the political right has a lot of explaining to do. With the Republican Party unmoored from reality, actively nativist and anti-science, it's crucial that people who speak for it be invited to at least attempt to articulate what their actual views are and how they arrived at them. 

The key for the Times opinion section going forward should be quality control, not opinion control. There should be a near-zero tolerance for bad-faith arguments — those that rely on false statement, hyperbole, unfair descriptions of competing views, absurd straw men, logical fallacies and trolling. But as long as the arguments are honest, I think almost anything goes. 

That would be a huge ratcheting up of standards from those the Times opinion page currently applies, which mostly rely on the quaint notion of " fact-checking ," which is both anemic and insufficient . 

Not every publication could pull this off — in fact, maybe not any publication other than that one — but did you know that nearly 150 people work at the New York Times opinion section? This is where editors come in.

Here's what Sewell Chan, the editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times — and a former deputy opinion editor at the New York Times — had to say in a recent panel discussion , which I think was dead-on:

Instead of thinking about "Are some ideas acceptable or not acceptable?" … what I think we're more likely to be encountered with are ideas that are provocative or challenging or difficult or controversial. And our job as editors is to help the writer — whether we personally agree or not is not relevant — our job is to help the writer adduce evidence to make the strongest possible logical and persuasive case. But it ultimately has to be a case that is grounded in logic, persuasion and evidence. And if we do that, I actually think a lot of ideas that are provocative or difficult can enter the discourse. And yes, they'll provoke people or upset people. But we've done our duty as opinion editors because we've at least exposed our readers to the broad range of views throughout. 

Practically speaking, helping some writers meet those standards will be hard, if not impossible — especially for essayists who are at heart advocating such things as nativism or Christian supremacy, but who are accustomed to launching their arguments by denying any such thing.

And it may be impossible for Republicans to honestly address the most important question of the moment: Why they continue to engage in the Big Lie (and so many smaller ones).

But then they've opted out; they haven't been silenced. If they complain about being canceled, just turn over the email chain.

Imagine if a process like this had been in place when Sen. Tom Cotton wrote an op-ed last June full of slippery and dishonest arguments attempting to incite the violent dispersal of Black Lives Matter protesters. Rather than getting published — and then retracted, but only after a newsroom revolt that ended Jim Bennet's career — it would have been either edited into an honest expression of Cotton's objection to BLM protests or, more likely, spiked.

Who is this person and why did we invite them?

As part of the "redesign" of Opinion, New York Times lead product designer Dalit Shalom promised a "second important editorial change": "a more detailed bio about the author whose opinion we are sharing." Adopting a "dinner party metaphor," the designer wrote that "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."

There's been no sign of any such thing thus far. Bios remain a couple or three lines long, offering little more than institutional affiliations.

But increased transparency is an essential part of the way forward, as I argued immediately  after Bennet's ouster . Firstly, it would fix the longstanding problem caused by the wildly insufficient identification of opinion writers' sometimes spectacular conflicts of interests.

Beyond that, it would provide readers with valuable context: Why was this person invited to offer a guest essay in the first place? What do they bring to the table? 

In some cases, that could even include a warning — an advisory that the views expressed are potentially highly offensive to those who share the Times editorial board's devotion to "progress, fairness and shared humanity," but nevertheless are an important part of the national discourse, and that this writer has been judged to be making their argument in good faith.

That distancing — combined with an honest and defensible explanation of why an essay was nevertheless worth publishing — would make it much harder for the Times to publish something like the Cotton piece, which was the ultimate example of how low the Times was willing to lower its standards in order to demonstrate a willingness to publish views from "both sides." 

But let's be clear: The publishing of performative garbage has not stopped under Kingsbury. When right-wing icon Rush Limbaugh died in February, Kingsbury understandably wanted to showcase a variety of writers, each with "a distinctive and authoritative point of view on Limbaugh's legacy." 

(The essay from feminist writer  Jill Filipovic  — "Cracking open his slobbering hatred of women allows insight into his success, as well as the perversion of the party he championed," she wrote — was one of the sharpest pieces of opinion journalism I've read all year.) 

But for the fanboy view, Kingsbury picked Ben Shapiro, the hard-right provocateur well known for his bad-faith arguments. 

In an essay explaining her thinking , Kingsbury acknowledged Shapiro's "trollish online presence and, to me, unpalatable views." But she defended her selection by calling him "popular" on the right and "well positioned to carry Limbaugh's message to a new generation of listeners."

What Shapiro turned in , predictably, was a stream of offensive, valueless liberal-eye-poking that praised Limbaugh for "fighting back against the predations of a left that seeks institutional and cultural hegemony."

As political journalist Mehdi Hasan  tweeted , Shapiro was allowed to write about Limbaugh, in the New York Times, without having to "mention or grapple with" Limbaugh's record of misogyny and bigotry. 

It might have been of some value to hear Shapiro honestly address Limbaugh's darkness. Apparently, the Times editors actually asked him to. In a podcast a few days later , after Megyn Kelly mockingly quoted Hasan's tweet, Shapiro replied that the Times' editors "wanted me to do some of that stuff too." But, he said, "I'm not gonna do that."

Kingsbury published his piece anyway. She shouldn't have.

How to expand the range

Ironically, considering what a debacle that was, Kingsbury's concept of featuring a variety of voices on a particular topic should be one of the ways the Times starts to diversify its guest essays going forward — with the ever-present requirement that they actually have something of value to offer, and do so without deceit. 

Another good move would be to encourage writers to respond to what they've read in the opinion pages, something explicitly discouraged in the current guidelines , which relegate such responses to the letters page.   

When someone like author Heather McGhee writes something as mind-blowing as her Feb. 13 op-ed about how white people turned the U.S. economy into a zero-sum game after the civil rights movement, that's an occasion to host a multiplicity of views. Admittedly, in that case Times columnist Michelle Goldberg proceeded to write about it and Times podcaster Ezra Klein proceeded to interview McGhee — but why not get responses from people who have watched this process play out and, for that matter, people who defend it?

Immigration policy is a hugely important, complicated and nuanced issue that would benefit from an intelligent exchange of views. Some issues, like voting rights, have only one defensible view. But the opinion page should try to find someone on the opposing side who will be honest about their goals, at least.

I'd like to see debate about media narratives and framing. Should the behavior of the Republican Party continue to be normalized by political reporters, no matter how extreme it is? At what point do you declare a politician, or a party, presumptively untrustworthy?

The opinion pages should also address fundamental underlying issues that rarely make it into daily journalism despite their significance in day-to-day life, like wealth inequality, educational inequality, misogyny and the corrupting lure of money. 

The opinion pages should showcase non-writers. People living incarcerated lives. People living in poverty. The undereducated. Let's revive the "as told to" format, if necessary. Washington Post reporter Eli Zaslow's Voices From the Pandemic series reminded us of its incredible power.

It's quite possible that only the Times, with its huge opinion staff, could do this right. As I wrote last year, the major investment Bennet made in  investigative reporting projects  for the opinion section — which seems redundant to me — could be better used finding and raising up underrepresented voices, especially those of oppressed people.

As Sewell Chan has said, "people's authentic lived experiences" are "often as important a form of authority as traditional research scholarship."  

The ubiquity of both cell-phone video and Zoom conferences suggests new ways of presenting the voices of real people. 

The key, of course, is not just to look for soundbites that fit a predetermined narrative (an unfortunate hallmark of Kingsbury's new deputy, the aforementioned Patrick Healy). The key is to find people who lead representative lives and get them to honestly express not just what their views are, but how they came to hold them. 

In her essay explaining the opinion redesign, Kingsbury hearkened back to the original goals of the op-ed section — "the allure of clashing opinions well expressed" — and vowed to host a space "where voices can be heard and respected, where ideas can linger a while, be given serious consideration, interrogated and then flourish or perish."

I wish her godspeed. But doing that will depend on her recognizing how much more there is to do than change a label.

Dan Froomkin is Editor of Press Watch. He wrote the daily White House Watch column for the Washington Post during the George W. Bush administration, then served as Washington bureau chief and senior writer at Huffington Post, covering Barack Obama's presidency, before working as Washington editor at The Intercept.

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How to Start Guest Blogging for The New York Times

The New York Times is an old and venerable institution, a newspaper gone digital, though they have had a print edition in regular publication since 1851. As the website for a newspaper, it’s still formatted to feel like a newspaper, with individual sections for topics like politics, business, art, opinions, food, fashion, and real estate. You can see the full list of categories just by hovering over the drop-down “sections” button in the upper left corner of the site.

Since the New York Times is a newspaper, you aren’t so much “guest blogging” as you are contributing. There are something like 100+ different sections to the online newspaper, ranging from the parenting section Motherlode to the educational Learning Network to the At War section of breaking global news.

Step 1: Figure Out Where To Write

The first thing you need to do, then, is figure out which part of the site is somewhere you can target. If you’re not an international reporter, you probably aren’t going to be able to write for the news in Africa. If you run a blog about fashion, you can probably target one of the fashion sections, like the Men’s Style or Weddings sections. You likely won’t be able to create their crossword, but you can probably write a nice local article for their travel section, particularly if you’re a travel blogger.

Since a large portion of the people who read blogs like this are in some kind of business, marketing, or blogging niche, you can expect to aim for one of those sections. The Tech sections Bits and Personal Tech can have some opportunities, and the Business section is open in the Money, Entrepreneurship, Media, Economy, and a few other sections. Again, however, it depends on your blogging niche.

Basically, since the New York Times is such a big paper with so many millions of readers, they are absolutely swamped with submissions for every possible section on their site. Many of them essentially just disregard any submission that isn’t from an invitation. If you don’t know the editors, or more importantly, they don’t know you, you aren’t going to find much opportunity.

I would say without exaggeration that the New York Times is one of the hardest places to write for simply because you have to compete with so many thousands of other people. Your content must be superior in every way, you must somehow get a good “in” with the site, and you have to avoid squandering your opportunity. There’s no guarantee you’ll get it a second time.

Step 2: Find the Submission Guidelines

Depending on where you want to submit your content, you’re going to have a tough time even figuring out the submission process. Every section is managed by a specific editorial team or a specific editor, and every editor has their own process.

For example, the letter to the editor section has a page for submissions here . A letter to the editor is an exclusive letter specifically referencing an article on the New York Times, within the previous seven days, and it has to include your own contact information. It’s not for guest blogging, of course; it’s 150-175 words and generally made as a correction or expansion upon what was published in the newspaper.

The main reason I link to this page is because they have contact information for a handful of other sections. You can see the list of email addresses halfway down the page. The book review section is [email protected] . The dining section is dining@, the real estate section is realestate@, and so on. This is important, because it lets you contact some sections you might want to write for, and it lets you guess the email address for a section you don’t see listed.

Another contact page is the one for the Lives Essays , which are short, 800-word stories about your life. They tend to be humorous stories rather than anything relating to marketing, but if you’re working on a personal blog and brand, it can work towards both ends.

The Travel section has their own submission process on this page . They have a street address you can send content to, and you can send pitches to an email address. They don’t publish anything that was subsidized or paid for by any organization or promoting an organization, they want content between 1,200 and 1,400 words, and they don’t want photographs.

If you’re capable of producing short documentary-style videos for opinion pieces, the Op-Doc section is award-winning and has a slightly better chance of getting in, simply because the barrier to entry – creating a video – is higher. You can read about that submission process here .

The Opinion and Editorial section is the most open to submissions, with the most visible submission process, but that means it’s also flooded with tons of pitches at all times. They will accept op-ed pieces on pretty much any topic, ranging from 400 to 1,200 words, though longer pieces are occasionally considered. They require exclusivity, but are open to any topic, from business and politics to travel and fashion to entomology and meditation. “Anything can be an op-ed. We’re not only interested in policy, politics, or government. We’re interested in everything, if it’s opinionated and we believe our readers will find it worth reading.”

The Op-ed section submission page is here . You basically just send your pitch to [email protected] and hope they accept it.

One common thread amongst all of these submission processes is the volume. All of them have a “will not necessarily contact you” clause. If you haven’t heard from them by X amount of time – three days for op-ed, two weeks for Travel, etc – consider yourself rejected. They will generally only reach out and respond to you if they’re interested in having you write for them, or if you’re so egregious in spamming them that they’ve blacklisted you.

The op-ed section is both your best and worst chance to get a post published on the New York Times. On the one hand, it’s the most open and accepting of content, since it’s a section specifically designed for accepting guest posts from writers all around the world. On the other hand, it’s the most open and accepting of content, which means there are approximately five billion people trying to submit pitches at any given time. If you thought your email inbox was bad, you should see theirs.

Step 3: Craft and Submit a Pitch

I’m not going to cover writing a pitch in great detail here because I’ve covered it in other sections of the site fairly well. Try reading How to Write the Perfect Pitch and, since you’re likely to be rejected a few times from the Times, check out 5 Strategies to Try if Your Guest Blog Pitch Was Rejected .

When writing a pitch for the New York Times, you can go one of two ways. The first is timely . You see something on the news, or on niche news that you know is likely to hit the mainstream in a day or two, or even in the span of a few hours. You write up a guest blog pitch for that topic, citing your authority in the niche and presenting a good idea for how to cover it.

This is a tricky situation for two reasons. First, you’re probably not the only one looking to cover that topic, and you might not even be the first person to submit a pitch on the subject. Second, if it’s particularly newsworthy, it might be something one of the actual staff reporters for the New York Times is covering, so it could be something you’re just not able to cover. You might have to wait until an actual article is published about it, and then respond to it in a customized way with your expertise.

The second type of pitch is the more informal , opinion or story-based content. Come up with a good anecdote with a good moral that ties into your life and your business somehow, and pitch that. Bonus points if it’s recent or can tie into some modern amount of relevance. There are plenty of opportunities to tie into current events if you just dig into your history a little and get a little creative.

The second type is more likely to get you accepted , but at the cost of requiring a lot more thought and creativity. A basic anecdote about seeing a Muslim help someone and how that ties into politics and so forth is, well, basic. It’s not the kind of stand-out content that’s required to get on the New York Times.

Step 4: Repeat Until You’re Accepted

A simple step, really: just keep at it until you’re accepted or they politely tell you to stop sending them emails. They don’t usually blacklist people, so really, you can keep going as long as you have ideas and the will to keep submitting them.

On the plus side, anything you submit to the New York Times that is ignored and rejected is something you can then adapt and submit to another site. No idea is a wasted idea, they’re just ideas you might need to save for another opportunity. I have a dozen pages of ideas stored away for when the opportunity arises to use them.

Step 5: Read and Sign the Contract

When you’re finally accepted, you will have to go through a process. They will send you an email about accepting your pitch, along with a contract. The contract is you giving them the rights to publish the content and assigning you certain responsibilities. These responsibilities are pretty standard: don’t plagiarize your content, even from yourself. Don’t submit something that has been published anywhere else. Disclose any conflicts of interest, financial or otherwise. You also need to provide all of the supporting information for your story. Cite your sources whenever you state a fact, even if the citation isn’t necessarily going to make it into the finished article.

The New York Times does, in fact, fact check their posts, and they want to make sure that not only are you citing actual, real facts, that you’re also citing them from reputable sources. Don’t just cite your buddy’s blog for a fact with no verification. Cite real sources, authoritative sources. If it wouldn’t make it past a Wiki editing team, it won’t make it here either.

Only once you have signed the contract can you start to work with the editor on your piece. They will have suggestions and guidelines. It’s possible that they didn’t actually like your idea as written, but that they were willing to extract some core value out of it. Maybe they like the scenario but want a different moral. Maybe they want a different direction for your story telling.

Do not worry yourself about the title of the piece. The editor always writes the headline, not the writer. Likewise, it is the responsibility of the editorial team at the New York Times to provide the imagery to go with the post, not yours. This is both so that they can have a consistent visual brand for their paper, and so that they can be guaranteed that they have the rights to use the images they use. It’s just a hassle to accept images from authors.

You also have final veto power. If you are not satisfied with the direction the editor wants to go, and feel like it corrupts your piece or fails to cover the message you want to cover, you can take back the article. They will never publish something you have not agreed to publish.

Don’t worry about adding a shoehorned link to your brand, either. When you publish something, you get a small author box that typically has a link to your email and to your Twitter profile. That, and a small bio, is about all you get. You’ll have to work with their editors to see what all you can fit in. Beyond that, the value comes from having your name and citation on the New York Times, not from a link you post.

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Guest Essay

We Still Haven’t Figured Out How to Beat ISIS

By Christopher P. Costa and Colin P. Clarke

Mr. Costa was the special assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council from 2017 to 2018. Mr. Clarke is the director of research at the Soufan Group.

For all of the counterterrorism wins that the United States has had in its fight against the Islamic State — and there have been many — we still have not figured out how to defeat it.

A terrorist attack targeting a concert hall in the Russian capital of Moscow on March 22 killed more than 130 people and left many others severely wounded. It served as the latest deadly reminder that the Islamic State — and particularly its Khorasan branch, ISIS-K, which is active in Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan — remains a potent threat. It’s a painful lesson Afghans and Americans alike learned in August 2021, when ISIS-K conducted a complex suicide operation that killed at least 170 Afghan civilians and 13 American service members in Kabul, in the midst of a chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Since the start of the new year, ISIS-K has launched lethal assaults in Iran and Turkey . Several ISIS-K plots in Europe have been disrupted , with arrests in Austria, France, Germany and the Netherlands. On Tuesday, four days after the Moscow attack, the ISIS-affiliated al-Battar Media published a message threatening Italy, France, Spain and Britain: “Who’s next?” Both France and Italy have since raised their terror threat levels.

All of these events point to what we now know: Stripping the Islamic State of its self-proclaimed caliphate is not the same as beating it. At its peak, the caliphate was as large as the territory of Britain, stretching from the Levant to Southeast Asia, and boasted over 40,000 foreign fighters from more than 80 countries. Forced from this redoubt, ISIS has reconstituted itself in other countries, going underground in less detectable — but more dangerous — forms.

To stop that threat from reaching America and its allies, the United States must prevent two decades of counterterrorism expertise from atrophying. There are other serious threats that deserve Washington’s attention, including Chinese adventurism and the challenge of artificial intelligence. But to keep Americans safe, counterterrorism must remain a strategic priority — and that includes finding a way to keep eyes on the Islamic State in parts of the world where we no longer have a footprint.

After the terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda of Sept. 11, 2001, the American public was told to brace itself, that the war on terror would be a generational one. The United States made some profound blunders in the decades-long fight that followed, and eventually, Washington turned its national security focus to different geopolitical threats . But neither of those facts obviated the need to remain committed to countering transnational terrorism. By pulling back troops and intelligence assets from active conflict zones, the United States has allowed groups like ISIS-K to rebound. It’s not the time to let up, or predictably, we will find ourselves facing a resurgent adversary.

The Islamic State is nothing if not resilient . Aggressive Western military campaigns helped dismantle the caliphate and have in recent years severely curtailed the operations of ISIS militants in other countries, including the Philippines and Syria. Rather than disappear, they have gone on to rebrand, enlist new fighters under the same banner and plot new attacks. Some have reappeared in other countries, better trained and harder to find and protect against. Some are intent on committing acts of terrorism like those we’re witnessing now, traveling across borders to infiltrate target countries.

How did a jihadist group operating from a remote region of Afghanistan manage to expand its networks and begin planning external operations with such global reach?

Part of the answer is that we left. Before the United States withdrew, ISIS-K was far more constrained, particularly its ability to launch external attacks. In a 2020 agreement between the United States and the Taliban signed in Doha, Qatar, the Taliban agreed to prevent terrorist groups from using Afghan soil to threaten the United States and its allies. In return, Washington agreed to fully withdraw its forces from the country. The stipulation to prevent terrorist groups from using Afghanistan as an operating base was primarily relevant to the Taliban’s longstanding, cozy relationship with Al Qaeda. The Taliban and ISIS-K, on the other hand, are mortal enemies and have been fighting each other since ISIS-K started operating in the country in 2015, at the apex of the Islamic State’s so-called caliphate.

So while the Taliban, once in power, may have intended to combat ISIS-K and keep its militants in check, its success has been mixed at best. Taliban fighters were highly effective insurgents but are proving to be far less effective in their still new counterinsurgent and counterterrorist role. They have made modest progress in eliminating ISIS-K commanders and reclaiming some territory from the group, but Islamic State militants still operate along Afghanistan’s borders — and still retain the capacity for spectacular attacks.

Precisely because the Taliban has enjoyed some success in limiting ISIS-K’s attacks within Afghanistan, the group has deliberately focused its energy on an “ internationalization ” agenda, including shifting resources to build a robust external attack network. ISIS-K now maintains a vast network of extremists it can tap into, spread across volatile regions such as the Caucasus and Central Asia. Thousands of Central Asians have joined the Islamic State, with many Uzbeks and Tajiks holding leadership positions, especially in ISIS-K. Militants from Central Asia now form the backbone of ISIS-K’s external operations cadre. “In the past year, the Afghan affiliate has planned 21 external plots or attacks in nine countries, compared to eight plots or attacks in the previous year and just three between 2018 and March 2022,” notes a report by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Put simply: The Taliban is unable to contain the ISIS-K threat alone. The time has probably passed for trying to unseat the Taliban by discreetly supporting Afghan opposition groups like the Panjshiris of the National Resistance Front , who oppose Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Now it’s time for diplomacy. Washington and its allies could engage the Qataris or the Saudis to provide incentives for the Taliban to ramp up their pressure on ISIS-K, share intelligence and, perhaps in time, walk away from their past pledge to unconditionally support Al Qaeda and provide the group with safe haven. Maybe the Taliban has learned from Mullah Omar’s fateful refusal to hand Osama bin Laden over to the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks. Maybe not.

Either way, it’s unrealistic to expect the Taliban to be a reliable counterterrorism partner in an international effort to defeat ISIS-K. But some level of cooperation, however unappealing, is necessary. The human intelligence so critical in counterterrorism can only be gathered on the ground. With no American footprint left in the country, our counterterrorism interests would be better served with intelligence derived from Taliban security and intelligence operations directed against ISIS-K — a mutual enemy. The cooperation should remain limited to information sharing and should not extend to training or the provision of equipment.

Intelligence history is replete with examples of marriages of convenience between intelligence services for sharing threat information, even between adversarial countries. Although a “ shadow war ” has played out between Iran and the United States for decades, the United States still reportedly shared threat warnings on an impending terrorist attack with the Iranians in January. Washington did the same with Moscow two weeks before the ISIS-K attack on the concert hall.

Of course, coming to any kind of agreement with the Taliban is a deeply complicated and controversial endeavor. Even a highly restricted relationship with the Taliban would be distasteful and fraught with ethical dilemmas, given the regime’s human rights record.

But it’s been considered before . And the alternative is worse: a devastating attack directed at Americans overseas or at home.

Christopher P. Costa was a career intelligence officer and was the special assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council from 2017 to 2018. Colin P. Clarke is the director of research at the Soufan Group, an intelligence and security consulting firm based in New York City.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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