A San Francisco Alum on Her Op-Ed in The Boston Review

Tanya Maria Golash-Boza

A San Francisco public seminar alum, Tanya Maria Golash-Boza writes about her latest op-ed success in The Boston Review and the resulting responses.  She is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Merced. She is the author of: Yo Soy Negro Blackness in Peru, Immigration Nation: Raids, Detentions and Deportations in Post-9/11 America, and Due Process Denied: Detentions and Deportations in the United States.

I attended The OpEd Project workshop in San Francisco last November to learn strategies that would help me communicate my ideas to a broader audience. My goal was to publish an op-ed in a major media outlet – particularly The New York Times.  During the workshop, I learned all that and more. Since the workshop, however, I have realized that publishing op-eds can be less straightforward than I had imagined.

After The OpEd Project workshop, I worked with a mentor-editor, and sent an op-ed off to several major newspapers. I did not receive a single response. Thus, I sent that piece off to Racialicious and Counterpunch. Those alternative media outlets published versions of it.

Trying to publish an op-ed in a mainstream media outlet did not work that time. Ironically, I got my next op-ed published by not trying to publish one.

In January 2013, I wrote a report on mass deportations. It has several graphics and is a bit long for an op-ed. Thus, I posted it on my own blog, thinking people might find the data useful. Roberto Lovato, co-founder of Presente.org, saw the post and shared it with his connections in the media. The post generated interest among reporters and I had a phone interview with Elise Foley of the Huffington Post. She wrote a post about the report, and then Salon and Alternet picked it up.

An editor at the Boston Review saw the Salon article and contacted me to ask if I could write something for their next issue. My short piece came out in the March/April issue of the Boston Review

Since then, I have had radio and other newspaper interviews, and have published two Opinion pieces in Al Jazeera.

I will continue to work on my goal of getting an op-ed in the New York Times, but, for the time being, am happy knowing that, wherever I publish, there are myriad ways the information could be disseminated.

The Week In Review

Notable O.E.P. Stories for the Week Ending in August 24th, 2012

Alex Prager, “Deborah”

Two of our reported successes this week deal with Missouri Representative/Senate candidate Todd Akin’s indefensible (though even this is contested), “folkloric” comments regarding the biological processes informing rape, pregnancy, and female physiology. The remaining two address similarly hot-button topics – men with eating disorders and the United States’ aging prison population, and just what to do with them – in a studied and cool manner that we’ve happily come to expect from our prolific alumni. All timely and utterly necessary appraisals of the various truths of our “now.”

	While a definite stigma persists as to the so-called truths and lived reality of eating disorders, a good portion of the conversation centers upon young girls and women – keeping with many medi- cal, psychoanalytic, and societal “tradi- tions,” it seems. Men have only recently been more fully conceptualized as hav- ing eating disorders; Abby Ellin‘s NYT article testifies on their behalf.
	In her own words: “Little Margaret found her voice this week.” Indeed, and it’s one of subtle irony and insight: PVF Fellow Margaret Martonosi writes candidly about MO Rep. Todd Akin, all the while maintaining a rhetorical/ideo- logical distance indicative of a thinker who’s spent time sitting with her mind, crafting her voice, and enacting close readings. She asks questions – how, why? – and is unafraid to highlight the hypocrisies of Akin’s social proclivities.
	“When Representative Todd Akin said that cases of ‘legitimate rape’ do not result in pregnancy,” muses Susan Celia Greenfield, “he was simply artic- ulating a widely-held medical belief. In second-century Rome that is.” This is an opinion worthy of PBS’s “Need to Know” designation and one, we might all agree, so deserving of attention.
	Can such a thing as “compassionate release” for aging prisoners exist? Perhaps the most notable aspect of Tina Maschi‘s HuffPo article persists as its understated ability to incite inquiry in readers (including myself), doing so by proffering points-of-view that some might consider inconsequential or even inflammatory. But what progress can be made without the willingness to talk, to question, to offer insight? We comm- end Tina for having the tenacity to approach, and critique, this subject.

Because I can’t seem to help myself, and in celebration of his one-hundred-and-ninth birthday this year, I’ll include an excerpt of a clipping from George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Why I Write” (found on Brain Pickings, one of those places online in which I easily and freely become lost, as if in a vortex of ideas). This is also another of those “But I promise you, it relates!”-type moments:

“And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a POLITICAL purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.” (emphasis mine)

- J. J. Morr

Men in Pink: The Byline Survey, October 13 – 19

Hello Byline readers!  One of the more interesting surprises that I  (Taryn) have come across in the course of this survey has been the relatively high number of men who write about Pink topics.

As a reminder, “Pink” topics are the topical spheres that compose what some media critics refer to as the “pink ghetto” because women have historically been confined within them.

We’ve defined the Pink ghetto as:  1.) anything that falls into what was once known as “the four F’s”: food, family (relationships, children, sex), furniture (home), and fashion, 2.) women-focused subject matter, e.g. woman-specific health or culture, 3.) gender / women’s issues, or 4.) a profile of a woman or her work in which her gender is a significant issue of the piece.

By no means are these subjects the exclusive domains of women – they are just as much a part of the lives of men.  The relatively high number of men traversing the Pink ghetto borders indicates a significant amount of progress and serves to further mainstream content that was traditionally for women and by women.   Perhaps a ghetto begins to break down not only when those trapped inside begin to move beyond its constraints, but also when “outsiders” freely choose to inhabit its space.

The chart below shows the percentage of Pink topics in each outlet broken up between men and women.  I should point out that the The Huffington Post figure might seem low, but keep in mind the fact that women contribute heavily to Pink topics in new media, and that the 2.5% accounts for 14% of all of The Huffington Post’s Pink topics.

Each news outlet has a unique array of subject matter than it tends to publish.  Of the four traditional media outlets in our survey, The NY Times tends to publish the most diverse range of topics.  In the last 4 weeks, 13% of its articles involved a Pink topic.  Nicholas Kristof alone accounted for 4 of 17 Pink topic articles.  5 other staff writers pitched in, three of who were men, as well as 7 op-ed contributors, 1 of who was a man (see the chart below).  This content distribution is in accord with the past month’s findings in which NYT op-ed contributing women had the highest rate of Pink topic authorship.

Finally, we have the week’s proportion of op-eds by women in the chart below.  The traditional media outlets are on the low side, but new media is staying strong.  I do have to say that it is such a pleasure to tabulate the university numbers.  The strong showings of those women bode well for the future.

Freedom, Foliage, and the Final Frontier: End of September Updates

Hello everybody, this is Taryn (dedicated intern), here to catch you up on some of the latest OpEd Project successes.

There’s been so much action this week – with teams in NYC, Dallas, Chicago, and at Yale.  In Dallas, we presented to Women Moving Millions.  In NYC, we ran public programs and held media meetings.  Our Chicago team – Debbie Seigel, Michele Weldon, Katherine Lanpher and Zeba Khan — will be running a public program on October 1st, hosted by Northwestern University, with forty women in the room (a record).

Successes this week included:

*Qanta Ahmed published an op-ed on Saudi women in today’s NY Daily News, which was the most emailed article of the day. Qanta is now on her 20th published column since coming through OpEd project, many of which have been featured in the Washington Post and USA today. Read You Don’t Know Saudi Arabian Women. 

*Marielle Anzelone, an urban ecologist, had a gorgeous column in the NYT  this week on the beginning of Autumn –
 it’s the first of a 13-week online column on urban ecology that was offered her after she published her first op-ed ever in May, in the NYT print edition, after coming through The OpEd Project. Read: Autumn Unfolds in a Patch of Urban Forest. 

*Yale Scholar Laura Wexler (part of our OpEd Project at Yale fellowship program)  had a beautiful CNN column on the Troy Davis execution, and the unreliability of eyewitness identification and memory. As a result of this, Laura will be on Minnesota Public Radio today.  Listen to the interview.

*Also,Yale astrophysicist Meg Urry wrote a great CNN piece on the expanding galaxy – her fourth for CNN in the past few months that we’ve been working with her (she also did one for The Huffington Post). Yesterday, CNN offered Meg a monthly column, and potential TV spots.  Find Meg’s columns here.

*Finally, Fordham/Princeton scholar Carina Ray (we are launching OpEd Project fellowships at Princeton and Fordham both in the next two months) published an enlightening article in the Huffington Post this week titled The Gaddafi Mercenary Myth; and Sarah Fitts, who came through our NYC public program just this last weekend, published her persuasive piece Freedom is an Electric Car, also in the Huffington Post.

Wow.  What a week!

The Building of an Op-Ed – Alyssa

Alyssa Best, the OpEd Project’s East Coast Program Manager, recently published a fantastic piece in The Huffington Post discussing the abusive dating dynamic suggested by the Twilight series. We asked Alyssa, who is one of the very first alums of the OpEd Project (she came through one of our pilot programs before we even officially existed), to tell us about the process of writing an op-ed during a seminar, finishing it afterwards, and publishing it – and her reactions. Congratulations to Alyssa, and we hope her story encourages you to add your perspective, no matter what the subject.

“Last week, I wrote an op-ed, “In Twilight: Eclipse, I’ll Vote for Team Bella” in The Huffington Post criticizing the way the Twilight films portray the lead female character, Bella Swan, as a victim in need of rescuing. I felt compelled to write the piece as a reaction to the “Team Edward vs. Team Jacob” discourse that has dominated our popular culture and that has obscured the identity of the story’s heroine. Especially in light of more powerful female leads in recent movies, I feel that the Twlight movies are moving our popular narratives backwards in a harmful way.

I started brainstorming this piece in the last public seminar in DC on May 1st, began to design a strong argument in the DC follow-up workshop series in May, and continued to workshop my ideas with other alums at a DC happy hour on June 10th. As a staff member and alum of The OpEd Project, I wanted to experience first-hand the benefits of having access to a community of other opinionists who will help me stay accountable to my goal of writing this piece. Tapping into the various activities The OpEd Project offers to alums to help us broadcast our voices has been critical to my success. The reaction to my piece has been more than I expected: in one week, I received 26 comments, the op-ed was shared 27 times on Facebook, and it was re-tweeted 177 times.

Most of all, the debate my op-ed has spurred has been tremendous: from getting blasted by some fans who claim I’m not qualified to comment onTwilight because I haven’t read the books to a community advocate from Start Strong Idaho who pushes forward my linking the story line to teen dating abuse and claims that “the high proportion of 11-14 year olds (primarily girls) who believe that controlling, obsessive behaviors by dating partners are indicative of true love is shocking.” This level of commentary further reinforces why my perspective –and the critical point of view of other members in The OpEd Project community — is necessary to change our public debate.”

- Alyssa Best

The byline survey begins again!

Hello readers, my name is Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and I’m the new social media intern with the Op-Ed Project.  I’m a junior at Princeton University, majoring in religion and women & gender studies, where I run our campus feminist blog, Equal Writes, spend a lot of time riding my bike, and drink prodigious amounts of black tea.  I’m absolutely thrilled to be following in the illustrious footsteps of Chloe Angyal, who began the byline survey last August and ended, 3 months later, in October.  Ravenna Koenig, my fellow intern, did a mini-assessment of where women are in the world of op-eds since the beginning of 2010, and let me warn you – the stats are not good.  The percentage of most of the newspapers’ female contributors was hovering around 20%, which is abysmally low.

So I’ll be here for the next 3 months, tracking the bylines of seven major news outlets: the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the LA Times, Slate, Salon, and the Huffington Post.  I’ll also be looking at the op-ed pages of three college dailies, the Daily Princetonian, the Yale Daily News, and the Daily Texan, to see how women are represented in their college papers (these findings could have interesting implications if, as I suspect, more women are being published in college).

I’ll also be updating you periodically about just what the women who are published in the op-ed pages of these papers were writing about – are women, for example, writing frequently about foreign policy, hard sciences and economics?  I hope that you’ll respond to my findings in the comments, and add your own thoughts!

And, without further ado, the first week of the byline project 2.0:

Mainstream news outlets:

NYT   WaPo     WSJ     LA Times   HuffPo    Slate    Salon

% by women       23      41.2        17.6         15.4            24          32.4         0

% by men             77      58.8       82.4        84.6          76          67.6       100

Clearly, Salon has some catching up to do – they make the LA Times, at their pitiful 15%, look positively bursting with female voices.  This week was interesting because there were several op-eds about the need for gender-neutral Oscar categories (do you really think Sandra Bullock would have beaten Jeff Bridges in a unisex “best actor” category?  Okay, now tell me where you think the good roles are going in Hollywood).  The Washington Post, by contrast, was inching close to an even balance – we’ll see if they keep it up!

College newspapers

Daily Prince   Daily Texan   Yale Daily News

% by women               30                   50                    70

% by men                    70                    50                    10

Take a look at the Yale Daily News!  They run two op-eds a day, one by a staff columnist and one by a guest columnist, and there was never a day when there wasn’t a woman on the opinion page – there were even a few when both columnists were women!  I know it’s the first week, but Yale and UT are already making Princeton look pretty bad.

Ask an Editor: Stuart Whatley, Huffington Post Associate Blog Editor gives the inside info on how to get published

Stuart Whatley is a Huffington Post Associate Blog Editor in the Washington D.C. bureau. Other than HuffPost, his writing has appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Guardian, TruthDig.com, The American Prospect, Free Inquiry and other outlets. He spoke with OpEd Project Intern Ravenna Koenig about what he looks for in a good op-ed, what’s up next for the Huffington Post, and the most important lesson he’s learned about submitting opinion pieces.

Ravenna Koenig: What advice would you give to people looking to get published by the HuffPost?

Stuart Whatley: The most important thing is speaking from a perspective where you have credibility. A lot of the pitches we get are from people who read the newspaper, make observations and become kind of armchair experts… and you can do that—in some ways it’s the only way to start—but at the end of the day it kind of puts you at a disadvantage. Obviously we’re going to take an op-ed on the filibuster from a senator who’s working to reform it versus someone who just read the New York Times that morning. Write from where you have credibility.

RK: I know you get a really wide range of pieces, what are the common elements of the best pieces?

SW: Well, you want to get the style and the format down. 700 words or so, state your point early on; you don’t want to lace it with a forced use of big words. Clear, succinct. The biggest thing for us—because we’re a pretty fast-paced news site—is timeliness. It means you probably need to know something about it beforehand… Like the Citizens United court case a few weeks ago: we had tons of stuff that came in that day, the next day, and the day after that. After that, people were sending in fine pieces, but everything had already been said.  It’s easy for your average citizen to make all the same observations on what it meant, but the ones we ran offered something beyond that— [were by] people who were speaking from a strong expert position. For aspiring writers the idea is just: be able to tell, are you going to be able to be the best authority on subject?

RK: In just a couple of years the HuffPost has gone from being a relatively small blog to perhaps the major online news source ( 3.7 million unique visitors), adding new content areas and developing a non-profit investigative journalism arm. What’s next for the Huffington Post?

SW: We’ve been opening some local pages, like the LA page, the Denver page, we’re opening an art section soon, a foods section. Basically what you can see us doing is creeping out to cover all those things that traditional newspapers have generally covered. With my job it’s just about getting more and more strong outside voices contributing on the site.

RK: Out of curiosity, how did you get your job as a Huffington Post Associate Blog Editor?

SW: My first year out of college I worked for a law firm, which was completely unrelated, but I had always enjoyed writing, so during that time I started doing the whole blind submitting op-eds to newspapers thing. That’s how I started learning what they were looking for, what kinds of things belong on the op-ed pages, who should be writing them, etc. I would either never hear back, or get turned down but then I started tailoring [my articles] to where I had expertise. The first thing I got published was in the Atlanta Journal Constitution about Wake Forest University, where I went to school, changing its policy to make submitting one’s SAT score optional. Since I was a recent grad, I was speaking from a position of some credibility. And then once you start getting stuff published, it lends itself well to continuously being published. After that I did some internships in [Washington] D.C.; then I was an intern at the Huffington Post before I was hired. At that point I had been working with the news side and the blog side, so I had a good sense of what was going on in the news, what was timely, and also a good sense of what we were looking for on the site.

RK: The difficulty of transforming “old media” employees into “new media” employees was recently cited by Kenneth Lerer as the reason a number of people “ungracefully” left the HuffPost. What do you think is the difference between “new” and “old” media journalists?  What has been your experience with these factions?

SW: In some cases you can definitely tell when you’re dealing with someone who’s used to old media versus someone who’s used to new. Fortunately my part of the HuffPost, the blog side, can be a lot like old media. We’re looking for op-ed type pieces, but obviously there’s more flexibility than in your traditional newspaper. You can tell when people aren’t too tech-savvy or blog-savvy but they still fit in well enough. Bascially, we just have a lot more options [than traditional media]: we can run your traditional op-ed or something more unique—it all depends on who wrote it, the angle they used, etc. The biggest difference is definitely the faster-paced environment—we turn it over much more quickly than a traditional paper ever would. I think there’s a subtle paradigm shift [from old to new media]—I don’t think it’s absolute, a lot of stuff is still the same. Pieces still need to be timely, topical, and well sourced—all that stuff is still the same. It’s more a matter of going viral, making a unique point that can’t be found anywhere else. With so many voices out there, it’s pretty hard to have a totally unique argument. We’re always looking for stuff that stands out.

RK: You write predominantly about politics: in a world so inundated by so much information, how do you filter through it all and decide what to write about? Do you have any advice for how the average person can abreast of political events?

SW: It’s impossible to keep track of everything. I would find a collection of sources and sites that you trust and that you enjoy reading. Here we all have RSS feeds that deliver everything to you. I’m big into magazines. I subscribe to, like, ten different ones, even though I can’t read them all it gives you a good sense of what’s going on. Basically you have to be a voracious news consumer to get a thorough understanding of what’s going on in the world on any given day.

Here comes the home stretch

Well folks, the Byline Survey is coming to a close. Every day for almost three months, I’ve been checking the op-ed pages of six different papers and counting how many women op-ed contributors there are on each day. The final numbers are almost in – there are two weeks still to go, but we already have ten weeks’ worth of data to look at. So let’s look at them.  Here are the raw numbers:

TOTAL	HuffPost	LA Times	NYT	Salon	WaPo	WSJ
Total op-eds	1479	100	82	76	72	136
Op-eds by women	301	30.33	17.75	7	10.5	8.75
%age	20.35	30.33	21.64	9.21	14.58	6.43

So, what’s going on here? Well, first of all, not one paper is at 50% women. No paper is even close. The LA Times comes the closest, but even there, less than 1/3 of the op-eds they publish are written by women. And, as you can see, the other papers trail the LA Times by almost 10%, if not more. By far the most disappointing is The Wall Street Journal, with only 6.43%, but Salon isn’t that far ahead of the WSJ.

It’s also interesting to note that being an online publication doesn’t necessarily mean more women – Salon’s 9.2% is more than doubled by HuffPo’s 20.3%. Sort of makes you question the theory that the online revolution has made media representation more democratic and equal, doesn’t it?
Stay tuned for more findings from the Byline Survey, including our final numbers for the entire three-month survey period.

Wrapping up Week 5, and welcome to Week 6

Welcome to week six of tracking the bylines on America’s most influential op-ed pages. As regular readers know, I’ve spent the last five weeks counting how many women-penned op-eds are published each day in The Huffington Post, The LA Times, The New York Times, Salon, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.

The findings have been fascinating, and have really driven home the need for the kind of work we do at The Op-Ed Project. It’s clear that, with the percentage of women on the op-ed pages hovering anywhere between 5% and 25%, depending on the paper, we’ve still got a lot of work to do before women are equally and equitably represented on America’s op-ed pages. The Op-Ed Project aims to inject women’s voices into public debate by teaching women how to write and pitch op-eds, creating an opportunity for individual women and individual editors to work together to change the byline imbalance. Last week reflected the varying levels of women’s representation on the op-ed pages. As you can see below, some papers are doing well, and some are doing… less than well.

	HuffPost	LA Times	NYT	Salon	WaPo	WSJ
% Op-eds by men	78	50	64	100	100	90
% Op-eds by women	22	50	36	0	0	10

So here we are, at the start of the sixth week of tracking bylines. This week, in addition to counting the number of female voices on the op-ed pages, I’ll be talking to some of The Op-Ed Project’s Mentor Editors about the op-ed gender gap, and what we can do about it.

Ask a Mentor Editor: Michael Kimmel

Michael Kimmel, one of the OEP’s newest Mentor Editors, is a Professor of Sociology at SUNY Stonybrook, and the author of more books than some people have read in their life. His most recent book, Guyland, is about masculinity in America – on which Kimmel is an expert -  and focuses specifically on young men between the ages of 15 and 25. Recently, Kimmel has begun writing columns for The Huffington Post.  Last week, he answered some of our burning questions about the op-ed gender gap:

Chloe: Why do you think there are fewer women on the op-ed pages than men?

Michael Kimmel: My answer’s going to sound sort of ironic. Feminist women are kind of in a contradictory position, because on the one hand, women assert that there’s no difference between women and men, that women can do anything men can do. Therefore, since women and men are so similar, why do you need to put women on the page? Editors can almost use equality feminism against women. We don’t have to hire a female surgeon to get a feminist perspective on surgery. So since women and men are so similar, we hire the best qualified. That’s what they would say. And the best qualified are the ones with the best history, so in this sense, seniority and tenure, all those sorts of things, which we know are gendered, come back to haunt women.

CA: Do you think there are really editors out there who would justify their 80-20 breakdown like that?

MK: No, that’s what I, as a sociologist, would say. What the editors would say is that they are definitely looking for the distinctive voices of women or minorities. And what my belief is that women and minorities are seen as niche groups. So you have one, and you check it off. It’s like The New York Times. They have Bob Herbert: Check. They have two women: Check. And then outside those niches they have economics, politics, global affairs, and those turn out to be – what a surprise! – white men.

So what happens is, women are a topic to be covered, so when you have one, you basically cover your base. And that’s how I do think they see it. Women are a niche market, a particular topic. And you can’t have a man cover that. So you get a woman, and if you’ve covered it demographically, and you’ve covered it substantively.

So the argument that I just made (and this is the sociologist speaking again) is a difference feminism argument. Yes, women have a different voice, women have different sensibilities, women have a different perspective, OK, so we’ll cover women. We’ll have our girl, she’ll cover girls, that’s solved. And in a funny way, difference feminism ends up segregating women into a kind of ghetto, which has been the argument against difference feminism all these years. But equality feminism also ends up hurting women because then you’re just looking at the blank, de-gendered resume, and you have one person who’s had all these great previous appointments and the other person who’s had less, and you say, “we’ll take the best.” And the one who looks like the best looks that way because of institutional discrimination, which gets buried in the credentialing, and you always end up with the white man. So whether you use a similarity or a difference model, either way, women lose.