My first job as an opinion columnist was here at Fast Company, writing the back page column for the magazine, circa 2006 or so. The column was about the absurdities of the innovation industry and over-the-top marketing stunts, and anything that could be mined for comic fodder while saying something interesting about the mid-’00s post-crash business environment.
I stopped writing the column because, well, Fortune magazine recruited me and offered me a big pile of money, which is always a pretty good incentive to switch employers. There, I wrote about economics, technology, and media. Before I went into media at the ripe old age of 23, I had been a buy-side tech equity analyst, and had also started a Wall Street site called Dealbreaker that was popular with second-year analysts at investment banks who paid for bottle service at nightclubs. The latter is not what made me equipped to write about things like how core inflation is calculated, but it made me appreciate the art of writing for people who have no attention spans whatsoever.
Now I’m a contributing writer for The New York Times opinion section, which means they give me space once or twice a month and I write mostly about politics, tech, and culture. (I also co-host a financial news podcast, Slate Money, so I have not stopped punditing about the economy entirely.) I’ve also written columns for The Washington Post, The New Republic, the Financial Times, and others.
The most obvious reason your pieces may not be working
I say all of this to establish that I’ve been writing opinion columns in large national outlets for over 20 years, and in what Dan Drezner calls “the ideas industry,” that gives me standing to give other people advice about how to write columns and get them published. The idea of standing is important here, and if you’re reading this because your thought leadership isn’t getting any traction, let’s start with what you do have going for you: your area of expertise.
Your expertise is why you have standing to opine on your topic of choice. You can choose to write and say things that are completely outside of your area of expertise, but if you are doing that, it’s probably part of the reason you’re not getting traction. You may not have established that you know enough about the topic to be considered a credible source. This is not a dismissal of your ability or range. I am asking you to put yourself in the mind of the reader and ask, Why should I listen to this particular person on this particular topic?
The biggest mistake inexperienced columnists make
But that’s not the only reason you may not be getting traction; it’s just an obvious one I wanted to get out of the way first. I also teach an online workshop about how to write op-eds, and most of the people who take it are academics who are looking to make their work accessible to a larger audience or executives who want to get their ideas into the marketplace. The biggest mistake my first-time students make is trying to cram every good idea they have into one column.
It is very hard for people to resist doing this when they are looking to put their ideas in public, particularly in opinion column format. It comes from a place of insecurity. Somewhere in the back of their brains, would-be opinion writers become convinced that if the column they’re working on gets published, it will be the only column they ever get to write. So they need to get it all out there—all at once!
The problem with this is that if you throw too many things at readers, it will overwhelm them, and they won’t know what you really want them to take away from the column. For those of you writing (or speaking or blogging) about complex topics, there’s sometimes a temptation to cast this behavior as necessary for the reader to truly understand what you’re saying. But that’s almost never the case. You can be nuanced and complex without overloading your argument.
Newspaper and magazine columns generally run from around 750 to 1,500 words. Most of the stuff I write lands around 1,200. (If you’re writing on a blog, length is less important, but print constraints tend to affect how long your pieces can be at big publications.) At those lengths, you can probably get one or maybe two major ideas across, especially if you’re rigorous with your work and can back up your idea with evidence, knock down counterarguments, and include enough compelling narrative to keep the reader going.
So the healthy way to think about what to include and what to leave out is to confidently tell yourself this will be one of many columns I write and to choose a single idea to start with. Put anything that is not about that single idea in another document titled “Future Columns I Will Definitely Write and Publish and Am Not Going to Think About While I’m Writing This One.” Or, you know, something shorter.
How to make your ideas spread
It is extremely important to say what you want to say in a manner that makes it easy for the reader (viewer, listener, etc.) to absorb and relay your idea. That is a big part of how ideas spread, and that’s what you’re going for here.
Again, this doesn’t mean that you can’t have nuance or complexity, or that your ideas should be reducible to a meme on TikTok. What it does mean is that your argument should be so clear and compelling that it travels easily through the ideas ecosystem and doesn’t mutate too much as it spreads.
One way I think about it is to imagine how the idea would be articulated on a cable news show. Sometimes I get asked to come on CNN or MSNBC to talk about the columns I write, and the appearances are very brief, sometimes three to five minutes a segment. That means I get maybe 30 seconds to answer a question (if that), so I need to know ahead of time what it is that I want to communicate in that tiny window. If someone asked you to explain your idea in less than a minute on national television, could you do it? Not your entire argument, but your thesis and maybe one supporting point? If you can’t, you probably have too much crammed into your column.
I plan to write more about how to get your ideas out there in this space, but I’m at about 1,000 words and that feels like the right length for this column, which contained two core ideas I hope you can use: Make sure you establish standing, and don’t try to cram everything in your big, brilliant brain into one column.
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