How do they submit opinion pieces?

The_Minister

How do people (politicians/economists/doctors etc), submit those opinion pieces to papers? Do they just dump them on the newsdesk (or e-mail them), or are they asked to write them?
I just wondered this now. Are there freelance opinion writers, or what?
Just curious.

mike65

Good question cos the standard more often than not could be surpassed by many who post on boards. I suspect you need to know someone who knows someone on the features or op ed desk.

Mike.

Overdraft

The_Minister wrote: »

How do people (politicians/economists/doctors etc), submit those opinion pieces to papers? Do they just dump them on the newsdesk (or e-mail them), or are they asked to write them?

Generally they're asked for an opinion piece by a newspaper when their specialist subject is topical, rather than them just sending one in. The paper will have a list of specialists in each area that they often use, or else they'll just opt for a high profile figure - eg Peter Sutherland on the Lisbon Treaty - when the need arises.

More often than not they don't write the pieces themselves, a journalist ghost writes the column after interviewing the person in question - until recently the journalist's name had to appear at the bottom of the column (ie 'in an interview with Joe Bloggs'), but not any more.

jdivision

Overdraft wrote: »

More often than not they don't write the pieces themselves, a journalist ghost writes the column after interviewing the person in question - until recently the journalist's name had to appear at the bottom of the column (ie 'in an interview with Joe Bloggs'), but not any more.

That's not necessarily true, in three newspapers I've written for over 9 years, the columnist wrote them themselves. The copy usually needs a lot of work but they were written by the person involved. Only exception is in sports pages, eg Mark Lawrenson, Liam Brady, Trevor Brennan in the IT
OP, sometimes an opinion piece is pitched by the opinion writer, sometimes it's sought by the paper. Some do write occasional freelance pieces but unless you're well known the reaction is likely to be so what?

Overdraft

jdivision wrote: »

That's not necessarily true, in three newspapers I've written for over 9 years, the columnist wrote them themselves.

Point taken. Generally academics and often politicians will write their own columns (agreed - the subs earn their money when dealing with the latter's work ) but aside from that my experience is that they're usually ghost written after interviews.