Here’s how to still find success in the old stalwart.
Jake Meth is the owner of Opinioned.
Thoughts and prayers for the op-ed. Apparently, it’s dead.
Or at least that’s what you’ll hear if you hang out too long in the communications world.
This notion initially caught my attention when Eleanor Hawkins wrote for the Axios Communicators newsletter last August about the thought leader exodus from traditional opinion pages to social media. Then this March, One Strategy Group CEO David Meadvin wrote an op-ed (of all things to write) in PRWeek on the op-ed’s demise.
Not to mention that the pioneer of the term, the New York Times, retired the term in 2021, with opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury calling it “a relic of an older age and an older print newspaper design.”
Also feeding this narrative are the recent changes, initiated by Jeff Bezos, to the Washington Post’s venerated opinion page. Bezos said the page would, going forward, run pieces that espoused “personal liberties and free markets,” leading to the resignation of longtime editor David Shipley and much consternation from readers.
To its critics, these signs point to the inexorable conclusion that the op-ed’s time has come. But before we note the time of death, let’s at least check the pulse.
The op-ed, a term originally coined as a smashburger of “opposite editorial page,” has long been a means for non-journalist writers to opine on any topic they hold authority in, so long as it’s interesting enough for other people to care. In a world where anyone can fire off a hot take in seconds, though, critics of the op-ed argue that it’s too slow, too stuffy to any longer be an effective means of thought leadership. Instead, they say, executives should go directly to their audiences via social media or newsletters or other owned content modes that don’t need to pass through any gatekeepers.
But does this criticism really mean that the op-ed is dead? Or is it more about what’s happening around op-eds?
Today, many thought leaders have come to appreciate the benefits to bypassing traditional media. You have a little more room. You can curse. You can digress. You can post photos of yourself along with your thoughts. And you can do all this with rapid results.
As a former opinion editor at Fortune, I understand the frustration of many aspiring op-ed writers. We received dozens of submissions daily and had to reject most of them. The submission count, and the bar for entry, is even higher at publications like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the Atlantic.
But for all the frustrations associated with op-ed writing and virtues of “going direct,” it still doesn’t support the conclusion that the op-ed is dead. It just means it’s been joined by other avenues of self-expression in an increasingly complex communications ecosystem.
Sure, some opinion sections like those from CNN and NBC have been shut down in recent years, and Gannett said in 2022 it wanted less opinion writing in its local newspapers. But does that really constitute a trend? I don’t think so.
Take U.S. News & World Report, which recently decided to reinvigorate its opinion section by hiring a top editor and committing to expanding its commentary.
Or read the recent blog post where Adam Bink and Daniela Ramirez of Spitfire Strategies reported back on a recent phone call with a New York Times opinion editor. “The editor told us they had received more op-ed submissions [in February 2025] than in the history of The New York Times (for those counting, that’s 173 years). The Times is known to get well over 1,000 submissions a week.”
Gotham Ghostwriters surveyed its writer community following the publication of Meadvin’s PRWeek take and asked if they agreed that the op-ed is dead. Only 8.2% said yes. Of the remainder, 54.6% said no and 37.1% said not yet, but its future is limited.
To me, none of this indicates irregular heartbeat – let alone death. Yes, the op-ed publishing world is top-heavy when it comes to elite publications like the Times. But that’s always been the case, and what some see as a problem is really a benefit. The relatively small number of top outlets ensures that these opinion sections retain their prestige in a crowded media marketplace.
Instead of blaming the op-ed or declaring it “dead,” comms pros should better understand what value it still holds in modern communications and then figure out how to best execute one.
Here, I must acknowledge my obvious bias: I run a business focused on helping clients publish op-eds, so I have a professional and financial interest in them being alive and well. But this doesn’t subtract anything from the reality, which is that in the modern media landscape, op-eds matter more than ever.
No matter how stuffy one might think the op-ed page is, it represents content that’s been carefully curated. For many readers, this is a refuge from the often poorly written slop they encounter on the internet daily.
It’s tremendously beneficial to have an external party evaluate whether you’re saying something valuable. Readers of a traditional media op-ed intrinsically know this process has taken place, and so automatically anything they read in a newspaper op-ed page carries more weight.
It’s easy to see the difference in quality between vetted pieces on op-ed pages and ill-conceived rants on LinkedIn. That there are so many more avenues now for bad, unedited writing is even more reason to value well-vetted opinion pages.
Then there’s AI. A December 2024 study by Originality.AI found that over 50% of long-form content on LinkedIn is now AI-generated. Comms pros on LinkedIn love to complain about bad AI writing. If so, shouldn’t they accept that the antidote is human writing evaluated by other humans?
So no, I don’t think the op-ed is dead. I actually think it’s more valuable than ever in such a crowded thought leadership landscape.
More than most, I understand the challenge of creating a great op-ed. But that difficulty is not a reason to write off op-eds entirely. If anything, it should be more motivation to do them better.
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