Writing to Persuade: How to Bring People Over to Your Side - Trish Hall 2019
Running Op-Ed
Lessons from my story
I couldn’t sleep that night.
What if the article I was about to publish by Vladimir Putin wasn’t from Putin? What if it was a hoax, something that would humiliate me publicly and lead to my firing? As a child I used to daydream about accepting awards for my novels. As an adult, my daydreams were more like nightmares. I worried about my dog being run over by a car. I worried about my daughter being attacked on a deserted street. Now, I imagined that the hoax that had trapped me would be the top story the next day in the gossip and media site Gawker, ending my career.
In my restless wide-awake state, refreshing my email obsessively in a darkened bedroom while my husband slept, I relived the day. I had received an email from a public relations executive I had never met who said he worked for a large international firm in Brussels, that he represented the Russian head of state, and that he had an op-ed to offer. Putin! He never wrote for the American media. I said, “Sure, I’ll take a look.”
I am partial to short first sentences—even when they make up the entire first paragraph. They’re easy to take in. Make them a little twisted, a little surprising, so the reader wants to continue.
An hour or so later, the piece arrived. I mostly liked it, although some of its points might have been considered not quite true. In consultation with our lead fact-checker, I asked for some wording changes to protect us from being deluged the next day with complaints of, “That’s not right.”
Putin’s representative insisted that the Russian leader had written the article and was attached to each word, so he couldn’t just go ahead and say yes to anything. Could that be true? Could one of the most powerful, most feared men in the world be in his palace stretched out on a couch, hard at work on a laptop, writing his op-ed? Because Putin’s representative couldn’t approve changes, the time difference meant that editing moved slowly. Each time I asked for something as small as removing an a or a the, I would get an email saying, “I’ll have to get back to the Kremlin on that.”
I would like to have talked to Putin. Ever since immersing myself in Russian novels in high school and taking Russian in college, I had been intrigued by that part of the world. Sadly, I just had a lot of emails back and forth with his people, until just before our 9 p.m. print deadline.
I never did call the people who the public relations executive had suggested could vouch for the op-ed’s authenticity. My boss, Andy Rosenthal, who had once worked as a correspondent in Moscow, had received a call from the Times reporter there. The reporter told him that Putin wanted to submit an article. That seemed like enough validation of the Russian president’s identity. Calling people I didn’t know who could be pretending to be someone they weren’t seemed like a mistake.
Before considering logic, structure, and spelling, an editor should think about the overall truth and authenticity of a piece of writing.
✵ Get the name of any unidentified source. Does the writer have any history with that source?
✵ Does the writer know any of the people being quoted?
✵ Does the writer have any possible conflicts of interest—an investment in the company being written about, a relative who works there?
✵ Research the writer to be sure you know about anything that might make you hesitate to publish the work.
As that sleepless night refused to end, I kept telling myself that I had obtained plenty of confirmation for the authenticity of the piece. Even so, I worried that I should have done more. To take my mind off of the certain Putin disaster, I decided that 3 a.m. New York time was the perfect moment to start answering emails from our Hong Kong bureau. Besides, how was I supposed to rest when in the same room a man and dog snored in unison, happily sleeping while my career collapsed before me like a crumbling hillside?
That was a particularly scary day, but it wasn’t the only one. Journalism is brutal. In surveys, most people say they mistrust and dislike journalists. After decades in the field, I’m still not sure why anyone thinks they could do it better.
Journalism is exhausting. You’re constantly swept up in deadlines. You’re criticized by your bosses, by readers, by media critics and columnists. You have a lot to lose at all times. The pay is low considering that a reporter needs a college degree as well as fluency with interviewing, writing, and analysis—and for those skills makes on average about $52,000 a year. Reporters at big-city unionized papers like the Times make twice that or more, but they’re a small part of the workforce.
Getting the Op-Ed job was random, as many things are. I had heard that David Shipley was leaving his job as the Op-Ed editor to start an opinion operation for Bloomberg. I already had a great job, and I felt grateful to have arrived on the newsroom masthead as the editor in charge of the feature sections. Even though my job sounded important, it felt inessential to me. If I took two weeks off, the work would continue as before. I wanted to edit and make decisions about what stories appeared in the paper and on the site, not just manage people. So I wrote Andy Rosenthal an email asking, “Would it make any sense at all for me to apply for this job?” If he was going to hire someone from The New Yorker or the Atlantic I wanted to know, before I got too excited. He answered immediately.
“Sure. Come up and talk to me.”
We’re all nervous before interviews, if the stakes are big. But there are ways to calm yourself. If you’re prepared with the facts you need to be persuasive, that show you’re the right person for the job, then it’s much easier to relax.
In the few days before the interview, I immersed myself in what Op-Ed had been publishing and then headed up to the thirteenth floor, where I found Andy. With his flyaway hair, jagged beard, and a shirt from Target, he was obviously indifferent to labels and style, so I felt comfortable right away. He was sitting in a corner office with views west to New Jersey, where he was proud to live. I sat down on the gray couch where I was to spend so much time in the next five years.
It was a relaxed and intriguing conversation. He was quick and funny and smart, and I felt like I was talking to a friend I hadn’t seen in a long time. The next morning, I sent him a long note recapping some of the story ideas I had mentioned and explaining why I thought I was the right person for the job. After you meet with someone you’re trying to influence in some way, always send a follow-up note thanking the person for taking the time to talk, and use the email as a way to take the conversation even further.
I should have been thrilled when he offered me the job, but I almost said no because the leap from news to opinion seemed too big. After hours of conversation with a close friend and fellow journalist, I decided I would and could do it. He convinced me that Andy wanted what I had to offer: a relaxed way of working with people, broad experience in journalism, and just a trace of the nerd factor that sometimes drives away general readers.
The first day on my new job, I saw that I had been deluded in thinking I could make that leap. What had ever made me decide that this made sense? People were looking to me for direction, so of course I pretended that I was fine. I knew they admired their former boss. I wasn’t following a failure; I was following a successful, well-liked editor. At the very least, I couldn’t let the staff see that I was nervous and intimidated. But I had no idea what I was doing. And I do mean, no idea. Since becoming a journalist in high school, I had believed that I should always try to be fair and impartial. Suddenly I was charged with seeking opinions. Even with being opinionated. I didn’t want to give my own opinions, and I didn’t know what an opinion piece should be.
News organizations have multiple ways of reporting the news—through stories, profiles, features, graphics, videos, podcasts, and news analyses. Although the forms vary, they all are supposed to give perspectives from different people on what the story means. A story might say that a bridge fell down and twenty people died, and some people are blaming the mayor; but as contrast, it might also say that other people think the problems started long ago.
Opinion pieces are not like news stories. They have facts that must be verifiable, but they do not need to be balanced or give equal time to various points of view. There is always a conclusion or a solution—that bridge fell down because the government was incompetent, and the solution is to vote out the mayor and create a special agency to fix infrastructure.
The Times and other publications run many types of stories, graphics, and videos, but all of them, when labeled as news, typically report what happened and attempt to bring together various important elements of a story and make sense of them; the opinion piece makes a strong argument without being forced to present other points of view. I had never written an opinion piece or thought about what made one successful.
I learned quickly though, mostly from the editors who worked for me, because I had no choice. They were an amazing crew, dissecting words and ideas with sustained rigor. Bosses don’t admit often enough how much they learn from the people they are leading. In my case, some of those who worked for me were much younger, and yet their experience was more relevant than mine. I survived and flourished only because I absorbed their different thinking processes and editing styles. As each day went by, I developed an understanding of how to assess the strength of a potential op-ed by reading their responses in our internal email called Op Discuss.
Anyone in Op-Ed, from a young assistant to an experienced deputy, could send a piece to the Op Discuss address, and anyone could jump in and say what they thought. Should it run? No? Be revised? Those emails were priceless to me. As I looked at the comments from the staff, I began to remember what I had learned in high school and college about making an argument.
The approach to argument that I learned in classes at Berkeley was much more similar to an op-ed than the inverted pyramid of daily journalism or the slow, anecdotal flow of feature stories that had dominated my professional life. Despite their varying perspectives, the editors were bonded by the desire to get the most original thinking on every topic. Their responses were witty, smart, and taught me how to identify an article’s logical flaws. That applied to the traditional eight-hundred-word articles we ran in print on the Op-Ed page as well as the long and less conventional work that made up our online offerings, which featured series on areas like philosophy, psychology, and the Civil War.
Not long after I started, I got a critical lesson in op-ed writing from Carmel McCoubrey, the editor who was the final reader on all copy. She heard me debating with another editor the pros and cons of asking a certain writer to contribute, and I think she was frustrated by our unfocused discussion. Looking annoyed, she stood up and made this pronouncement: It has to be a surprising idea or a surprising person writing. If you don’t have either, it’s not worth running.
Then she sat down. And with those words, she succinctly explained what Op-Ed editors are looking for.
Wherever you are, in school or at work, learn from the people around you. There are a variety of approaches to thinking and editing. All have something to offer. Mimic your smartest, most creative colleagues.
I tend to read and edit fast. I tell myself that my style puts me in the place of the busy reader. More likely I read fast because I just do, and I always have. My third-grade teacher wrote on my report card that I read too fast, and if that continued I wouldn’t remember what I read. She was right! I don’t remember much of anything and never have. But that’s my style. I give writers fast answers; I go with my instincts about what should be at the top, what at the bottom, what is missing. I edit so quickly that all my editors knew that if they had something long that needed five hundred words chopped out on deadline with just 5 minutes before the close, I would be eager to dive in and do it for them.
Learn what you are good at and build on it, but also work on your weaknesses and study those who are different from you. My polar opposite in editing style was Aaron Retica. I hired Aaron from the Times magazine, where he led the fact-checking department and also edited stories. His mind was miles deeper than mine. He edited deliberately and slowly, answering writers with long queries about structure, language, and the like. He rarely changed the writer’s words. He asked for rewrites, and kept asking until he was satisfied. Aaron withheld copy as long as he could, not wanting to release it until it was flawless. I had been trained on newspapers, which value speed, while he had worked for magazines and was rewarded for thinking more carefully about flow and structure.
So don’t reject different styles. Learn from them. It is easy to dismiss them as inferior, but if you do, you will be missing an opportunity to improve. Same with backgrounds and perspectives. Aaron grew up in Manhattan, the child of working-class Italians and lower-middle-class Jews, and went to Yale; that informed his ideas, just as my small-town, WASP-y upbringing affected mine. Look for people who will round you out and present different points of view.
Gradually I merged what I considered my biggest strength—an affinity for different kinds of people and an understanding of what they might want to read—with this unfamiliar form of opinion writing, in some cases stretching the definition so it included whatever I wanted to read. Did I want to please the audience? Of course. But from my earliest days as an editor, I published what spoke to me. I don’t know of any other way to work. You can’t go by what people say they want, because they often don’t know until they see it.
If you want to be an editor, you need to read widely. That’s the only way you will recognize an original idea when you see it. There’s another benefit, too: absorbing varied styles will turn you into a bit of a ventriloquist, so you will be able to help writers find their own voices.
Eventually, despite the endless hours and the feeling that the learning curve was not only steep but maybe insurmountable, I was glad I took the job. Beginnings are hard for a lot of us, so don’t make rash decisions after your first day, week, or even month in a new job. Andy, who looked like a teddy bear, was a big part of the reason I was happy in my job. He was quick and funny, telling long stories about his life in Moscow, his time running the foreign desk, his years in Washington. He had a talent for supporting his staff when they needed him and leaving them alone the rest of the time. He had little respect for authority or conventional wisdom. Andy demonstrated the value in being original and refusing to follow the pack. He appreciated that quality in others, which is critical in a boss. I never felt that he would give me a hard time for doing surprising things. I never asked permission first before exploring some outlandish idea with a writer.
Andy had another rare quality: he actually liked women. With him it wasn’t affirmative action, nor was it theories about the economic benefits of diversity. Until Opinion, I had never worked in an environment, other than the traditionally female ones like Style, that had so many women. I remember when I wanted to hire the opinion editor of the Guardian. Without knowing much about him, Andy was opposed, partly because he made too much money. But I thought it was more than that.
“Andy, you have to get over your aversion to men,” I said. “It’s not his fault.”
He just raised his eyebrows. “We have enough men.”
And he was right. Although there were many women in the department, in the core group of Op-Ed editors, the ones who decided what we would run, men far outnumbered women. Women and men, coming from different backgrounds, bring different perspectives, as do people from different races, parts of the world, and social classes. I didn’t disagree with Andy. At all. I had interviewed many women for the job, though, and no one seemed to me as good as the Guardian editor. I wanted variety in viewpoints, but the Op-Ed department had to churn out a ton of stories, and that was worrying me.
“We need someone like him,” I told Andy. “He has a lot of experience, and he’s fast and smart. So many of our editors are young. He balances it out.” Eventually I prevailed, but only after agreeing to trim the salary of another open slot, which pretty much guaranteed it would go to a young person.
Whatever disagreements we had were couched in humor. I knew Andy had my back. When I landed in Op-Ed, I learned what it meant to be attacked all the time. If I ever forgot, all I had to do was look out the window at a big billboard outside of the Times put up by CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America), complaining about our supposed bias against Israel. The kind of support Andy gave me is not something I’ve always had in a boss, and in your work life, it’s worth searching out.
But there were limits. If the Putin story was fake, there would be no recovery.
That night, I was so exhausted from the tension that when I finally went to sleep, I overslept. I grabbed my phone when I woke up around 9 a.m. and opened my email, terrified, knowing that if something had gone wrong, it would be clear by now.
There was no story in Gawker. No angry emails. No problem.
And so another day began.