[MUSIC] Welcome, we're going to talk, right now, about opinion writing. And you might be wondering where does opinion writing fit into journalism because we've been doing a lot of talking about values like accuracy, balance, fairness, thoroughness. And these values actually help us be better editorial writers. When you think about it, the more persuasive you are depends on whether you're accurate, factual and making a rational argument. It's not all about emotion, it's also about logic. So, yes, there is a place in journalism for you if what you really want to do is to write your opinion, and there are so many ways to do it. I got my start as a journalist with opinion writing. When I was in high school, I was assigned to write a letter to the editor and I was so excited. When the newspaper published my letter to the editor, I couldn't believe that they took a letter from a high school student and published it just as though I were an adult. [LAUGH] So it's not the age or where you are or what you're doing or what your reputation is, it's the logic of what you're saying. So, we're going to be doing a lot of that. Later in my career I wound up writing editorials for a couple years and so we're going to be coming from that place. When we talk about opinions in journalism, we're talking about basically six kinds of opinions. We're talking about editorials. We're talking about columns. We're talking about reviews and critiques, I'll treat those as one. We're talking about cartoons. We're talking about guest opinions, and we're talking about letters to the editor. Some of these may be the kinds of things you want to do now, and some of these may be the things that are kind of reserved for editors of publications or websites to do. Editorials, the first thing we're going to talk about, tend to be the official view point of the website, the newspaper, the broadcast outlet that we're really working for. An editorial is kind of official and that it's usually set by an editorial board. So several people sit down and talk about what their opinions should be. It's usually consistent with campaigns, or policies, or positions they've held in the past. And it's assigned to one person to write the editorial. It very often is unsigned because it speaks for the whole organization. But it's a thing that that person is passionate about and can write about with some authority. So the first place we go to is an editorial. Now, newspapers, and television stations after that, did not always have editorials. It used to be that newspapers were entirely opinion driven. Many times they were started by political parties or people who had opposition that they wanted to get out. Only later as media outlets became smaller, or fewer did we wind up having places for official opinions and places that were meant to be off the opinion track and more on to what the news was. Now, with the Internet giving everybody a place to talk, we're back at that place where opinions can be on almost every medium we see. The next point we want to talk about would be columns. And the interesting thing about columns in this new age is because now that we're mixing opinion and what you might call balance information in the same publication. When somebody from the media outlet write a column, it's usually one person heavy on personality, and it's usually labeled as an opinion piece, and not as a news story. So, this is where we see the split coming between opinion and news. Columns can be about anything. Some columnist specialized in political columns, or they might write sports columns or they might write about the local community. There are humor columnist. There are basically as many different kinds of columns as there might be interest among the people who follow the publication. A columnist has a strong personality feel in what they're writing. Often it appears with their picture, unlike the anonymous editorials. And a columnist has freedom that other writers don't have to express their opinion, and to make statements that sometimes a news reporter can't really state because they're too opinionated or too analytical. So that's the second kind, column writing. Related to column writing is a specialty kind of opinion writing, where a person will write about critiques or reviews. This is very popular. All over the web we find people who are writing their opinion about, you name it, concerts, sports teams. This is a big one. We don't refer to sports writers as being critics, but most of them seem to be. There are food critics, there are book critics, movie reviewers, theater reviewers, you name it, there are probably critics for that kind of interests. It's often an area where there's big public participation. And so the critic, or reviewer, serves as a guide to the public. Do I want to eat at this restaurant, go to this movie, go to this play? Very often, these people do their work anonymously. They want to get the same experience as the person who might come later and eat at that restaurant or go to that show. So they might show up, not let anybody know what they're there for, and try to keep a low profile. Let's see, so we have editorials, we have columns, we have reviews or criticism. The fourth kind that comes straight from the people who are sort of be running the outlet would be cartoons. These are very popular and we have a cartoon here by Mike Thompson from Detroit Free Press. He'd done this cartoon in the aftermath of the tsunami that struck Japan, and he's saying, okay, next step, watch out for a disease. So, you'll notice in an editorial cartoon, and I recommend that you look at a lot of them, you'll notice in editorial cartoons that they have to convey their meaning in a very short amount of time, maybe three seconds. One of the tools they use very often, although it's not used here, is caricature. Where they will exaggerate a person's features or use certain kinds of symbolism to represent the point they're trying to make. They might represent government as fat cats. They might represent different political parties in different ways, depending on their point of view and how that party is known. Nowadays editorial cartoons have become a lot more interesting because, at the beginning, They were simply black and white, or maybe black and white with a little bit of yellow in them. Now they're in full color and they're animated. Editorial cartoons have taken to making cartoons that move and tell a little story. They're like little drawn movies. So this is a really interesting area. If you love cartooning and want to get into it, there's a space for that in journalism. If you're running a journalistic outlet, this might be something you want to add to your website, or whatever your publication is. We have two kinds of opinion writing left. One is the guest opinion piece. In a newspaper it's called an op-ed because it usually appears opposite the editorial page. I'm going to try to call them guest opinion pieces. And the other kind is a letter to the editor. These come from the community. Better for exposure and length would be a quest opinion piece, because they give you more space, and they're usually taking it from you because you have some kind of expertise. So if you're an expert, or an authority, an author, you were there. You're a member of the organization that has been in the news. They will take a guest opinion piece from you, and run it maybe 700 words. It's a nice place to have. It's also a nice way for a person running the publication to vary the points of view they have on their opinion pages. And the last part of this is the letter, we call them letters to the editor, of course nowadays these are mostly emails to the editor. These are very, very short, usually under 150 words. If you want to submit letters to the editor, keep them that short. Editors, and I've edited a lot of these, editors do not want to take a thousand word piece and cut it down to 150 words. So before you submit a letter to the editor, if that's the way you want to go, read some of them, see what they're like, see how long they are, and try to meet that goal. Don't expect that somebody's going to love your letter so much they'll make it four times as long as everybody elses. And don't expect they'll want to take the responsibility of cutting you from 500 words down to 150. They'll just pass on it. So, keep your letters to the style where you're submitting them. And if you're welcoming letters, tell people how to submit them and bring them in and it will help vary the kind of content you put out. So, six ways that editorial or opinion material is getting into the news. It's journalistic, yes it is for the most part. It certainly relies some of the journalistic values that we're going to be talking about throughout this whole course. Thanks very much, it's been a pleasure. [MUSIC]
