Mathew Rodriguez On How To Write An Impactful Op-Ed

Writer, editor, and educator Mathew Rodriguez will teach a digital course on opinion writing for Study Hall on October 24. Rodriguez began his career in media in 2012, working as an editor at TheBody, an outlet that publishes news and resources about HIV/AIDS. Since then, he has worked at digital media companies like Mic, legacy media publications like The Atlantic, and also started the queer outlet INTO, which was originally owned by Grindr. 

As an opinion writer, Rodriguez has tackled topics like fatphobia, the similarities between COVID-19 and HIV, and the first Trump administration’s weaponization of the fight for gay rights in Iran. 

In a conversation with Study Hall, Rodriguez shared how he first started writing op-eds: “After a while as a beat reporter, you realize that you have a perspective on an issue and there’s something you want to say about it,” he said. 

His key piece of advice? Writers should contextualize their personal experience with data and facts, lending the narrative more weight and poignancy.  

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What are some of your highlights as an op-ed writer? Can you share a few instances where you felt like you really contributed to the broader conversation through your op-ed writing?

There have been highlights and lowlights, because op-ed writing obviously brings fierce opposition.  There was a moment in the first Trump administration when I had written about how a member of the Trump administration, but not Trump himself, had said that there was going to be an effort to decriminalize homosexuality in Iran. I wrote this piece that was about how that whole plan was, in essence, pinkwashing, or using the “interests of queer people” to help further U.S. oil interests in Iran and other interests that had really nothing to do with the United States taking a stand against another country’s stance on homosexuality. At that same time, there were a lot of issues with how queer people all across the LGBTQ+ spectrum were treated by the Trump administration, and those issues have only been exacerbated today. The op-ed ended up actually [resulting in] a lot of right wing pushback. I have a friend who covered right wing extremism, and he texted me and was like “your name is on all of these message boards.” I think that my op-ed really hit the nail on the head and unraveled, or unmasked, why this policy was not actually good for queer people in Iran. Sometimes a really well timed opinion piece can get to the heart of a conversation really quickly, as long as it’s well researched and well argued. 

When you were writing it, did you feel like there was some potential risk?  I feel like pinkwashing is a very complex topic to communicate because you have to toe the line of understanding the desire for LGBTQ+ people in a foreign country to have equal rights but you also have to comment on the metanarrative and the broader picture. When you’re trying to communicate those nuances, some people can get upset.

I totally agree. Op-eds are much shorter than reported pieces. They’re usually punchy, and it can be hard to communicate nuance in them. But ultimately, the work of writing an op-ed is not really about writing opinions, it’s the work of corralling together facts. An 800-word opinion piece is not 800 words of opinion. I don’t like writing that uses buzzy words or even academic language to talk about something. You really need to rely on fact gathering, quotation — all of these things that are about strengthening your main argument.  

Can you elaborate on common misconceptions about op-ed writing?

For several years, I’ve taught a class about writing think pieces. My original concept for the class was that the think piece has always been a joke. I actually point back to writing in The Washington Post from decades ago that’s like,  “we need to get rid of think pieces.” There has always been this bias against what people have painted as reactionary opinion writing that just talks about the news of the day. But I think that there’s usefulness in being able to reframe an ongoing cultural conversation. So I’ve always thought of opinion pieces as opportunities to bridge understanding between disparate groups. I came up with that class because I knew that think pieces and opinion writing had such a negative connotation, but I really do think that there is a lot of value in teaching people how to write them while adhering to principles of journalistic rigor.

I feel that the negative connotation around the term “think piece” might stem from the fact that during the digital media boom, we had the era of the hot take, and writers had to respond to the news of the day with a very quick turnaround. With self-publishing on Substack, there’s also a temptation to publish an opinion really quickly. Do you have advice for writers who feel strongly about a topic and want to write about it and are approaching it with a great degree of passion? 

First, I just want to address the term that you used — hot take — because that is, I think, at the heart of the criticism of think pieces, the hotness being that they are off-the-cuff and not thought out. I know so many incredible writers who are at the top of their field in journalism who got their start, or built a brand, or started their brand with writing what people would consider hot takes, but were not actually hot takes. It was deploying information that they knew about everything from white nationalism to racial justice to LGBTQ+ issues. These were all journalists who had a wealth of knowledge, and they were able to apply that knowledge. Often journalists accused of writing hot takes are just offering a lens on the situation that is informed by two things: personal and professional expertise in the subject matter.

For me, whether your expertise is personal or professional, my philosophy has always been to teach writers how to walk readers through their lens using facts. You can bring a level of personal expertise to it but I’m still going to tell you at the end of the day, like, this needs to be reported. So if you’re telling me that this is your experience, I need you to show me something — a piece of data that backs it up, or a quotation from someone else’s writing that points to it. 

So, you encourage writers to draw from personal experience and unpack why they specifically feel passionate about a subject? 

Yes. For instance, if I wanted to talk about my personal experience as a queer person who is facing certain health problems, I can also do research into the health disparities that LGBTQ+ people face, and I can take that opportunity to make the data human. I think that reactionary label that opinion writing gets is because people believe that it’s all just ranting from a personal place. If you’re going to use personal experience, that’s fine, but also couch it in a real piece of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or some other source. That’s not always the easiest thing to do because data on almost everything is incomplete, but there are creative ways to find your way into something.

Can you tell me a bit about your teaching practice? What do you enjoy about teaching?

I love teaching. I started teaching formally in 2018, when I lived in Los Angeles, and I was asked to teach an op-ed writing class at UCLA Extension. When I moved back to New York City in 2019, as a graduate of NYU’s journalism program, I approached my [previous] professors and asked them if I could bring the class to NYU undergraduates. I’ve taught “Writing the Think Piece” now at NYU for about five years on and off. Every once in a while they’ll offer it, and since then, I have gone on to teach a graduate-level introduction to journalism class at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. I’ve also taught essay writing with the Boston-based creative writing center GrubStreet. I think of myself as someone who just really wants to help writers express their ideas, and that comes from my life as an editor. While I’m a very good line editor, my passion as an editor has always been trying to help writers get their ideas from ideation to execution.

Any tidbits of advice from your classes you can share?

I’ve had a lot of students who want to do really, really, really grand stories, and I always tell students that you need to walk before you can run. For instance, I had a teacher who told me you can usually get only one idea across in an 800-word piece. So if the focus of the class is 800-word pieces, as my think piece classes often are, it’s to actually train people how to have one argument or one idea come to fruition in that many words. And when I do my personal essay class, those can be like longer pieces. So if you were doing a 1,500 or 2,000-word essay, maybe you can get two or three ideas across. It’s about letting form match content, and really walking through like, “Okay, what can you actually convey to a reader in this amount of time?” And once you bring the scope down, it usually becomes clear for them. It’s about bringing one aspect of the larger issue in the broader consciousness that is a little blurry into focus. 

What can people look forward to with your Study Hall course?

Once again, form meets content. It’s only an hour, but I really do think that my class is going to be about giving people the tools to start to engage with their own ideas and opinions in a way that is actionable and makes sense for what they cover. I want people to be able to look at the news that they cover, or the world as it is, and say, “Alright, I have something that I want to add now. How do I go about doing that?” That includes ideation, research, and execution. So I think those are the three things that I’m going to speak about: how to clarify what you want to say, how to find stuff that supports your point, and then how to lay that out in a way that brings the reader along with you.

Sign up for Mathew’s op-ed course.