It’s extremely difficult to get an oped published.
I read thousands of oped pitches during my time at Fortune. I probably passed on 95% of them.
Why? Even if they were well written and argued, they didn’t break through the noise—that is, the dozens of other pitches I’d received that day.
The reality is this: A lot of people are writing opeds, but there aren’t nearly enough opinion pages to publish all of them.
“B+” opeds aren’t gonna cut it.
Are you wasting time on a bad oped?
If an editor doesn’t like your pitch, they’re not going to publish your article. There’s no point in writing an oped draft if you have no chance of getting it placed.
But despair not! There might be hope.