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I (once) wrote a Sports Illustrated opinion article years ago (similar situation to yours: made a comment on twitter to one of the popular talking heads, talkin
by iamdave 8y ago
I (once) wrote a Sports Illustrated opinion article years ago (similar situation to yours: made a comment on twitter to one of the popular talking heads, talking head took notice and replied, SI took notice, asked me to write something), your experience matched mine from the editing and review standpoint.
At first sitting back and reading the suggested edits and changes in place I had a similar first reaction as you did, but after doing the "walk away, do something else and come back to your writing later" thing, I found the opinion was still there though much less verbose.
Share that to say, the editorial process itself, even for opinion pieces-is rather....well... opinionated.
- rossdavidh 8y agoVery interesting to hear that. I guess I am not surprised. I felt that my basic opinion was there, but an opinion of theirs had been layered on top, in a very politically-oriented way. I don't know if this was conscious or not.
- iamdave 8y agoI suspect this will be a take that someone is going to have a problem with, or maybe many do-but this is kind of the editor's job. Editorials while probably not the express opinion of the publication you're writing for does need to at least carry enough of an opinion of theme to stay consistent with readers expectations when they pick up $Publication_Weekly$. Would it be nice to see if a publication just decided to run editorials contrary to or perhaps ones that eviscerated a viewpoint or position said publication has been known to hold-and entertain plurality for plurality's sake? Probably. If that's what the readers have come to expect, probably. But as a default condition of running a newspaper? I think senior editors like keeping their jobs too much for that.