The biggest advantage of independent op-ed writers

We don't have editors.

Photo by Good Faces on Unsplash

Every year, I write a post about writing. Here’s my writing advice, my advice for creating a successful Substack-type newsletter, and some thoughts on how to add value as an opinion writer/pundit/commentator. This year’s post is about some big advantages that independent op-ed writers like myself have over those who write for publications.

I’ve been blogging independently since 2011, but for most of my years as a paid op-ed writer, I wrote for online publications. First I freelanced for The Atlantic, Quartz, Bloomberg Opinion, and The Week for a couple of years, and then I became a full-time writer at Bloomberg Opinion (though I was still counted as a contract employee, which allowed me to do side jobs).

I enjoyed writing for Bloomberg, but writing for Substack is a lot better. It’s brought me a much bigger readership, for one thing — each post now gets read by about three times as many people as before. A lot of that is because of the magic of email distribution; I didn’t have my own newsletter until now. But I’ve also just been able to put out a lot more content on Substack than I did for Bloomberg — and in my personal opinion (and the opinions of many readers), it’s higher-quality content as well. As for whether I’m generating more subscription revenue for myself now than I did for Bloomberg back then, I can’t say; they didn’t let me see those statistics (and they probably couldn’t separate out each writer’s contribution, either). But I would bet that I am.

Independent op-ed writers are certainly at a disadvantage in some respects. They have to do all their own marketing, and they don’t automatically get their columns in front of a big existing readership. Instead of earning a steady salary, they have to cope with income volatility as subscriptions go up and down. But they have one huge advantage over op-ed writers at publications: They don’t have editors.

It may come as a surprise to hear that I think this is a big advantage. Usually, “such-and-such doesn’t have an editor” is used as an insult, meaning that a writer is too verbose or disorganized. But after having written with and without an editor, and having watched other writers do both, it’s my considered opinion that editors generally subtract value from the opinion writing process.

Before I explain the (many) reasons why I believe this, I should issue a couple of qualifiers. First of all, I’m only talking about the value of editing for op-ed writers, not for reporters. News journalism — reporting original facts by quoting sources — is something I’ve never done, and it seems like much more of a team exercise than op-ed writing. Editors seem like they play a useful role in determining the appropriate tone for reporting, maintaining objectivity, etc. They help reporters decide which sources are reliable and which aren’t. And they also play a critical role in assigning reporters to beats, so they don’t all report on the same thing. Throughout this post, I’ll keep coming back to the differences between reporting and op-ed writing.

Second, what I’m saying applies to most op-ed writers, but not to all of them. There are some independent newsletter writers who employ professional editors to edit every post they put out, and I defer to their judgement. It’s not hard to imagine some writers who are great at most of the tasks involved, but just persistently bad at one or two of them — for example, a writer who’s great at writing paragraphs but simply terrible at organizing them into a coherent flow. An editor can fill that gap.

But I think that most op-ed writers — or at least, most good ones — would thrive and flourish without editors. And most digital publications could save a lot of money by letting their op-ed writers work without editors; this could help a lot of publications survive in an increasingly competitive content marketplace.

Let me explain why I think this.

Editors prevent writers from finding product-market fit

I am a high-volume writer. Over several years at Bloomberg Opinion, I wrote five posts a week, took no vacation, and rarely missed a single day. Tyler Cowen recently gave me his “writing every day” award. Thanks, Tyler! (In fact, I used to write every day, but have recently scaled back to 4-5 posts per week so as not to flood my readers’ inboxes).

High-volume writing has been essential to the growth of my newsletter, since every post acts as an advertisement for the newsletter itself. It’s also helpful for staying on top of the news, for maintaining consistent engagement with readers, and for covering a wide variety of topics. But that’s not why I do it; I just enjoy commenting on a lot of different stuff.

Publications make high-volume writing very hard to do. Most writers have to go through a process in order to get each piece approved before they write it; this usually involves at least one round of pitching the piece to the editors, getting feedback, and delivering a revised pitch.

This process can take days. That means that by the time a writer even gets started on a piece, the issue has often begun to fade from the news. It also limits the number of pieces each writer can write. And the editing process itself adds delay between writing and publication.

For most of my time at Bloomberg, this wasn’t that huge of a problem for me. I was fortunate enough to have an excellent editor, Jim Greiff, who would “go to bat” for every single one of my posts, arguing for its merits in the daily meetings. And he would edit my posts at lightning speed, typically returning them within the day. I was also fortunate enough to have an excellent executive editor, David Shipley, who was willing to sign off very quickly on almost everything I pitched. Still, even with the very best editors I could wish for, I often found myself frustrated when my post on a topic came out a day or two days after other publications’.

Towards the end of my tenure at Bloomberg, though, the editorial process got much worse. An additional layer of approval was added to the pitching process, and new executive editors started pushing back much more on everything I proposed. (Also, Jim Greiff was transferred to Bloomberg News and then fired, which was an absolutely terrible decision on Bloomberg’s part.) As a result of these changes, I found myself spending many hours each week on the pitching process, but only able to publish three things a week instead of my usual five. Quality definitely did not improve.

Writing on Substack simply dispenses with all of that. As soon as an important event happens, I can write about it without needing any permission. I can write about whatever topics I want — science fiction novels, war, depression, youth subcultures, and so on. And I don’t have to spend hours and hours wrangling with editors on the phone; I can use the extra time to read more and write more.

I would argue that the quality of my writing has not suffered from any of this.

Now, you could argue that I’m a special writer, and that most op-ed writers need the pitching process. I strongly doubt it. Instead, they just need to see the readership stats on what they write (note: Bloomberg didn’t let me see my detailed stats, which was a mistake). A writer who writes too much will see their readership decline, and will know to scale it back and focus on quality instead of quantity. A writer who sometimes picks topics that generate little interest will be able to better identify which subjects their readers want to see them write about.

In fact, this process of trial and error is absolutely essential for a writer to develop what tech founders call product-market fit. Writers don’t automatically know which topics readers want to see them write about, and neither do editors. Finding that out requires a process of trial and error. Running every idea through a gauntlet of editors prevents writers from exploring the space of what their readers might like. This limits their audience growth and their growth as a writer.

In other words, when you have to go through an editor, your editor becomes your audience. Instead of writing for your readers, you’re writing for one to three corporate higher-ups. Inevitably, this leads you to shift your topics and your argumentation toward pleasing that small set of middlemen, instead of the real end user.

Note that reporters have very different needs here. Facts are pretty much the same thing no matter who’s reporting them, so it doesn’t make sense to have a million reporters bunching up on the same topic. Editors thus add value by assigning reporters to beats over the long term, and to specific stories on a day-to-day basis. But if op-ed writers all decide to write about the same thing, that’s fine — their job is to come up with original takes, so there’s room for a lot of different people to come at the same topic from different angles.

Editing removes voice

One of the most important aspects of op-ed writing is voice — a writer’s unique style. The reason people love Matt Levine is that he’s droll and tongue-in-cheek. The reason people love Matt Yglesias is that he’s dry and snarky. I’m actually not sure how I’d describe my voice, but I’m sure that I have one, and that it’s pretty distinctive. (In fact, I think I write in two different voices — my normal, conversational/explanatory voice, and what I call my “essay” voice.)

Voice is what allows writers to differentiate themselves, instead of blending into a mass of bland forgettable cookie-cutter sameness. And it increases a sense of rapport between the writer and the audience, which makes it easier to communicate ideas.

The most consistent thing that editors do, when they edit an op-ed, is to try to remove all elements of voice. Personalized flourishes, informal language, jokes, etc. are prime targets for editors. There are several reasons for this.

One is that op-ed editors usually come from a newsroom background, so they naturally treat op-eds similarly to how they’d treat articles by reports. Reporting requires the appearance of objectivity — the famous “view from nowhere” attitude — in order to convince readers that they’re reading facts rather than one individual’s viewpoint. Opinion pieces need to do the exact opposite — the view has to be from somewhere or it’s not interesting.

A second reason is that an editor naturally tries to insert their own voice into each piece. This isn’t usually conscious; most editors are or were writers themselves, and they each simply have their own idea of how ideas ought to be expressed. The editor’s own voice comes through in every little change they make, but it ends up competing with and diluting the writer’s voice.

Put another way, editing inhibits the stylistic component of product-market fit for opinion writers, in much the same way that it inhibits product-market fit in terms of topic choice. This actively subtracts value from the op-ed writing process. Economist Arpit Gupta absolutely hit the nail on the head here:

Note that it isn’t a hard-and-fast rule. The Economist has done an amazing job of editing all of its writers to sound like they’re the same person — a wry British know-it-all. This works great for them, because the Economist voice is unique and distinctive and effective, and their editors are very good at editing every piece to have that voice. But this is a very unusual and difficult trick to pull off; most publications that try something similar end up falling flat.

Editing is a crutch that prevents writers from developing their organizational skills

I have seen some cases in which editors unambiguously do add a lot of value to op-ed writing. These were cases where a particular writer was good at writing but bad at organizing what they wrote. Some writers are in the habit of turning in long rambling mishmashes, which their editor then reshapes into a more coherent, well-structured post.

But I strongly believe that almost any writer can learn to organize their own thoughts. It takes a little work to learn how to do it, but it’s not actually that hard, and there’s a definite benefit once you learn it. Posts that are organized by the author are usually just better than posts organized by an editor. When you organize an essay as you go, you naturally think about how your points are going to unfold, one after another, in the reader’s mind. This makes your overall argument more powerful, because you’ll be able to structure your specific points so that one leads into another. When an editor organizes your points for you, the transitions tend to feel more forced and disorienting.

When a writer gets used to having an editor do their organization, they tend to become lazy; the editor becomes a crutch, so the writer never learns. From the writer’s point of view, this is labor-saving, but it’s not labor-saving from the point of view of the publication itself, since the publication has to pay the editor too. An independent writer who pays for their own editor will quickly discover the true cost; at that point they’ll usually either learn to organize their own posts, or just use an LLM to do it.

News reporting is a bit different. A news article is meant to inform rather than to persuade, so it’s much easier to organize — it’s basically a series of bullet points with some transition phrases added in. An editor may have unique insight into which facts the readers will want to know first, and which can be safely buried at the bottom. So I do see newswriting as being more of a team activity here.

(As an aside, I have personal experience on the editing side here. When I lived in Japan in the mid-2000s, I worked as an editor for Japanese academics in the economics, law, and STEM fields. Although officially my job was to “check their English”, I usually ended up reorganizing their entire papers, which tended to be written in the form of unstructured data dumps. I did add value, but I’m sure the academics would have benefitted from learning how to write in the more discursive American style. Anyway, now this work is mostly done by LLMs.)

Editors cost a lot of money

Even after reading all of these drawbacks of editors, you may still be able to identify some cases in which editors add value to the op-ed writing process. And you may even still think these cases outweigh the drawbacks. But there’s one more factor to consider here: Editors cost money.

An editor is not a piece of capital equipment that automates parts of the op-ed writing process; an editor is a highly paid employee who adds a large amount of labor cost to the process. Most editors are former writers themselves; editing is something you “graduate” to. This means that editors tend to be older than writers, and thus more highly paid.

For a lot of publications, this expense could be critical. Right now we’re in the middle of a massive shakeout in the digital media world. Iconic publications like Buzzfeed, Vice, and Gawker have had to sell off, shutter, or totally restructure major pieces of their business. In an environment like this, cost-cutting can mean the difference between survival and destruction. Opinion editing is a huge cost center that provides dubious value to the final product.

There is one other option, of course: Automate. You can paste your unfinished essay into an LLM like GPT-4 and ask it to edit it for you. It will do the job in minutes, for a minimal cost. This does have major downsides, though. LLMs tend to remove voice even more than human editors do; everything comes out sounding very bland, unless you spend a lot of time prompting the LLM to change the voice. And even if you do that, it makes it very hard to develop a consistent voice as a writer. LLMs also have a tendency to inject hallucinations into your writing, which requires you to check carefully even after it’s finished editing.

So far, I have found LLMs not to be very useful for editing (or for writing in the first place). The one exception is proofreading. If I ask an LLM to “check carefully for typos, omitted words, and hanging sentences”, it will catch about 2 out of 3 typos — not perfect, but definitely worth the short amount of time. And LLMs will basically always catch the dreaded “block-delete” typos, where I accidentally delete a whole word or block of text by accidentally leaning on the laptop touchpad as I type. (Note to readers: If it ever looks like I left out a word or forgot to complete a sentence, this is almost certainly what happened.)

Anyway, I realize that this post is going to be very controversial. Nobody likes being told that they subtract value, and everyone tends to get vaguely uneasy at the notion of reallocation away from unproductive tasks in the economy in general (something I plan on writing more about soon). In general my editors at Bloomberg and elsewhere have been great, and I don’t want to dismiss or minimize the work that they did, or the times when they helped me out.

But the history of productivity improvements is mostly just the history of identifying and eliminating unnecessary work, either through technological automation or through reorganization of the production process. There’s no reason to expect op-ed writing to be any different. And the rise of Substack and other newsletter platforms, together with the bust in the digital op-ed space, suggests that independent op-ed writing has a major advantage over the old, editing-intensive process that publications have tried to port over from newsrooms to the op-ed space.

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