As the media landscape shifted from print column inches to bytes online, we have had to adjust to the new realities that paradoxically offer far more media outlets than when New York had 10 major English language dailies, three major TV networks, and half-dozen radio news broadcasters.
Breaking through the dissonance of voices can be more difficult, but the fact that there are so many more outlets can work to the advantage of someone wanting to enter and affect public debate, whether it is a campaign for a candidate or an issue of public import.
One of the tools we have found very effective is op-eds, which besides their wide distribution and ability to affect public debate, offer an opportunity to make an argument unfiltered by a reporters’ obligation to get the other side into a story.
There are three key elements in an op-ed: the message, of course, but also the messenger and the target audience.
I once represented a group of independent pharmacists pushing a bill in the New York State Legislature to ban mandated mail order. Independent pharmacists rely on their pharmaceutical business far more than chain pharmacies, which make the bulk of their income from “front of the store” sundries and toiletries. We wrote a series of op-eds pointing out that independent pharmacies should have access to filling all prescriptions if they matched the co-pays and cost to insurers that the mail order pharmacy benefit managers charged.
This was a somewhat technical consumer issue but it was of great importance to small businesses, which anchor so many communities around the state. We sought pharmacists to sign op-eds we placed in the local newspapers in the home districts of chairs and members of the Assembly and Senate insurance committees.
Similarly in our work with New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty, we worked with retired judges of New York’s Court of Appeals (the state’s highest court) to write op-eds and then placed them in those retired judges’ hometowns since the judges were highly respected local voices.
In each of those op-eds – both on the pharmacy issue and the death penalty – the message did not change. But the messengers were tailored to the communities they served, which meant the targets of those messages – mainly influential legislative leaders deciding the issues – would be more likely to see them and to recognize that their constituents are seeing the messages as well.
We have brought the same approach across a broad array of issues and for a broad array of clients, including law firms, unions, non-profits, hospitals and many, many, many political campaigns, as well as with national clients.
For the Onondaga Nation, part of the Six Nation Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, we have tackled issues as varied as seeking the return of treaty land taken over the centuries, their insistence on traveling internationally on their own passports and their campaign to get lacrosse – the Creator’s game, which they invented – into the Olympics, where they want to march and play under their own flag.
In addition to working with reporters across the country to cover the issues, we have written and placed op-eds in outlets such as The Nation magazine and the Guardian to spread the word.
And then every now and then, I write an op-ed under my own name, especially concerning baseball. I have written about my outrage at the designated hitter rule coming to the National League, and explained that as someone who roots for the Mets and anyone playing the Yankees, the only time I root for the Bronx Bombers is when they play the LA Dodgers. As someone old enough to have seen the Brooklyn Dodgers play at Ebbets Field, the near-70 years since they departed to the West Coast is not long enough to forgive Walter O’Malley’s team for shocking my boyhood psyche. That’s not business, of course, but it is deeply personal.
It helps that both George Arzt and I spent decades as reporters here in the city. It means we know a lot about how City Hall and Albany work, or don’t work, and we know key legislators and staffers in the City Council and Albany, as well as in Governors’ and Mayors’ offices.
We understand the pressures and demands on reporters covering our issues and the political universe at large. And we know how to write. We understand that an op-ed is a piece of journalism, which must have a sharply expressed point of view and be written to length, depending on the publication, whether print or on-line.
We understand that, as print media has sadly withered, where a piece appears is not always as important as what we do with it once it does appear somewhere. We spin those pieces out via the plethora of social media outlets that get them far more exposure than shrinking print circulations might indicate.
We love to mix it up in a good fight, and we love to exercise our writing chops.
Give us a call.
