In September 2006, I was mad about the way people were linking medieval history to the war in Iraq. Yes, we need to read history to understand modernity, but just recasting contemporary wars as “the Crusades” is dangerous politics and bad history. So I wrote an op-ed, got connected to the opinion editor at The Minnesota Star Tribune and, after several rounds of edits, they published my first piece on the first Sunday in October.
My fiancée (now wife) and I went to a grocery store in Edina, Minn., to buy a copy of the paper. There, in the coffee shop attached to the store, a man sat, reading the paper, his copy turned to the front page of the opinion section. To my article. I was a visiting professor at Macalester College in St. Paul at the time, just a few days post–defense of my Ph.D. It was strange but also encouraging to realize that on that Sunday, people all around me were reading something that I had written.
Over the past few years, I’ve been relieved that I don’t usually have to argue why public engagement matters for academics. But there’s still a ton of work to be done on how to do it. One problem is that in academe we become enmeshed in prestige economies that encourage academics to aim for and value the most lofty publications. That’s fine, but I want to argue that you’re more likely to succeed and do more good by aiming locally.
Some bona fides: I was a professor at Dominican University, a lovely teaching-oriented institution in the Chicago area, for a decade. I’m now the undergraduate adviser for history majors and minors at the University of Minnesota, or, as I like to think of it, a writer with a fabulous day job in a great department. I’ve published well over 500 essays in a wide variety of outlets and spent more than a decade traveling the country teaching academics of all sorts (students, faculty, staff and other folks in related work) how to write and, often just as critically, how to pitch writing for mass media. One of my core pieces of advice: Focus on local outlets.
There are two related issues here: First, it’s really hard to get published in The New York Times, The Atlantic and their peers. Second, even if you do, you’re likely to have less impact than you expect.
The New York Times opinion page does have outsize impact, even compared to other national outlets. But each day the NYT publishes a handful of guest essays, likely selected out of hundreds of pitches. A few will be from academics with expertise trying to comment on the news, but others come from among the rich and powerful—celebrities, major politicians, CEOs, already famous authors. If you’re already famous, well, you probably don’t need my advice.
There’s nothing wrong with being rejected by the NYT—I’ve been rejected at least a dozen times by that page and published there once—but it does cost you time. The easiest way to get an opinion essay published is to move fast. If you’re waiting for that NYT rejection, which likely won’t even come (you just won’t hear back), that peak window elapses and makes a piece harder to place anywhere else. The same is more or less true of other well-known national outlets.
But more importantly for me, unless an essay for a national outlet goes hugely viral, it might reach some tens of thousands or even a few hundred thousand readers dispersed across the nation or the Anglophone sphere. That may feel significant, but that dispersal also comes with costs. As a writer, I do best when I really know my audience. When I wrote for CNN, as I did often over the last decade, I had no idea who was likely to read my work. That made it harder for me to identify useful points of argument, pre-emptively rebut misconceptions or attacks, or even know if my writing was making a difference.
An outlet located in a specific community, on the other hand, has a knowable body of readers. I’m chiefly thinking about newspapers and magazines with a specific geographic location, but this is true of topic-specific outlets as well. I roughly know who reads Inside Higher Ed and I am able to calibrate this essay for, well, you, the reader. I hope I got it right.
When I write in Minnesota, I know just who is likely to read my piece. I have a sense of what they care about, and we share common references. In Minnesota, I can compare events to the “Halloween Blizzard” and assume everyone knows what I’m talking about. I’d have to spend at least a few sentences explaining things for The Washington Post. Similarly, when I’ve helped academics place essays in (for example), The Monitor (in Jefferson County, Mont.), the Arizona Daily Star (in Tucson) or The Sacramento Bee, the authors were able to focus on local concerns, local readers, local shared cultures.
Finally, there’s an unspoken (usually) relationship between local news and local institutions of higher education. I tell my colleagues at the University of Minnesota all the time that if they are writing on something newsworthy, the editors at the Star Tribune and other local outlets are eager to hear from them and their odds of being published are actually pretty good. Good opinion editors want to publish expert commentary from local experts. But the broader rules of op-ed writing still apply—you have to have an argument (not just expertise), and you have to move quickly. Spending your time searching for a national outlet burns that time; in contrast, once you start getting published locally, those bylines give you more stature to pitch nationally, if that’s your goal.
It used to be my goal. I collected bylines at outlets the way my kid collected Pokémon. And to this day, I still think about The New York Times. I’m as vulnerable to the lure of prestige as anyone.
But in December 2024, I was trying to figure out what I might be able to usefully do in the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump. I knew there would be attacks on subjects about which I had written for years—higher education, secondary education for disabled students, and Medicaid—and that I’d want to write about. The opinion section at CNN had been shut down over the summer, forcing me to think hard about what I should do next. I decided that maybe I should focus on my home, my communities, and try to write useful essays for the people among whom I live.
So I pitched The Minnesota Star Tribune a piece about RFK Jr. and disability history, which they accepted, even though I hadn’t written for them in almost 20 years (once in 2006, once in 2008). A month later, I wrote for them about Medicaid waivers. Then about Section 504 and disability education. Eventually I was invited onto the masthead for a year.
As folks know, the winter of 2026 was terrible here, with killings in the streets and masked secret police destroying families. In this moment of crisis, I’ve felt lucky to have a local voice, and I’m using it as best as I can. I encourage everyone thinking about public engagement to start by working near to home, rather than up at the heavens.
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