So, thank you all for attending. The title of the lecture here is Your Opinions Count Too. And what I'm speaking about today, well let me introduce myself first. I guess this is the first one of these I've given where I've not had a moderator and I've got an unlimited amount of time, up to one hour. It won't take that long. Just to introduce myself, my name is John Williams. I'm board certified in occupational medicine and ophthalmology. I've been a member of ACOM for just about 28 years. I think the first meeting I came to was here in Orlando back in 96. And it was a completely different meeting, much bigger back then. We were at the convention center, I think. So a lot has changed over the years, but I'd just like to welcome everyone here. Whether you're a doctor, a PA, a nurse practitioner, a tech, whatever. You're all welcome here. You all have something to contribute. And hopefully by the end of this talk you'll understand what the process is. Disclaimer, I have no financial or other conflicts of interest to disclose. And all the images that you'll see fall under the standards of fair use. So nothing is more interesting than opinion when opinion is interesting. And has anybody heard of Herbert Bayard Swope before? This is about 100 years ago, 1921, I believe he made that quote. And he was the editor of the New York World newspaper. And to kind of show how little things change as years go by, the New York World was kind of a tabloid sheet. And he was the person who decided, let's let the public, let's take some public ideas for publication, let them write some articles and we'll put them in our paper. And at the time he said, and it doesn't really matter if they're factual or not, let's just get the information out there. And it really increased the readership for their paper, the New York World. And so I thought it was kind of interesting. I guess it was a bit of a national inquirer at the time. Definition of an op-ed. Some people think op-ed, op stands for opinion. Well, it really, originally when the definition came about, it was not that. And if we look at probably two of the premier places where you read op-eds, I would say the Washington Post and the New York Times, the definitions are a bit different. The Washington Post is a more traditional definition where they talk about it being an opinion piece by a guest writer that makes a clear argument about a topic in the news. So it's a guest writer, someone who doesn't work for the paper. They make a clear argument and typically if you've read the Washington Post, you've seen opinion or op-eds where there are people you recognize, people that you've seen in the news. Perhaps they're university professors or politicians or actors and actresses, that sort of thing. And you go, oh, wow, Tom Cruise wrote something about action movies. Maybe I'll read that. And so that's typically what they look for, someone who has some prominence, whose opinion people might be interested in reading about. The name is originally derived by the traditional placement of where these pieces were put in the paper. Back in the days when we got our information from the traditional newspaper, you would open certain sections, you'd find the sports, the comics, the society page, that sort of thing. And they derived the name because the op-ed was opposite the editorial page. So the op stands for opposite. The New York Times has actually changed the name to guest essay because so much of the content is delivered electronically these days, there really isn't a paper to open up and go, oh, here's the editorial, here's the op-eds. And so it's basically the same thing, an argument in the author's voice based on fact and drawn from expertise or experience. So over 100 years we've sort of transitioned from something that was maybe printed in a scandal sheet based on rumor and gossip to something that is moderated and edited in a manner where, you know, supposedly the publication is saying that most of it is factual. And they want to offer the readers a robust range of ideas on newsworthy events that are of broad public concern. So editorials, if you look at the left side of the page, those are opinions of the publication on major issues, typically written by the editorial board. They're not signed, so you don't usually, you know, there are some exceptions, you don't usually see who's written it. It's a group of editors for that particular paper who have sat down and said this is our consensus opinion on a particular issue. The editorial page may have the political cartoons as well as the masthead, which is a list of the people who run the paper. We flip over to the other side, which is opposite the editorial page, and the opinion columns can be about major news events, current affairs, and usually written by subject matter experts. And that's where those of you out here come in who may have opinions that you want to get out there. Has anyone here written an op-ed before? There we are. Okay, now I'm going to call on you. Later. And the emphasis is on subject matter experts. So if you have an opinion on something, like say, for example, you don't like homeowners associations and you want to park your car on the street all the time, that sort of thing, typically you want to write to your local paper a letter to the editor. That's anybody who is eligible to do a letter to the editor, a public citizen, anybody who has an opinion. An op-ed is a place where an opinion can be expanded upon, but typically they're looking for someone who has some expertise, and everyone in this room has expertise in some area and likely multiple areas. And then sometimes you'll see syndicated columnists from other newspapers. They'll put those in as op-eds. So here's the New York Times. Anybody still get the print edition? I get it on Sunday. So we look here, the editorial page. Here's an editorial. They're unsigned. The editorial board writes them. It represents the newspaper itself, not just an individual. Letters to the editor here. They can be very brief. They're sent in by the public, selected by the editorial board, limited in size and number. And that's one thing that I will probably repeat myself during this talk, is that there are limitations on the amount of words that you can write. So if you've ever written an obituary, if you've ever written a news article, they talk about column inches, numbers of words, those sorts of things. So there are constraints, and that's one of the important things to learn if you're interested in writing these, is taking your ideas, however great they may be, and condensing them down into 500 words, 600 words, 1,000 words, that sort of thing. And that can sometimes be difficult. It's always easier to write a lot of words than get the same points across in fewer words. The authors have expertise or specialization. They appear on a schedule, depending on the publication. If it's a print publication, some of the newspapers in my area, it's like Thursday is the day that the op-eds appear. For online publications, it can be any day of the week. Limited in size, they don't necessarily reflect the opinion of the publication in which it appears. So to me, if I see a publication that is publishing op-eds from both sides of the spectrum, I tend to like to read that sort of online news outlet more than perhaps one that limits itself to one end or the other of the spectrum. These are a few op-eds that I've written, and you can see that there is the ability and there is interest out there for these news outlets to get opinions from people who have some expertise in certain areas. This is my local paper, the Colorado Springs Gazette. That's where I practice in Colorado. Colorado Politics, The Hill, if you've read that online, San Antonio Express News, and then Police One, which is an exclusively online publication. I didn't mention I'm a retired Reserve Sheriff's deputy, so I write for Police One. I've done a few columns for them. But as you can see, if you look up here, as far as how does this tie into occupational medicine, there are some areas here that are in the news that we can comment on with expertise. And it's not, you know, the ABC News medical correspondent who's maybe a great cardiologist but doesn't know really anything about heat stress or maybe doesn't know anything about vaccines or what's involved with drug testing, that sort of thing. That's where you have expertise. I'm sure we have some MROs in the room, right? Anybody an MRO? We've got a couple, two, three? Sure. This particular article here I wrote about an OSHA standard for heat illness prevention as needed. That was my personal opinion. But the article was published after a... There was a high-profile incident of a young man, a college student working a summer job in San Antonio, who became disoriented on the job. I think it was his first week on the job. It was very hot. Last year was the hottest summer we have ever had on record. And he became disoriented. He was a bit incoherent. And his boss thought, oh, this kid's on drugs. And so he proceeded to try to get him to go get a drug test. And in the interim, he collapsed and ended up going to the ER and dying of heat stroke. Very tragic, but if it had been recognized appropriately, perhaps he could have been saved. Remote work works for the environment. I wrote that talking about environmental impact, positive environmental impact we saw of reduced commuting, business travel, and those sorts of things during the pandemic. Rescheduling medical marijuana. The recent push by the administration to take marijuana and take it from Schedule 1 to Schedule 3 wrote about the particular thorny issues that would have to be dealt with if you take all marijuana and make it medical in terms of requiring prescriptions, doctor visits, that sort of thing. And as I mentioned, I do have some experience in the world of law enforcement and talked about the difficult working conditions, low pay, and that sort of thing that may be contributing to our difficulty in recruiting and retaining new law enforcement officers. So a variety of subjects. And you probably have sat out there and you've read something or something happens or you see a news report and you think, well, that's not really what I think about that and the reason I take this particular position on a particular issue is through my experience and that sort of thing. And I'd really like to get out there and get my point known. Well, I'm going to tell you how to do it. Here are some other op-eds that have been written by other physicians in national publications, the LA Times. I'm California's acting Surgeon General and I have bipolar disorder. Say again? Yeah, we started at 11. Oh, well, can you all hear me? Okay. I got my microphone on. Yeah, the slides are fine. So you look at the potential impact. If you see maybe you're just a private citizen out there and you have bipolar disorder and you're really feeling pretty bad about yourself and thinking, wow, you know, life is not going well for me and then I read an article, wow, the Surgeon General also has bipolar disorder. Maybe there's some hope for me. Maybe I could become a doctor. Maybe things aren't as gloomy as I think. And so those articles have significant interest for the general public. This article here was written by a couple of ER docs, Herbie Duber and Christopher Kang in Seattle, talking about let's address the real source of overburdened ERs. Worth a read. Who knows better as to what's going on than those people on the front line, the ER docs in this setting? And then academic medicine needs to get with the times. I'm not going to make any editorial comments, but I think if we all attended the meeting this week, you would probably agree somewhat with that premise. So current topics of interest, probably number one, vaccines, heat stress injuries, as I mentioned, health effects of climate change, communicable diseases that we're seeing and experiencing, shift work, labor relations, workplace safety, environmental disasters, fitness for duty testing, drug testing, even daylight saving time. You know, we had the Senate, I believe, what was it, a couple of years ago, voted unanimously that we should be on year-round daylight saving time. Well, what do we think as occupational medicine physicians, nurse practitioners, PAs, allied health professionals, about circadian rhythms and the effect of that? You know, what would that be? And so I would think someone with some expertise in that area would have perhaps a more informed opinion than maybe a reporter who isn't a physician or has no experience or background in occupational health, public health, that sort of thing. So how much does the public trust health care providers? Any ideas? Alan, what do you think? They trust us? That's a good answer. More Americans trust AI and social media over their doctor's opinion. And as humbling that is as a physician to hear that, when, you know, I talk to family and friends, they will, you know, if you try to pin them down, yeah, yeah, I go online, I go to Google, I'm using, you know, Bing or ChatGPT and that sort of thing to sort of self-diagnose and find out what's wrong with me. This was a recent survey done, you know, just in the past year, and it said more Americans are trusting social media and health-related websites for medical advice over an actual health care professional. Why would that be? Perhaps it's access. Perhaps it's maybe as physicians or health care providers we're not as approachable. It's harder for them to connect with us to give them advice. I'll have to admit sometimes I do that myself. But if we look here, significantly more people consult health care websites, 53%, and social media, 46%, than a real-life doctor. And nearly three-quarters believe they have a better understanding of their health than their own doctor does. So whether that's true or not, you know, perception is reality. So we have to deal with people and have that conversation where we're co-managing care as opposed to talking down to them and saying, well, I'm the doctor, I'm the nurse practitioner, I'm the PA, I've got all the years of training, you must do this or do that. Rather, I think it's better to, you know, have a more egalitarian approach and to educate them. Now this is interesting. Anyone familiar with the Epoch Times? Reddit, subscription, yeah, okay. This headline came out, and these always attract my attention in my news feed. People who tested positive for COVID-19 and took ivermectin as a treatment recovered faster than a comparison group, a new study found. And this was just from that article that came out last March. So I thought, well, I'm going to go look for the source article. And in publications that publish op-eds, the ones that are online and allow embedded hyperlinks, I tend to gravitate more towards those because I like to go back to the source data and find out, okay, where did they come up with that conclusion? You know, this is better than that. You know, this causes that. And scientific studies show, you know, how many times have we read that? It's the science. Well, show me the science. So anyway, this particular article, they didn't have the article hyperlink, so I had to dig a little bit to find it. And this is the article that was referred to, the Journal of Infection, Ivermectin for COVID-19. And they talked about a recent Cochran review. I'm sure we're probably all familiar with Cochran reviews. You know, they're very well done. And essentially the conclusion was, our findings in an open-label trial of no differences in hospital admission, a modest reduction in first reported time to recovery, no impact work or studies at 3, 6, and 12 months, we consider the additional studies should not be a priority for research. So what I think they did, okay, a modest reduction in first reported time to recovery, took that, ran with it, and they recovered faster. So taking a tidbit out of the article and perhaps amplifying it. And if you're someone in the general public and you read that, you know, studies show that that's what's true. So where's our credibility? Only 57% of U.S. adults said science had a mostly positive effect on society. And to me, that's really disappointing. And I think all of us who've spent years studying and perfecting our craft, when's the last time anybody got a 57 on a test that you took in college or high school? Probably not many people here. And we see the trend, oops, let me go back, sorry. We see downward trending surprise during the pandemic. We hit a high of about 73% there in 2019 right before. And all of us during the pandemic saw the examples of, you know, people with white coats on, on YouTube, on social media, on the news, you know, professing to be COVID experts and here's what you must do, here's what you must take. And the whole issue of medical misinformation came to the fore. And, you know, here's some articles, you know, combating misinformation as a core function of public health. And I don't know if that should be one of our ACOM clinical competencies. I haven't looked at them recently, but perhaps it should be. And so coronavirus misinformation and how scientists can help fight it, well, you can substitute the word coronavirus, take whatever the next pandemic is gonna be, H5N1 or that sort of thing, we'll probably be having the same discussion again in the next few years. So I'll have to say one of my proudest moments of being an ACOM member is when the MD guidelines came out with the evidence-based COVID-19 guidelines for occupational health. And I'm sure all of you probably use these, hand it out to your patients, your colleagues, your family, friends, that sort of thing. But these were the best guidelines that were out there. They were continuously updated and they were outstanding. And I think it is something we should all be proud about. And I don't know that ACOM or the occupational medicine field got appropriate credit. And hopefully going into the future, we'll be recognized more as, okay, this is the source. ACOM's the source for information in these contingencies. Same thing with our guidelines and position statements. If any of you have worked on any of the committees to develop these guidelines, you know the process that we go through, very science-based. It's something that's not done on a whim. Lots of time and discussion go into creating these. So when vaccines first became available, if we can sort of go back to when they were first rolled out in late 2020, at least in the law enforcement sector, I was detecting, at least in the agencies I work with, a considerable ambivalence about taking the vaccine. And we know that the law enforcement community was hit really hard by COVID. Anyone here from Texas? Any Texas docs? No. If you look at some of the fatality data for COVID in correction officers in Texas, it was just unbelievable how many died that year. And in many cases, at least the anecdotal cases you read about, they were unvaccinated. And this was after the vaccine became available. So police one asked me if I would do a column about, okay, I've been offered the vaccine, what do I do now? And as opposed to, you must take the vaccine because I told you, tried to lay out some reasoning for doing so. And then based on this article in December 28th, you know, it created a lot of, we got a lot of feedback through the editorial staff with a lot of questions. And back then the questions were, is this going to incorporate into my DNA? Is this going to make me sterile? Am I going to have health issues? You know, why should I take it? You know, I'm healthy, nothing wrong with me. And so we developed a frequently asked questions article. And I know just based on some of the feedback that I got, at least at that time when the first vaccine was rolled out, that we did have a lot of people that were kind of on the fence who decided, yeah, I'll take a chance and take the vaccine. So I think at least for that intervention had some positive impact. And, you know, I think anybody in this room could have written the same articles, no problem, and had similar impact in your communities. Yet what kind of rested or stole the spotlight from us as physicians were some of these, some of the pseudoscience that was out there and people in white coats and on YouTube with MD behind their names who, you know, may not have had any experience in public health, no experience in vaccines, no experience in infectious disease. Just looking for their 15 minutes of fame. Okay, now I've kind of talked about the history. This is how, if you're still interested, you know, in doing some writing, I'm going to tell you how to do it. And here are the keys. And this is something I sort of discovered through, you know, process of elimination, trial and error, that sort of thing. So I'm going to try to make it a little easier for you. The Op-Ed Project is an initiative where they want to try to change who writes history. It's a project that is trying to engage people who are not traditionally writers, not people who are graduates of journalism school who are already out there, you know, writing their columns and that sort of thing. These are people, lay people, or people in communities with expertise in various different areas who need to know how to write and communicate their knowledge. Here's the link, www.theopedproject.org. The nice thing about this is you don't have to subscribe to it, you don't have to pay money for it. It's out there, it's free, and it's a tremendous resource. And I like this quote, the best ideas, regardless of where they come from, should have a chance to be heard and to change the world. So if you go to the page, you will see there are multiple tabs out here, and when you drop down on For Individuals, you see Ask a Journalist Office Hours. And so what that is is there is a trained journalist, a person who's out there doing this professionally, you know, maybe they're a columnist for Time Magazine or maybe they're a freelance journalist and they're writing for some publications that you're very familiar with. They have on a monthly basis a journalist who will donate their time and will have sessions that you can log into via Zoom. You can listen to them going over editing an op-ed piece. And in fact, if you submit one of your pieces and they pick it for that week, the piece of the week, it might be your piece that they're looking at. And, you know, you have to sort of check your humility and your ego at the door because they are not there to commend you on the quality of your writing. It's more, okay, you need to change this paragraph, this grammar's incorrect, you know, it doesn't match the style that the particular publication wants, but it's what you need to hear. And then if we go to the drop-down menu here, resources, submission information, very important, because that is going to tell you what publications are interested in publishing your opinions. And with the advent of online journalism, which has, you know, been out there for several years, there are many, many, many publications out there that you've never really heard of that may be very interested in something that you have to say. And you may go, well, if I haven't heard of it, it's probably not very well-read. Well, you can't be that dismissive because I've discovered some online news outlets when you go to their, you know, Twitter or X page or Instagram page, they've got, you know, 150,000 subscribers and so a significant part of the population following them. So that was a humbling experience discovering that. So ask a journalist, this was back in April, Stephanie Drenka, founder of Visible Magazine. She's director for Dallas Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation as part of a national initiative by the Kellogg Foundation. She's written for Newsweek, Washington Post, USA Today, heavy hitter. And so she, you could log on at a Zoom call and actually interact with Stephanie and other writers. So once again, free, you don't have to pay for it. And these, ask a journalist, the journalists rotate, I think about every month or so. Oh, anybody recognize any of the publications up there from your local market? Sir, which one? A Milwaukee Journal sent them. Yeah, great paper. I used to live in Marshfield, so I know that, excellent paper. This is the Arizona Republic. Ah, there you go, excellent. So if you, when you go on the webpage and you go under resources, like I showed you in the previous slide, previous, that one, submission information there, you're gonna get this page and others. And each one of these little pluses, you just click on that and there will be a dropdown and it will show you what they're looking for, how many words, what format, what style you need to follow. And as you can see, we've got, you got local papers here, Arizona Republic, the Daily Star, the Baltimore Sun. We got the Chicago Tribune. That's a big paper, huge circulation. And we also have the Northwest Indiana Times and then Newsweek. So from small markets, local, regional, national, and I would say even international, if you look at things like, you know, LA Times, you know, people read that all over the world. And you can see there are, if you look at the, you know, the political spectrum as well, represented on all ends and as well as in the middle. So I've taken the New York Times and I clicked on it and that's what the dropdown looks like. New York Times accepts opinion pieces on any topic, articles typically run from 400 to 1,200 words. And what that means is they don't want 399 and they don't want 1,201. They have a way of, you know, they get so many submissions that if you fall outside the initial guidelines, you're not even gonna be looked at. So make sure that your articles fit within their word count. And, you know, with Microsoft Word, it's pretty easy to, you know, get a word count. The piece must be exclusive to the Times. So simultaneous submissions are discouraged. What that would mean is, hey, I got this really neat article, I want to get published soon. I'll send it to the LA Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, I'll send it all at the same time and whoever says yes first, I'll say, yeah, okay, go ahead and publish it. You can't do that. The reason being is that they want to have a period of time for their right of refusal and I understand that. Typically, you know, three days to seven days. And if you put a piece out there and they say no simultaneous submissions and oops, it got accepted by the LA Times but I really wanted it in the Wall Street Journal and now they're coming back and saying they want to publish my piece. It's like, oh, sorry, I got to withdraw that. Probably will impact you later if you submit other pieces to that same paper, you know. You say no to them once and it, they won't, the editorial staff won't come out and say that but they essentially that does poison the well a bit. If you want to do a letter to the editor, once again, exclusivity, very important, letters to the editor, much shorter, 150 to 175 words and typically with letters to the editor they don't acknowledge receipt. They get so many, they just basically, you wait for a few days and, you know, if they select you they'll give you a letter or they'll send you an email within the week. If you haven't gotten something by the week, you know, move on to another publication. Interestingly, most news outlets, basically they like the text of the, of your piece, just put in an email. You know, they don't like attachments. Attachments can carry viruses, Trojan horses, et cetera. Some news outlets will have a form where basically you, you know, you fill, you know, put the title, cut and paste your article in this box and then hit submit. But the vast majority ask you just to put the text in the body of an email and with a little two or three sentence explanation as to why you're writing it and why they should publish it. And they will be, they'll be pretty specific as to what they want. USA Today, you see 650 to 900 words, quite a bit shorter than what the New York Times limit is. They want pieces that are incisive and compelling, of course, and include issues at the top of the news. So if you're writing about something and you get the, you know, say for example something happened today in the news and you write that op-ed and you get that submitted this afternoon and it's a good piece, your piece is much more likely to be accepted than somebody who writes the same thing who's maybe a more established author three or four days later. So a lot of it is timing. And just because you've submitted a piece and it gets rejected doesn't mean that they think you're a bad writer or they're not going to accept other things. They get so many excellent pieces submitted, they obviously can't publish all of them. And if yours happens to hit the right note with one of the editorial staff that looks at these when they come in, yours may get published. So as I'll talk about a little later in the talk, yeah, go ahead. So on that subject, if you're trying to promote an occupational medicine theme such as recent vigilance and et cetera, do you take, how do you approach it? Is it a just philosophical approach and that may be something to hard sell or are you trying to just say here's the issue, you know, you guys decide. But what are they looking for in terms of tone and intensity? No, that's an excellent question. And I think probably the most important thing is you need to write the article so that a non-medically trained person reading it will understand the point you're trying to get across. So if you happen to have a friend or a colleague who's, you know, maybe an engineer or maybe one of your kids or a relative who's, they could be an accountant or something and you're writing a medical piece. And I've written some before and thought they were great and I sent it to my sister who's in the TV news business and she goes, what's a good article but I don't understand half of what you were saying. And I said, well, what was it? The terminology says no, it's like you're operating from a position where you assume the reader to already know things. And I got, uh-oh. Yes? Right. If anybody here done utilization review, if you've done that, I think it's the, is it the Flush Warner, what is it? I know in the Microsoft Word they have that. I would say it'd be reasonable ninth grade, be reasonable. It's really hard to drop to the fifth and sixth grade level which we had to do with some of our utilization review opinions for Medicaid. That's really tough. Ninth grade I think is a reasonable place to shoot. Did you have? It does. It's got to be a little more esoteric. Yeah, that's true, that's true. Go ahead. Right. Right, yeah, they're not doing, it's not a public service announcement. That's true. These publications are in it for, you know, they're in business to make a profit. And go ahead. I think one of the challenges of writing these op-ed pieces is that, and talking to a lay audience, is that, you know, as science, as scientists, as physicians, we like to show data, right? Or we like to like have a citation. Right. So we say that this is not predictive, you know, this test is not predictive of this. Or, you know, it's shown to be ineffective. It's almost like you want to say, you know, and if you can't, obviously you can't put footnotes, no one takes footnotes or references, but you'd like to at least have a hyperlink to the article. Exactly. As recently shown in a study published in the New England Journal by so-and-so, you know, a randomized controlled trial showed that ivermectin had no effect or, you know, so how do you get around it? Well, that's an excellent question. I'll address it in another slide, but coming up, but just to answer it, is that these publications do ask you to back up your assertions with facts. And they do allow you to embed hyperlinks. That doesn't mean that the hyperlink is necessarily going to be there, obviously no hyperlinks in paper newspapers. But online, I think the best publications that have online op-eds leave the hyperlinks there. So the reader can dive down and go, oh, there's the source article. There's that article on ivermectin from the Epoch Times. Right. You should embed hyperlinks, absolutely. Yes, in your Word document, it's pretty easy to embed a hyperlink. And the purpose of that, and what you want to also recognize is that just embedding a hyperlink from some newspaper story that said that, you know, secondarily quoted the article, that's not enough. You really need to go back to the source, the original source, so the editor can look and go, oh, well, that actually is, yeah, okay, he or she is backing that up with a study. Those, and I haven't had as much success with those. I don't know that they want that level of granularity, which I think can be a problem, because I want to give it to them. Because if somebody comes back to me and says, well, I don't believe that. You made that up. Well, here's the New England Journal article here. You can do that, but that's going to cut into your word counts. You have to be careful with doing that sort of thing. But I think, you know, when you read editorials in a print format, I have a problem when I'm reading editorials on paper, and I go, well, where did they get that information? But if it's something very, very important, a prominent study, you could mention that, sure. I noticed in the New York Times, when you read editorials online, they do that. They do, exactly. Yeah, and I actually prefer to have my things published, if I have a choice, you know, in an online format as opposed to print. I mean, it's always cool to, you know, get the print article and show your wife, hey, look, there's my article. Ellen. I think you will lose people. Their eyes will glaze over when you start writing as per a double-blind placebo study. You just need to say a study. When you start being too scientific and too professional, you are losing your audience. Just say a study. It's good enough for the people you're trying to reach. You're not talking to colleagues. You're talking to the lay public. I used to have a column in LA, and I know this. If you lose the audience, they don't want your article. Yeah. Yes, sir. Is it relatively easy to find out if a prior submission already covered what you're trying to do? that's a very good question. Repeat that so that recording can hear it. Go ahead. Yeah, is it easy to find out if a prior submission sufficiently address what you are trying to present? That's a great question. And yes, it is. For most publications, they have a search box. And typically what I'll do is I'll put in keywords, like for example, you know, COVID-19 or cannabis or rescheduling of marijuana, those sorts of things. Because if they've just had an expert do an op-ed three days before on the same thing that I'm writing about, I'm gonna look somewhere else because they're not gonna want it. And I've had some of these smaller publications get back to me and say, hey, we love your article, but we just published something about that last month. I go, oops, I missed that. So yeah, they're not interested in seeing the same thing over and over, unless you have a level of expertise or a different slant on that particular topic than other people do. But let me move on here. So you can see there is some difference between the, I don't wanna get the feedback here, between the different publications. And you gotta figure out who's your audience. Do you wanna get this out nationwide? Do you wanna go to the Washington Post or the New York Times? Disclaimer, I've not had anything published by either of those two news outlets. But, or do you wanna go locally or regionally where maybe you've got a regional issue where maybe there was, you know, in Colorado, you know, you've got environmental articles and things years ago, Rocky Flats, Rocky Mountain Arsenal, things like that that were in the news that people wanted to know about. An article about that might be more appropriate in a Colorado-based publication as opposed to, you know, the LA Times or the Boston Globe. So tips for the new writer, play to your strengths. Do you have some expertise or some background? Because one thing they're gonna ask you for is give us a two or three sentence summary of your background and your expertise. Well, I've got MD, I'm board certified by this organization. You know, I was in the Navy for 22 years. I did this or that, which basically shows you have some expertise in the area that you're writing about. You wanna do detailed research in the subject. You wanna get the latest that's out there. You don't wanna be caught up in, you know, I'm linking an article from 2009. Oops, there was one that came out two months ago that adds a tremendous amount to the science and I forgot to put that in there. No, don't get caught in that. Read other op-eds from the publications you pitch. Look and see what sort of tone they want. Are they interested in a very objective tone? Are they interested in snarkiness? Are they interested in, you know, and some are, you know. You read some of these op-eds, they're pretty snarky and they can be both ends of the political spectrum and I tend to, I kind of maybe snarky light sometimes a little bit, but grammar spelling is an absolute. You misspell words, they're gonna toss it. Your grammar's not correct, it's out. You wanna have, enlist the aid of a proofreader and that doesn't have to be somebody who's a paid proofreader or somebody who's, you know, that's their calling in life. Like I said, it could be your sister, it could be your wife, your husband, boyfriend, daughter, trusted colleague, somebody but who is not in your particular area of expertise so they're gonna read it objectively and they're gonna go, you know what, I graduated ninth grade, I have no clue what you're talking about here. What is this scheduling, rescheduling? I don't understand that. A schedule, that's like a train schedule. How's this, you know, for us we think schedule three, we think, okay, DEA and that sort of thing. To the majority of people in the public, a schedule is something like, oh, it's, you know, it's noon, it's time to go eat lunch. So you have to not assume that your audience, or always assume that your audience does not have the same level of expertise that you do. Okay, this may be tough. This may be a deal breaker for some people. No pay for most articles. There are a lot of people out there who like to get their opinions out publicly and the news outlets know that and they're not particularly inclined to pay for it. But however, if you establish yourself, you know, you've written a few of these op-eds and perhaps you want to maybe do some articles for a publication and reach out to them and pitch, hey, I've got an interesting article I would like to write. Maybe it's not an op-ed, but it's a piece talking about vaccines or shift work, things like that. They're gonna say, okay, let's see your portfolio. What have you written before? Okay, here are the links. Here's my Twitter page, here's my Medium page, whatever. And they go, oh, okay, that person can write. Yeah, we'll give you a chance. And that might lead to, and I don't know, Alan, I'm gonna put you on the spot. Did you get paid for your LA Times stuff or did they compensate you? Or? Okay, so there. Yeah, I know Dr. Alan Spira here. I know he, I remember reading your column and it was very interesting and that's great. So it can be a segue to, you know, if you're so inclined to perhaps write articles that you could get paid for. Rejection rates are high. What's high? Oh, my experience, you know, maybe 20 submissions for one news outlet that publishes it. But I don't give up, you know. If the second time around I submit it and maybe a publication that rejected me the first time accepts it, that sort of amplifies the fact that just because they didn't like one of your articles doesn't mean that they don't like you as a writer. What it means is, oh, maybe your article came, your article just didn't have enough of a wow factor for them to wanna publish it. Or maybe there had been another article just published or they're just saturated and maybe there's more important things. Just be humble about it and say, okay, I'm gonna keep pitching. And then finished articles versus pitches. In most cases, they're looking for finished articles. In some cases, and this is more in the news realm where they're looking where they may be calls for, I'd like a medical expert to give us like what the latest information is on vaccines. What about the boosters? What should we take? That might fall into the realm where you pitch an article and you say, yeah, I can write 1600 words on the latest on vaccines and here's my background and they can say, okay, we'll accept that. And typically with pitches, they're more likely to pay something because that's more of a news article than you just giving your voluntary opinion. Paywalls. The kind of the bane of online media. You see this great article, it pops up in your newsfeed, I'm gonna read it. Oh, it's in the Financial Times. I don't subscribe to that. I can't see that one. How much is that? Oh, it's like $80 a week. I'm not doing that. So when you're submitting, that's something to think about because you may have a dynamite article, it gets published and it's behind a paywall and then you try to disseminate it out there and nobody who, only people who can read it are people who have a subscription to that particular paper or journal or that sort of thing. So some of the online news, like I know Newsweek is not, maybe not as likely with some articles to be behind a paywall, but look at that because some are exclusively behind paywalls and others. You can ask the editors, is my article gonna be stuck behind a paywall? If you publish it and they go, yeah, all of it is and I go, maybe I don't wanna go, maybe I wanna publish it somewhere else. Or sometimes they have time dependent paywalls where for the first week your article will be behind a paywall, but after that anybody can access it. So I talked about a pitch is basically a summary of what you wanna write about, your background, why you have special insight. Completed articles should be a finished product that meets the guidelines, word count, grammar, spelling, the style. If you've written articles for the medical or scientific literature, you know, AP style book, APA, those sorts of things, you have to follow the style to the letter. And some prefer pitches, others completed articles. Okay, caveats, always important here. You wanna clear this with your employer. How many of us work for ourselves or who's an employed physician? You know, okay, we're maybe third of the room. Okay. So say you work for Sutter Health. I'm just gonna throw that out there and you write an article thinking that, well, Sutter Health really needs to diversify and you write something that could be perceived as negative. You definitely would wanna clear that with your employer before you put that out for publication. But I think if you discuss with your employer, look, this is an article that will further knowledge in a particular area of public health, you know, they typically are not gonna argue with that. As long as you got a disclaimer in the article, my piece or my opinion does not necessarily represent the opinions or policies of whatever, United Health Groups, Scripps Medical Group, et cetera, whatever. Backup assertions with embedded hyperlinks like we talked about before. If you don't see the guidelines, say there's a paper and you see op-eds and you can't figure out, huh, well, I don't know how to submit it. There's no email there. I don't know what the word count is. Reach out, pick up the phone or send an email to the editor and say, hey, do you take op-eds? And what are your guidelines? And they'll go, oh yeah, we do. And here's the word count, et cetera. And you wanna maybe start small, you know, try your local paper, go to regional, national, and then lastly, international outlets. And you might wanna try letters to the editor first, a little easier getting those published and not as much, not as many words involved. You wanna establish yourself as a writer. I don't know, you pretty much have to have a social media presence, whether it's X, Twitter, threads, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and others. The op-ed project, I'll mention that again, the National Writers Union is a union of freelance writers that it's basically a union, you pay dues, and you have the opportunity to interact with freelance writers who are writing on a national and international level. And I've been a member for a few years and it's tremendous to be able to work in working groups with some people whose articles you've read before. You can self-publish, there is medium.com, you can look that up for a subscription fee, you can put articles that you've written, may not have been published in other news outlets, but you can self-publish them there, they'll generate a hyperlink, they do show up on Google searches, and they do have SEO, which is search engine optimization to try to get your articles up prominently when you do a search. Brains is another outlet for self-publishing, then of course there's blogging, which I think is probably becoming maybe a little bit less prominent than in the past. And then importance of timeliness and pertinence, has it been written about before? Do I have an angle that nobody else has thought about? And I'm gonna throw it out there and I'm gonna tell the editor, hey, nobody else has really thought of this and what do you think, would it be worthwhile? And I'm gonna close with this, if you wanna be a writer, you gotta do two things, read a lot and write a lot. Very true. And particularly the writing a lot. If you wanna do this, it does require time and it does require patience and humility because you write your first one, you think it's fantastic and you put it out there and nobody's just like, is there something wrong with my email account? I'm not getting, I was expecting an email this afternoon. Or you write something and you think, ah, this is kinda not so great, it's not my best work, but I'll just throw it out there and that afternoon the editor, hey, we're gonna put this on Thursday's publication and are you good with that? And yeah, sure, no problem. So there's my email address, feel free if you have any questions to email me, I've got my social media accounts up there. And go ahead, I've got five minutes for questions. Let me get you the microphone so we can get this on the tape here. Go ahead. I haven't written much in the way of op-eds or letters to the editor, but I know there was one a long time ago that generated a lot of kind of hate mail to me from people that were maybe in the misinformation crowd. Would you comment on that? That's a great comment. So after your article is published and most news outlets will take it and put it on their Twitter account, they'll put it on Instagram and if you read the comments, just have a thick skin because those crowds do come out and it's like, this is the worst thing I've ever read and they don't know anything and it's like the keyboard warriors. Generally, my email address is not published with my bio, but if somebody took 10 minutes to do a little search, they probably would not have a hard time finding me if they wanted to. So really haven't gotten the email hate, but I have certainly in the comments and particularly when these things are published on Twitter, particularly article about medical marijuana rescheduling got a lot of discontent. No, no, it hasn't happened yet, but other questions? Yeah. I appreciate you picked up some good pointers here. Oh, thank you. What is this op-ed project? Who's behind that? That's a good question. My understanding is a consortium of some journalism schools and professional journalists that have come together to make themselves available to do that. As far as who's writing the checks, I'm not absolutely sure. I don't think it's a high budget thing. I think it's more, as I've seen with the freelance community kind of a labor of love for these journalists to try to bring on other journalists. And if you followed the news in print journalism, there have been a lot of layoffs. There've been newspapers closing down, things like that. And so suddenly the freelance community of journalists has really expanded. And so there are a lot of people out of work out there that are looking for paying gigs. And I think this was partly an answer to that. Okay, yep. How influential are op-eds? I know like along in the Washington Beltway and stuff, everybody's like into it. And you know what sessions it said. And on some news programs, they'll invite someone who said, hey, your op-ed said this. But are they influential in your opinion? I mean, have you seen them move the needle in hot issues? That's a good question because I think the attention span of the American reader is about 30 seconds. So if you follow like a Twitter account where perhaps something you published was placed, if the comments aren't there after 24 hours, nobody's even looking at it because this is the bottom of the Twitter feed. But I have, particularly in like some of the law enforcement stuff that I've done, I have gotten some positive feedback where, like when I was talking about the vaccines where people said, yeah, I was on the fence and I read this and I really thought that this stuff was going to go on my DNA and I was going to have mutant children and things like that because that kind of information was being passed out there, you know, when the vaccine first came about. So it's a tough thing to gauge, I think, in terms of how many people did I influence by the one article I wrote. But sometimes in the comments, if I see people, I know people read it, particularly if they're mad or upset about it, they will comment. So at least I'm, the worst thing when you write an op-ed is nobody pays attention to it. It can be an enduring resource, too, because people can search for it later. You know, even years later, you know, if someone wanted to, you know, like your article on rescheduling, which had an interesting point of view because you raised some points about like dispensaries. Oh, that could be a whole other session. Yeah, yeah. So that was something I hadn't seen come up in other things. I mean, people will, who want to search, you know, under rescheduling, that may come up. Right. It may come up two months from now, you know, when people are looking at it. So that, I think that's the value of it. Make a reasonable argument and leave it there. We'll have some enduring power. Right, and I think that's one thing that's helpful when you, when the article gets out there and the search engines, Google or whatever, put it near the top of their feed, which with medium, that tends to happen. You do have people discovering it later. And I actually did have an article that I wrote a couple of years ago where somebody reached out a reporter and said, hey, I'd like to ask you a few more questions. It didn't, nothing really came of it, but it was, it showed me that somebody, well, you read my article, so that, I reached one person. Go ahead, sir. Do you have a view on using AI as insights about AI in this? That was an outstanding question. I should have addressed that in the talk. Okay, the publications do not want AI, okay, and it is, in fact, I helped the National Writers Union draft their position statement on AI, and I'll, anybody interested in it, email me and I'll send you a copy. AI is something that is a threat to journalists, and it is not the same thing as someone sitting down and writing an article and, you know, doing their due diligence and research. And if you've played with ChatGPT or any of the other AI programs and you say, you put something in there, you, you know, you read it and you go, well, that's not right, or where did they come up with that, or that's not referenced. And so they do not want AI content. And there's actually, my understanding, there's anti-AI apps out there that will detect if you're using AI. And we all have read articles that you start reading it and you go, a human didn't write this. They're repeating themselves multiple times. This, this particular verbiage is archaic, or why are they using these words, and it's like, probably AI. You know, if you want to see an example of AI journalism online, it's like, okay, I'm a motorcycle enthusiast, okay, what's better, the Harley Sportster or the Road Glide? And you'll see 50 articles, Sportster versus Road Glide, and I'll start reading and it'll go, the Harley Sportster is a really wonderful motorcycle that gives much pleasure and enjoyment to many people across the country. And I'm reading, okay, I want some details. Well, I know that's AI generated. And, and we see all that sort of stuff. So, I, we'll run over, but I'll be, I'll stick around if, and thanks for coming. I really appreciate, you know, the last day, it's, you know, you want to be at Disney World or whatever else, but thanks to everyone for coming. Thank you.

op-eds

writing

submission process

pitching

impact

timeliness

pertinence

hyperlinks

public opinion

social media presence