Charles Murray?! You’re kidding. His shoddy scholarship has been thoroughly debunked.

I would be interested. When are you accepting queries?

At least The Times still pays SOMETHING, unlike The Huffington Post…
By the way, what do you think about The Huffington Post’s new Religion and Science forum?
http://www.mediabistro.com/webnewser/connected/the_huffington_post_launches_religion_and_science_a_contemporary_discussion_165702.asp

$250 for 800 words? Of liberal folderol? That’s 32 cents a word — even less if you don’t count prepositions, articles, conjunctions and interjections. Maybe they don’t pay for adverbs and adjectives either? By that criterion I would expect Templeton to pay “good money” of at least ten times that amount and include all grammatically cohesive parts of speech. That includes pronouns, personal, relative, interrogative and indefinite.
If the late Sir John, an American citizen beknighted by the English monarch, is willing to part with $2500 for 800 words of closely reasoned Gallican prose, I will gladly submit the last letter of each paragraph as a bona fide sampler. I have a drop box in lower Manhattan at a well-frequented Irish pub where the proceeds will defray a portion of my bar tab. And that of others whose onversation has opened my purse.
Pay for opinion. That’s morally more iniquitous than pay for play.
Allora, chi piange per Italia? Io, per certo, ma non troppo. Et pour la France? Je m’en fous. Cette équipe c’est pas la France. Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?

Rod, how much will BQO be paying? I might be interested.
By the way, contra Timothy Lee, it is not true that there is a glut of talented writers who are willing to produce consistently, free of charge. Perhaps a few times–but thinking and writing well is a time-consuming activity. Working without pay becomes tiresome, regardless of the field.

crossdotcurve: “Charles Murray?! You’re kidding. His shoddy scholarship has been thoroughly debunked.”
Debunked my a$$. Links to the so-called debunking of his scholarship, please.

The old Yiddish adage, “Sniff where the money is,” seems to be in play and everyone misses the point in trying to make a couple of hack-kneeded bucks.
Once upon a time, a true journalist could make a living as a syndicated columnist. Papers bought your pieces, mostly from syndicates but a few through entrepernurial solo efforts, and you got paid according to circulation – the higher the readership, the more per publication.
And the field was far fewer than today’s every Tom, Dick adn Harriet who THINKS they are a “published author” because they have access to a BLOG (which STILL sounds like someone is vomiting). As an editor/publisher, you were able to select columns that further advanced your product and attracted readers. For the most part, they were intelligent writers working on serious subjects – even the humorists.
But ALL that got blowed up by the Internet and the new modern attitude that ALL NEWS MUST BE FREE. As a result, we have shoddy reporting, voyeurism substituted for investigation, rumor in place of proven facts and a field SO crowded as to be a mere cattle call.
I believe THAT is more to Rod’s point…and if I, a retired professional journalist who has published more than 2,000 opinion/lifestyle columns in my career, would be deemed worthy to have anything OKed for this new publication, I’d be honored.
The money, trust me, would be secondary.

Rod, I think it also has to do with the value of opinions. In today’s media, we’re bombarded with bombast, and even “experts” don’t seem to know any more than folks from Podunkville. I seem to recall a Zen saying about the person who truly knows much will say little…that’s the person I want to go fishing with.
Sincerely,
Mike

I think Chuck Bloom has it about half right – the internet blowed it all up. The internet is the Great Equalizer of Ideas, the medium that makes all messages more or less equal streams of ones and zeros, endlessly and cheaply replicated, linked, liked and commented upon by anyone and everyone with phone or computer. It’s not so much that all news MUST be free, although there are those who will assert as much. The reality is that all information is now becoming cheaper and cheaper, approaching free asymptotically. After all, why pay good money for the content when you’ve already shelled out big bucks for the iPhone 4 and the monthly data package?
This is one area where the media ecologists Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman had it figured out decades ago. We’re amusing ourselves to death, with TV, the internet, always on, always cheap, 500 channels and Google, everyone and his dog has a blog, everything and nothing is always on, all for one low monthly price.
The internet blowed it up alright. The genie’s out of the bottle and there’s no putting it back in.

Murray is too cheap. The NYTimes gave him $75 and also a little box at the bottom of his column to plug his latest book, and perhaps link to his own webpage. That is valuable real estate.

I could be available. When do you start accepting inquiry letters ?
Your servant,
Lord Karth

Wow! I get $150 bucks an article for the South Korean university paper I edit, which has a circulation of about 12,000.

Yes, the internet ruined it. But there’s another point to be made (and perhaps it is the one I would have made, since I took the unconventional vomit-laden blog path to writership ) – the mainstream media has done an astonishingly crappy job of explaining to almost everyone the world they presently live in. The journalistic convention that every issue has two equal sides and only two sides and frankly, the unwillingness of most good reporters to go to the mat to get real stories out means that Americans, who are perhaps complacent but not idiots did notice that their papers never told them anything important about the implosion of their economy, that their papers never seemed to tell them anything about why real wealth was declining, or why their gas costs were skyrocketing, that their papers accepted spurious reasons for going to war in Iraq and for a whole host of other things.
If you looked to the New York Times and to other major papers for news, you got a worldview in which everything was totally great, right up until it wasn’t – no exposition of possible risk, no exploration of alternate futures and no complex analysis of real explanations for events (with a couple of major and important exceptions). If papers can’t explain the world, people look elsewhere – and the internet was one of the places they look.
Add in the reality that there was no real reason to be loyal to your hometown paper anymore in most cases – the Hearst Corporation or Murdoch or whatever not inspiring a personal loyalty, and you get a flocking outwards.
I don’t think this was necessarily a good thing – first of all, I’m an avid newspaper reader, grew up with my daily Boston Globe (had my own script by the time I was 12 so I didn’t steal my parents’), and still subscribe to the wretched Times Union in Albany, even though it is Hearst owned, badly written and a piece of crap. But it is my community’s crap and I want it to stay in business.
I don’t think that the internet operates as a useful substitute for papers and the hard work they do, and I think that the “blogger’s problem” which is that if you are any good, you need to be paid, makes the blog field inherently unstable, and prevents the creation of people who work the same field over the long term and can take a logn view. But I don’t buy the idea that it is all the internet’s fault – the newspapers lost some things to the internet, but they threw a whole bunch of them away first.
Sharon

It’s hard for me to believe those rates, after having been paid $50 recently to write a simple blog article. Sad.

Pay your reporters, not the op-ed writers. Op-eds are mostly a way for people to spread their own views. I suspect newspapers could make money by charging to have op-eds printed.
Steve

Seems just a tad inconsistent for a “great libertarian” to be complaining publicly that the “free market” is not compensating him adequately for his musings.

Steve and Mike W are both right on the money. Any half-savvy reader can predict just what a particular pundit will say about a particular issue. I’d usually pay to avoid those columns of recycled talking points! In fact, I think newspapers should charge to print them; most of them are really just political advertising. In place of the little blurb about who the author is at the bottom of a column, the paper could put a statement of who paid to have the column printed. That would be far more informative and useful.

I don’t know why my earlier comment was deleted…
I believe I asked some salient questions.
What sort of audience is this intended for?
Are they more Conservative or Progressive, more theoretically inclined or more interested in practical application?
No publication will publish out of their demographic (They may occasionally throw a dog to the wolves just for theater.), which is their responsibility to their stock holders.
So in order to know what sort of Op-Ed you are interested in for this publication it is necessary to know this information.
If this comment is deleted as well..
It would be polite to let me know why.

The only thing your average pundit is good for can be had for free on any number of blogs. Better still, you can often comment and argue with the guy.
It’s not just papers that are going the way of the buggy whip and slide rule. I haven’t had a land telephone line for over five years. I’ve never missed it. When’s the last time any of us took film to the Walgreen’s for developing? Soon, the same thing will happen to our PCs, I imagine.
As for Rod’s advice, it’s good if you’re determined to be a generalist. The only writers worth paying for are those who know something about a specific topic. Develop a field of knowledge and work on your style on the side.

Free software … free writing … what’s the world coming to?

Stefanie, most free software is actually not free. Most of it is sponsored by a company which makes money off the software either through support or consulting contracts. Or they split it into free and non-free version where the non-free version contains a critical feature.
I agree that the writers should pay to get their Op Ed columns printed. Most of them are of low value. A subject matter expert in any particular area would have a better, but perhaps more roughly stated opinion than the pundits who show up in the Op Ed columns.