Opinion journalism is a genre of journalism in which the journalist gives their own commentary, analysis or interpretation of an issue or attempts to persuade the reader of a certain viewpoint. The opinions expressed may be, depending on the type of opinion journalism, either the journalist's personal views or the stance of the publication for which they are writing. The most common types of opinion journalism are editorials, op-eds, columns and news analyses.
Opinion became common in journalism in the late 1400s with the advent of the printing press and the end of feudalism. Fact was inseparable from opinion in journalism until the 19th century, after the telegraph was invented and newspapers began to hire long-distance reporters; in the United States, objectivity turned into a standard, so opinion pieces started being placed in a designated section to distinguish them from fact-based news. Countries outside of the United States continued to incorporate commentary and opinion into their reportage. After television became the primary means of reportage in the mid-twentieth century, American news gradually returned to being opinionated. Online journalism appeared after the internet was invented in the 1990s.
Characteristics Definition Opinion journalism encompasses any form of journalism in which the journalist states their (or the publication's) view on an issue (often political), attempts to persuade the reader to adopt a certain point of view, provides commentary on an event, analyses a situation or satirises public figures. Any article of opinion journalism is called an opinion piece.
Distinction from news Opinion journalism differs stylistically from informational journalism in that it might come from the first person, contain loaded language, contain personal perspectives like anecdotes or use rhetoric to advance a point.
In newspapers, opinion pieces are located in a dedicated section, which is typically headed with "analysis", "review", "opinion" or "editorial", to distinguish the articles in the section from informational news. On websites, opinion pieces might be distinguished in a variety of ways, or not at all. Some online news outlets put the word "opinion" next to their opinion pieces' headlines.
Opinion journalism and informational journalism have been conflated both in the 21st century and throughout journalism's history; opinion journalism usually contains factual information and informational journalism often contains the journalist's opinions and commentary.
Functions Opinion journalism has multiple functions. A commonly stated one is to act as a "point of view" for the audience; that is to say, an opinion writer's commentary and analysis provides a variety of perspectives on a subject so that one can counter preexisting beliefs, consider every possible viewpoint and decide what one's own opinion should be. The commentary in opinion journalism also informs readers of the reasons for, the contexts behind and the connections between problems, events or situations. By giving people arguments that they can use to debate the answers to difficult questions, opinion journalists' work increases discourse between members of the public on the issues they cover. Many opinion journalists try, like news journalists, to hold public officials accountable and advocate for the public's best interests through their journalism.
Types There are four common types of opinion journalism: editorials, op-eds, columns and news analyses.
Editorial An editorial attempts to advance a specific point of view or incite its reader to do something. Editorials represent the viewpoints of an entire publication or editorial board, not only its author's; thus it may be authored by multiple people or published anonymously, in which case it is an "unsigned editorial". Editorials might include statistics and objective information gained from the publication's ordinary news coverage in order to strengthen their arguments. Editorials in newspapers are on the left side of the last page.
Op-ed An op-ed (short for "opposite of the editorial page") is similar to an editorial but not usually written by someone affiliated with the publication. Instead, its author will typically be a guest writer like a politician, an academic or an intellectual. Op-eds express their individual authors' opinions and are located on the page opposite the editorial page.
Column A column expresses the opinions of its author, who usually works for the publication, and does not always argue for a specific point. Columns are definitionally broader than editorials and encompass any non-fact-based article that is neither an editorial nor an op-ed. They may include personal anecdotes, whereas editorials and op-eds generally cannot. A column may engage in polemics, analyse an issue, give advice to the reader or mock a public figure. A series of columns written by the same author may feature regularly, such as on a weekly basis, in the publication. Columns in newspapers are on the reverse side of the first page.
News analysis A news analysis, which is usually authored by a regular journalist and not an editorialist, includes the journalist's analysis, commentary and predictions of an event. In an analysis a journalist may relate a contemporary event to similar happenings throughout history or explain how events lead to one another or are connected.
History In Europe in the late 1400s, the feudal system collapsed and the recently invented printing press became ubiquitous. Hitherto, journalists would note only what they observed, leaving out any interpretations or commentary, and submit their handwritten reports to their readership (usually members of the wealthy elite). Feudalism's replacement with capitalism and the printing press's ability to quickly produce documents (pamphlets, books and news sheets) turned writing into a commodity. Journalists began to incorporate their own opinions and personalities into their writing in order to draw readers. British journalist Bob Franklin considered Michel de Montaigne, who wrote commentary on events of his time (the 16th century) in his essays, to have created the prototype of a newspaper column.
Opinion journalism was, for most of its history from thereon, not separated from factual journalism. It was routine for journalists to include commentary and push their beliefs in their news coverage. For example The Pennsylvania Gazette, which Benjamin Franklin operated between 1729 and 1748, regularly published Franklin's opinions and observations. Newspapers, many of which were funded by political entities or made specifically to propagate their publishers' ideologies, could be extremely biased and composed of very little fact relative to opinion. The Journal of Occurrences, which from 1768 to 1769 was published throughout the American colonies by patriots from Boston in protest of the British Crown, was the first syndicated column in what is now the United States.
In the 19th century the development of the telegraph and the new practice of employing full-time reporters made gathering information easier and led to journalism being treated, in the United States, purely as a means of spreading information. Newspapers were now less dependent on opinion to fill their pages, so newspaper publishers and journalists abandoned their partisanship and increased the objectivity of their reportage. By the late 19th century American newspapers kept opinion pieces in a separate section from their normal journalism.
By the 1920s the Progressive movement, which pushed for better journalistic practices, had turned objectivity into a standard in American journalism; subjectivity was relegated to columns and editorials. Columns were often syndicated, meaning that one column would be run in many newspapers throughout the country; this supplied local newspapers that could not afford to hire their own columnists. Journalists' opinions remained an expected part of news in Latin America and the United Kingdom, so newspapers there did not decrease in partisanship and opinionation as those in the United States did. Magazines both in the United States and abroad have, unlike newspapers, never adopted objectivity as a standard. In the early 20th century in Spain, Eugeni d'Ors invented a type of column, a glosa, that consisted of several brief aphorisms, the last of which would often reveal the column's political point. Around the same time other Spanish journalists developed ensayimo, another form of opinion journalism, that read like an essay.
The first radio broadcasts to the public were made in the 1910s. By the 1920s journalists were using the medium to broadcast their commentary on contemporary events, as well as regular news. Debates were aired on the radio, too, such as those between Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan in 1925 during the Scopes trial. Television replaced radio by the 1950s as the primary medium through which news was transmitted. Televised news started off as straightforward and dependent on audio, but as its visual component improved through the 1960s it developed an opinionated style of reportage.Maniou, T.A. and Papadopoulou, L. (2025). Broadcast Journalism: Television. In The International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies (eds T.P. Vos, F. Hanusch, D. Dimitrakopoulou, M. Geertsema-Sligh and A. Sehl). https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118841570.iejs0187 News programs now featured editorial segments where hosts voiced their opinions. Two notable such hosts were Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, American journalists who in their segments condemned the Vietnam War and McCarthyism respectively.
In the United States during the 1960s, writers who disapproved of the Vietnam War became disillusioned with the notion of objectivity. New Journalism and gonzo journalism came into existence as a result. Both of these styles disregarded objectivity, applied literary techniques to nonfiction and centred their authors' subjective experiences. Among these styles' purveyors were Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Gay Talese and Hunter S. Thompson. The term "New Journalism" was applied, retrospectively in the 1970s, to a similar movement in journalism in Japan that also occurred in the 1960s; Japanese contributors to New Journalism included Takashi Tachibana, , Ryūzō Saki and Uwamae Junichirō.
From the 1940s to the 1990s political commentary and speculative pieces started to comprise an increasingly large portion of election coverage in newspapers in the United States, Sweden, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. In 1970 The New York Times, believing that readers would like to read more opinion articles, began including an op-ed section opposite the page the editorials were situated on; this op-ed section became the basis for the modern form of newspaper opinion sections in the United States.
In the 1970s, after the end of Francisco Franco's regime following his death in 1975, columnists, many of whom were also novelists, developed a style of writing, periodismo informativo de creación, that applied the narrative devices of literary fiction to the real-life basis of opinion journalism. Among the columnists who created this style were Francisco Umbral, Rosa Montero, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and Maruja Torres.
Televised opinion journalism was popularised in Japan in the 1980s by the station TV Asahi. Kume Hiroshi, who hosted the station's news programme, played a character called a "caster" who made acerbic commentary in mockery of the Liberal Democratic Party. Through the 1990s and 2000s, cable television news programs in the United States became more conversational, abstract and argumentative, since this informal style of journalism attracted specific audiences; broadcast television, contrariwise, targeted a more general audience than cable and thus kept a factual manner of reporting.