Yes, newspapers have lost the monopoly they once enjoyed. That vanished long ago when radio and television made their uninvited appearance. The term op-ed itself seems quaint nowadays, referring as it did to 700-word articles that appeared “opposite” the editorial page, where the paper’s official editorials were published. Op-ed pages were where the work of syndicated columnists appeared, alongside opinion pieces by outsiders with something important to say.

Prestigious newspapers still publish articles by opinion leaders not in their employ, and when a business leader has one of theirs appear in, say, The New York Times, The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal, it carries a good deal of clout. It means, among other things, that the article has sufficient merit to have been selected — and edited — by the newspaper’s own highly demanding gatekeepers. In February of this year, the New York Times received more op-ed submissions than at any time in its nearly 200-year history: more than 1,000 submissions per week. Other newspapers’ editors say they receive 100 a day.

This alone distinguishes such an article from what Jake Meth on PR Daily calls “the often poorly written slop [readers] encounter on the internet daily…It’s easy to see the difference in quality between vetted pieces on op-ed pages and ill-conceived rants on LinkedIn. That there are so many more avenues now for bad, unedited writing is even more reason to value well-vetted opinion pages.”

LinkedIn has its value, of course, as do countless other platforms. But the fact that more than 50% of long-form content on LinkedIn is AI-generated only amplifies the importance of thoughtful op-eds in respected newspapers which, by the way, tend to post the op-eds that appear in their print editions on their online editions, too.