Big mad that your big protest is being ignored? Have a hot take on a hot issue and the research to back it up? Then pitch us at opinion@horizonmass.news!
Marching season is upon us, as spring is one of two times of the year along with fall when people hit the streets to protest societal ills in significant numbers. And, wow, are there a lot of ills to protest this year from the broadly left-leaning editorial perspective of HorizonMass.
As a small, statewide, digital news outlet, functioning as a biweekly magazine and run with the help of our many student interns, this publication is not set up to do “breaking news” coverage of events like the growing number of marches and rallies being called in opposition to the many new policies of the Republican-led federal government.
HorizonMass focuses on “evergreen” coverage in the form of feature news articles meant to remain “fresh” for weeks or months. Such features typically take weeks to produce and are rarely written quickly by our reporters. Editorially, we steer our reportage toward deep analytical dives and away from “ambulance chasing” in the heat of any given newsworthy moment.
So while we get a lot of press releases from organizations holding protests and pretty much any kind of community event or activity imaginable across the Bay State, we can only cover a tiny fraction of the happenings we hear about.
Which is why I am issuing this periodic reminder that readers representing grassroots community associations and nonprofit organizations are encouraged to submit 500-700 word opinion articles (generally called “op-eds” by journalists*) about anything they’re doing that’s likely to be of interest to the public at large … including protests.
This does not mean just sending HorizonMass more press releases. It means contacting fellow editor Chris Faraone and me at opinion@horizonmass.news and pitching us your idea for an opinion article that you’d like to write (only one idea at a time, please). If we’re interested, we’ll reply with more information on how to submit a draft to us.
We are also soliciting well-written, carefully thought-out opinion articles on issues of the day that relate to Massachusetts. Ideally penned by contributors that have professional background in the area they’re commenting on. We’d love to publish more solid analytical pieces by experts who know what they’re talking about. Though we always use our editorial judgement to decide which opinion articles we want to publish and which articles we don’t. We absolutely will not accept every pitch we get.
Keep in mind that we do not pay for opinion articles and also know that we will not run opinion articles that are simply advertisements for goods and services in a different form, particularly from for-profit businesses. Marketers should therefore consider themselves on notice: This is not an invitation for PR flacks to bomb us with more garbage posts. Nor are we looking for canned columns of the type that some professional writers send out to hundreds of publications on a regular basis. We want original work that hasn’t appeared in any other news outlet.
But if you represent a grassroots group doing anything from an art opening to, yes, a big political protest in downtown Boston or you have some new analytical take on some societal development and the knowledge to properly back up your claims, then we’ll be happy to check out your opinion article pitch to us at, again, opinion@horizonmass.news. Thanks in advance for your submissions!
* From the old practice of putting opinion articles, columns, and letters to the editor on the page opposite the editorial page in a traditional print newspaper.
Jason Pramas is editor-in-chief of HorizonMass and executive director of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. This editor‘s note has been produced for HorizonMass, the independent, student-driven, news outlet of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, by Jason Pramas and is syndicated by BINJ’s MassWire news service. Copyright 2025 Jason Pramas.
