Students, professors and community members can send their pieces to opinion@theaggie.org
My name is Eden Winniford, and I’m the editor for The California Aggie’s opinion and humor desks this year. The opinion desk not only gives student columnists, humorists and cartoonists the opportunity to share their thoughts with the campus community weekly, but it also gives members of the wider Davis community the opportunity to publish guest opinion columns and cartoons. Guest columns can be responses to previous pieces the opinion desk has published, including other guest columns, or they can be about entirely new subjects.
To submit a guest column, anyone can email opinion@theaggie.org a copy of their full piece, which can be as short as a paragraph but no longer than a page in length. I would lightly edit the piece for grammar and clarity, and then I would email it back to the sender for their approval before publishing it. As long as a piece is factual, respectful and relevant to the Davis community, it will likely be published, although it is up to editorial discretion.
The Opinion Desk also accepts guest cartoon submissions, which can be humorous or political in nature. If you have an artistic flair and think it would be neat to see your work published, then I highly encourage you to consider sending in a cartoon. It can be one to four panels and can contain as much or as little text as you’d like. Above all, it is vital that any cartoons submitted are respectful of any people or things that they depict.
Guest submissions are incredibly important to the opinion desk and The Aggie as a whole since they offer different perspectives that might not be represented in our newsroom. Our yearly Diversity Report makes it clear that some groups are overrepresented in our newsroom while others are underrepresented, and The Aggie is committed to increasing staff diversity.
We have taken and will continue to take steps to address this imbalance — we hired an outreach director, have committed to publishing annual diversity reports and are transitioning from stipended positions to positions with hourly wages, which is important since hourly pay will allow staffers to be compensated more appropriately. And in the short term, publishing guest columns from a wide range of voices is another way The Aggie can best serve UC Davis’ diverse community.
Written by: Eden Winniford — opinion@theaggie.org
