Tips for Placing Commentaries in the Magazine.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew
• Position: EDITOR'S NOTES

One of the big parts of my job is coordinating the opinion pieces that appear every month in National Defense.

These usually fall under three titles: "Viewpoint," "Commentary" and sometimes "Industry Perspective."

The umbrella term is "contributed pieces," because the writers are not paid for the articles.

This month's column is a bit self-serving, as I spend a great deal of time fielding phone calls and emails from potential contributors, or their public relations representatives, who are seeking to place commentaries in the magazine.

And I do my best to walk them through what I need and don't need. I point them to the "Contribute an Article" section at nationaldefensemaga-zine.org under "Contact Us" that has a fairly good rundown of what we need, but these tips are often ignored.

Recently I had a potential contributor with an interesting topic. I gave them a standard word count--1,500 to 1,800--and added "please read the writer's guidelines." The article was sent to me 10 minutes later at 1,200 words with about 10 different rules broken. That word count leaves me in no-man's land. Too long for one page and too short for two pages.

It's very competitive to place a commentary in National Defense. So what are we looking for in terms of topics and contributors?

First, we are looking for topics that are of interest to a wide swath of our readers. Not every commentary is of interest to everyone, but we often receive items that are too far down in the weeds. A recent example was a submission about a program in the geospatial intelligence field. Interesting to some, but not to a large enough number of our readers, I estimated.

Bread-and-butter topics that are of interest to larger numbers of readers would include: acquisition reform, Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification, tips for small businesses, emerging markets and contracting insights.

As for contributors, we are looking for "noted experts," which has a broad definition, but normally doesn't include term papers from university students.

These experts are active duty or retired military officers, academics, think tankers, association leaders, attorneys, consultants and industry executives.

Industry executives get the most rejections because many of them are just looking for free ads.

Sometimes the pitch--usually coming from a public relations firm--is overt.

"Military innovation leader ACME Corp. would like to send you an article written by our president and CEO, retired Army Gen. Robert...