Historically, the op-ed page as a unique form of journalism has been designed to embody a moderated public forum. Today, as social media revolutionizes the way news is disseminated and consumed, there exist new challenges as well as new opportunities for op-eds to initiate, facilitate, and democratize cultural and political discourse in the public sphere. As an early step to evaluate the oped’s influence on discourse in today’s world, this study takes a mixed methods approach to examine the initial reactions generated by op-eds of established news agencies on Twitter. Online observations and both qualitative and quantitative analysis were used. This work found that people are responsive to the political stance, authorship, and caption style of op-ed tweets. By contextualizing these observations in the history of op-eds, this work highlights old and new challenges that the op-ed is facing in fulfilling its purpose of promoting civil discourse. This work demonstrates a need to re-envision the op-ed format to adjust to the current technological and ideological landscape. This work aims to offer insights to the ongoing transdisciplinary exploration around the interplay of journalism and discourse in the digital space.

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