The Weird and The Wacky Meet

Where YouBetIAm comes to write….

Media Diary 3:  Letters to the Editor

If you owned a community newspaper and had to formulate a policy for your editors about which letters from readers appear in a limited space on your editorial page, what kinds of letters would you eliminate and why? Would you be acting as a censor in this situation? Why or why not?

                 The role of an editorial board in choosing which letters to publish and which letters to ignore is a tricky one.  There are several competing needs that need to be satisfied, and each letter would have to go through several gauntlets to be put into the paper.   Newsworthiness, intelligence, originality are just some of the hoops that letters to the editor have to jump through to make it into a paper.  And the letters have to serve as a voice of the community, a way to inform people, and sometimes even as encouragement to reporters to keep writing.

                 First, letters have to be chosen by what people are writing in about.  It’s not fair for a “Letters To The Editor” page to claim to represent the community if only one person wrote in about a particular subject.  This is where newsworthiness jumps in.  A letter isn’t newsworthy if enough people don’t care about the subject.  Getting a fair sampling of the community is what is fair.  Besides, newsworthiness is what keeps people coming back to newspapers.

                 Still, even if one person has an original idea, it can be newsworthy.  A letter could still make it in if there is a need to point out a problem, or if an editor thinks that people need or want to hear a particular unique voice.  So, letters that seem like they came out of a cookie cutter would have to be cut.

                 Next on the chopping block would be letters that have no intelligence to them.  This serves two purposes.  The first is that people don’t want to read something that is lacking in something to say.  The second is that it’s very hard to make other people’s work suitable for publication if they can’t express themselves well in the first place.  Cutting out letters that make no sense, and have bad grammar and punctuation only makes an editors job easier.

                 After all this, there are still letters that need to be cut.  And this is when an editor really needs to start thinking about the different needs of the people he represents.  He needs to think about what is newsworthy and therefore good for the paper to print.  He needs to think about what reporters need.  Getting feedback from the community is very helpful to a reporter.  And he needs to think about the very basis of the section which is to give voice to the community.

                 Still, not every letter that should be run in a paper can be printed.  Cutting for space is not censorship; it’s just making a choice and prioritizing.  As someone who has had to make these decisions for Horizons I know how hard these decisions can be.  But it’s not censorship to cut a letter.  It’s recognizing that there are only so many resources that we have and can utilize, and sometimes a letter just doesn’t deserve to be included as much as another letter.

Copyright 2005

by Amanda Evans

Date: 03/29/05