Written, as signed below, by members of the National Conference
of Editorial Writers, April 5, 2007. Compiled with preface and epilogue
by Bernard L. Stein.
BERNARD STEIN WROTE:
I took the liberty of sharing Prof. Ewen’s announcement
of the unpublished letters to the editor website with the listserv
of the National Conference of Editorial Writers, whose members include
the folks who decide what letters get published.
The
responses revealed a clash of cultures.
Here’s a selection:
I wish him luck, but first among the problems is this: I read not
a hint of skepticism in the statement “Visionary thoughts
are rarely heard.” The presumption is that “visionary
thoughts” are out there in the form of rejected letters to
the editor. My reaction is: Not in the ones we reject!
—Brendan Conway
—Editorial Writer
—The Washington Times
Most of the rejected letters I looked at (hurriedly) on the Web
site were way too long anyway. Who publishes letters that long in
a print edition? Not to mention rambling.
—Linda Brinson
—Winston-Salem
Far be it from me to deny that we in the gatekeeping biz are subject
to the pressures of parochialism or cover-our-behindity. (After all,
the motto of the editor of the Lake Wobegon paper is “I have
to live here, too, you know.”) But I think this little project
is likely to reveal two things, if it hasn’t already:
1) A lot of this site’s potential patrons may be much more interested
in getting their screeds published than in reading other people's,
especially if the screeds run on and on and on and on and ...
2) Those shortsighted gatekeepers often have good reason for rejecting
letters.
(Who’d a-thunk it?)
—Alan Cochrum
—Former letters editor
—Fort Worth Star-Telegram, TX
I tried to read a couple. Too long. Too poorly written. Too boring.
I wouldn’t read them if you paid me. Damn. I am paid to read
letters like that.
—Wally Haas
—Editorial Page Editor
—Rockford Register Star
Some of us (e.g. my colleague Linda Seebach and her crew at the Rocky
Mountain News) have been publishing letters online as they come in.
Letting people gaze at the raw material we receive underscores the
quality of many of these “visionary thoughts.”
—Clint Talbott
—Editorial Page Editor
—Daily Camera, Boulder / CO
Perhaps at month’s end we should all box up the thousands of
visionary thoughts we’ve been arbitrarily suppressing and ship
them to the good professor.
—Dennis Mangan
—The Vindicator
—Youngstown Ohio
I publish them online as soon as they’re verified, but I edit
them first. I see it as my duty, sort of like taking a loaded gun
away from a small child.
Some people shouldn’t be trusted with a pen and paper; they're
deadly weapons in their hands. I cannot stand idly by while someone
butchers a harmless and defenseless verb and forces it into an unnatural
transitive form (I will grow the economy!)
—Pete Wasson
—Wassau Daily Herald
I just got off the phone with a guy who said he couldn’t possibly
meet our 200-word limit, but after hours of struggle and toil he had
trimmed his letter to a neat 278 words and e-mailed it to me “It
just can’t be cut anymore. You need to make an exception. This
is important,” he told me.
Here’s one provocative passage:
“With a price of $2.159 per gallon in February and a price of
$2.959 now the difference is $0.80/gallon. That isn’t too bad
but if your tank takes 4 fillings a month of say 20 gallons that’s
80 gallons and $.80/gallon comes to $64/month extra, this is a real
hole in the pocket book."
I imagine you’ll see this on the rejected letters site soon.
—Scott Ayers
—Opinion Page Editor
—The Bellingham Herald
I just visited the site, and we should all be ashamed to “censor”
such grand ideas and great writing.
—Robert Benson
—Opinion Page Editor
—Danville Register & Bee
We get accused of violating people’s First Amendment rights
by not running every vowel and consonant of their prose. Obviously,
I don’t have space to run them in the print product longer than
300 words. But online, the sky’s the limit, right? I wonder
if any of you lift the word limit for your online editions, as I’m
thinking about doing. We’d still reject letters for libel and
trashing businesses and saying bad things about people’s mothers.
But if they want to write it, and someone wants to read it, wouldn’t
the Web be a good way?
—Mark C. Mahoney
—Editorial Page Editor
—The Post-Star
—Glens Falls, NY
Say, I think Hunter College’s Distinguished Professor of Film
Stuart Ewen ought to pick up the 1975 version of “The Ransom
of Red Chief” starring Jack Elam, Strother Martin and Alan
Hale. You guys remember the great O. Henry story: These two kidnappers
swipe a boy from a little town, then hold him off in the hills while
they send a ransom note to his father. Of course, the kid turns
out to be such a holy terror that soon the battered, bruised, scorched
and bleeding kidnappers are desperate to send him home.
That’s when the boy’s dad responds to the ransom note
with a counter offer, "which I am inclined to believe you will
accept," the dad's letter reads.
“You bring Johnny home and pay me $250 in cash, and I agree
to take him off your hands. You had better come at night, for the
neighbours believe he is lost, and I couldn’t be responsible
for what they would do to anybody they saw bringing him back.”
I have a feeling before long, the good Professor Ewen will pay us
to take his Web site off his hands.
—Tom Dennis
—Grand Forks Herald
—Grand Forks, N.D.
BERNARD STEIN:
So what do I think? I think some of my editorial page editing colleagues
are too thin-skinned and too wise-ass (although it has to be said
that the impulse to bang out a quick response via e-mail encourages
the wise-ass in all of us.)
Still, I agree that many of the letters posted on the rejected letters
site are impossibly long. Tom Friedman doesn’t get to publish
as many words (917) as my union head Barbara Bowen tried to get
The Times to print.
My newspaper, The Riverdale Press, publishes every letter it gets,
so long as it’s signed, authentic, and not libelous. To give
everyone a chance to be heard, it generally restricts a writer to
one letter every five or six weeks, but it bends the rule if in
my judgment there's a reason to. But, while The Press will occasionally
publish a 700 or 800-word letter, it will beg the writer to cut
it down first, and I will help. (Writing short is hard, and most
people don’t know how.)
Community newspapers are among the few public arenas where ordinary
people can make their voices heard. The Web offers an opportunity
to enlarge that arena, and I was glad to see editors like Mark Mahoney
and Clint Talbott respond through it they see a chance to publish
letters without restrictions on length, elegance or expertise.
—Bernard L. Stein
EDITOR’S NOTE:
Regarding O. Henry’s “The Ransom of Red Chief,”
I love that story. I’ve always identified with the kid.
Regarding the purported 917 word letter that “my union head
Barbara Bowen tried to get The Times to print,” there is no
letter from Barbara Bowen in the RLTE issue that Bernard Stein is
describing.
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