By: Vic Monaco
Letters to the editor have been a revelation to me especially the accompanying criticism of the way we handle them.
I had been lucky in being able to do a lot of different things in the newspaper business before I became the managing editor of the Herald in the summer of 2005. News, sports, even a little entertainment. But not processing letters.
And during my pre-Herald days, I had certainly heard my share of criticism.
I had thought that my time as a sports editor at a suburban Philadelphia daily newspaper had won the prize in that area. The parents there seemed rarely happy, and often outraged, at our coverage of about a dozen high schools. Those criticisms had run the gamut from racism we were supposedly covering more white high school athletes than blacks to a man who called from his private jet to tell me that we had "ruined his daughter’s life" by reporting that she had given up a goal in overtime. Of course, if we hadn’t covered that game, we would have gotten hammered too.
But after close to two years here, I must say that despite palpable apathy over such important local issues as rising taxes and shared services, there’s little apathy when it comes to criticizing this newspaper.
The time-honored "shoot-the-messenger" policy is in effect, for sure. There is one local official who doesn’t want to talk to us because we recently reported on one of his superior’s criticism of him at two public meetings. We hadn’t criticized him but we are now the enemy.
Just part of the job.
With letters, we’re not the messenger. But we are the gatekeeper.
And, surprisingly to me, much of the criticism we’ve heard of late concerns the way we handle, or supposedly handle, our letters to the editor.
In recent weeks, we have been accused by a couple of people of withholding letters because we don’t like their content. This accusation simply is not true.
Generally speaking, we publish every letter that will fit in a given week’s edition as long as it is signed (many aren’t), includes a phone number for verification if needed and is received by our weekly deadline of noon Wednesday (many aren’t).
A major caveat here is that the primary responsibility of a letters editor is to try to ensure they contain nothing libelous. And, as we state in every edition, we have the right to edit letters something some folks find unfair.
If we spot what we believe are factual errors, I will ask the writer to make a correction. One recent example was a letter that incorrectly described how funding in a secondary school ballot question would be used. I didn’t want to confuse our readers right before the election.
In addition to cutting libelous comments and factual errors, I often have to trim letters that exceed our 500-word limit. If it’s way over the limit, I ask the letter writer to edit his or her own copy.
We also will not print letters that we suspect have been written by someone other than the stated author, such as those cut and pasted from advocacy group Web sites (and we get those).
I have been asked to limit the number of letters of certain writers, who are unappealing to some, to once a month rather than once a week.
I won’t do that, as I want to see as many letters on as many topics as possible in each paper. And quite frankly, at a time when apathy runs high, I give a lot of credit to these "regulars." They may be totally off the mark in their opinions at times, but there’s no doubt they care.
The bottom line here is that we don’t editorialize by editing or withholding letters. We have a big space to the left of our letters to publish our opinions, and I use that for local editorials with deference and caution.
So I hope our readers, regulars or not, continue to submit letters. I personally despise apathy and your opinions are very important to us.
Vic Monaco is the managing editor of the Windsor-Hights Herald. You can write to him at [email protected].
