I was out of town over the weekend so I just had a chance to read the Sunday edition of the Winston-Salem Journal. In their Opinion section the executive editor Carl Crothers announced some changes to their Opinion section, including changing their "Letters to the Editor" to "The readers' forum" and they carry a column written by their letters editor, Mick Scott, explaining how you can get your letter published by the paper. Let's just say I have a small problem with their attitude.
Really the heart of my problem I have with their approach can be summed up by the following paragraph in Mr. Scott's column:
to keep the quality high. Our letter writers expend a little more
effort, a little more thought than you'll find on most bulletin boards
or blogs and we want it to be that way.
Surely he's kidding. I'll grant that a great amount of total crap appears on blogs and bulletin boards, but let's be honest and say that some of the worst stuff that appears locally is in the comments on Journal stories. If you want to see exactly how infantile and almost illiterate many of your fellow denizens are then make your way to the JournalNow site and read some comments; just be prepared for indecipherable spelling and lots of really unimaginative spewing.
Still, the comments aren't the vaunted "letters" page that Mr. Scott is referring to, that outlet that is necessarily more selective due to limited space. Let's see some examples of the greater thoughtfulness and effort that they've carried on the "letters" page of the Journal in just the last couple of weeks:
December 9, 2008: Thank God and Greyhound that Forsyth County Commissioner Dave Plyler
has taken the chair from Commissioner Gloria Whisenhunt. It's time for
a change. -JIM HATCHER, Winston-Salem
December 10, 2008: While I read the article "DNA Secrets" (Dec. 4) with interest, was
it really key to the story to include a photo of decades-old feces? I
would submit that sometimes an accurately written description is worth
a thousand photos. – PAIGE DEAL, Winston-Salem
December 15, 2008: Congratulations to all who participated in the Dec. 7 performance of Handel's Messiah
, by the Mozart Club. To the local church choir singers who were not on stage — you missed a thrilling experience. Do join next year's performance. I hope that the same conductor, Peter Perret, and the same soloists will be there, too. – ANN W. CHARLES, Winston-Salem
Riveting stuff, eh? I have nothing against the letter writers, but if the space is so limited and special don't you think the paper could have found something more interesting or compelling to print? Honestly I think my kids put more thought into their Facebook status line than those authors put into their letters.
On another note, something that kind of nagged at me when I read Crothers' column was the question of why "Editor" is capitalized in "Letters to the Editor", yet "readers'" isn't in "The readers' forum." To me it reads that the paper feels that editors are somehow special, while readers are the great unwashed masses. It seems pompous.
Don't get me wrong. I like that the paper is trying to engage the readers, but I think they're hamstrung by their institutional tradition of pontificating rather than conversing. For their sakes I hope their efforts help save the franchise, but it's not happening until they start to think of their readers with a capital "r".
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