It was a line in an Editor’s Note on Thursday, Dec. 22, that prompted Mrs. Daley to leave her voice message.
About a dozen calls and e-mails have arrived in this office in response to the announcement that the feature would be dropped beginning Jan. 12, when Living/Arts and Thursday’s Life at Home section are replaced with a new Style & Arts section.
Confidential Chat is the longest-running continuous feature in the Globe. Launched in 1884 as the Housekeeper’s Column, it was renamed 84 years ago this month to “Confidential Chat,” and was a longtime staple in the Sunday Globe.
In his 1971 book on 100 years of The Boston Globe, former reporter Louis M. Lyons called the Chat “the first regular column about women’s affairs in any newspaper.”
The feature became a place where readers exchanged letters about their domestic and private lives. Often the items were about recipes, remedies for maladies such as shingles or whooping cough, or the occasional poem. “Confidential” meant that readers signed their contributions using fictitious names.
By 1965, letters to Confidential Chat came in about 2,000 a month, according to Lyons. The backlog of letters was so great that a 24-page Sunday magazine supplement of Chat letters were printed that year and the next.
Shirley Jobe, a librarian who has managed the Globe feature since 2001, said she gets between 75 and 90 letters and e-mails a week. Seventy-five percent of the correspondence arrives via letters, the remaining 25 in e-mails.
In addition to selecting letters for publication, Jobe forwards all responses from readers to the people whose queries were printed in the paper.
The volume of letters to Confidential Chat decreased significantly in 2001, when medical questions were dropped from the feature, Jobe added; and then again in 2004 when the column was moved from Sundays to Thursdays.
It’s clear from a review of several Confidential Chat columns and interviews with some contributors that the feature still maintains a loyal following, particularly among older readers. Some of those who send their e-mails and handwritten notes are the descendants of early Chat celebrities, such as “Fireman’s Wife” or “Dorchester Dottie.”
But it’s also apparent that in this age of electronic message boards, chat rooms, and instant messaging, Confidential Chat may have finally reached its sad but inevitable end.
“In its heyday, it was an innovative feature, a precursor to the kind of communication people now take for granted on the Internet,” Fiona Luis, assistant managing editor for Living/Arts, wrote in an e-mail response last week. “Space in the new Style & Arts section will be at a premium, and the Globe wants to emphasize content that fits with the theme of the section as well as offer new ways of sharing information and helping people connect.”
It’s unfortunate that the Globe could not find a way to fit an original like Confidential Chat in the new section. It could be an ideal way to bridge new readers the paper hopes to attract with those who for decades have used the paper for what it was originally meant to be — a place to learn about the world and exchange useful ideas with others.
For those Chatters who have embraced the new technology, the Globe has created an online version of the Confidential Chat message board where readers can continue their exchanges — more quickly — with one another. The new Chat can be found at www.boston.com/yourlife/.
For readers who don’t use a computer, or prefer reading their questions and advice in the newspaper, their sadness and frustration at the sudden loss of an old friend is understandable, and the paper’s editors should be more sensitive to that.
“Couldn’t there have been an open discussion, inviting views of longtime contributors and readers, at least allowing people to weigh in with their opinions and feelings about the role that Chat has played in their lives?” wrote Rosemary Putnam, a Cambridge reader who has sent about a half-dozen contributions under the name “Jalalabad.”
At the very least, after more than a century as the original message board, Confidential Chat deserves a more proper and respectful farewell and thanks from the newspaper it helped establish.
