“The oldest blog in Hampton Roads is getting a lot better,” editorial page editor Dennis Hartig informed readers of The Virginian-Pilot last month.
Hartig was stretching the truth, of course, considering that, by “oldest blog,” he actually meant the paper’s letters to the editor feature. But Hartig’s kid-with-a-new-toy enthusiasm was understandable: He was introducing bLetters, a new Pilot feature that, in his words, “turns every letter to the editor into its own Web log, or blog.”
Which means, Hartig explained: “More people can be heard from, faster, and as often as they want. And for those whose letters are published on the editorial page, you’ll get to find out right away how your opinion fares. And if you don’t like what’s being said, then you can reply.”
The Pilot’s decision to post letters to the editor on PilotOnline.com (they’d previously been available only on ePilot), and to allow readers to comment on them – and converse with one another – is part of a growing trend of engaging readers via technology.
A newspaper’s letters to the editor feature amounts to a town hall meeting where attendees get to sound off. But there’s a major problem: The room’s too small, so there are limitations. To permit a truly varied cross-section of views and writers, for instance, The Pilot has had to limit the length of letters and how frequently (now once in every 30 days) a person can be published, notes Commentary editor Lynn Feigenbaum.
“Thanks to the blog,” she said, “you can write as often as you like – and for some, that’s several times a day – as long as you like. Your choice. Maybe no one will read your l-o-n-g letter but, hey, you’ve gotten the issue off your chest.”
Hartig notes another plus: “It can permit public officials to respond to concerns, or criticisms, voiced in the letters. That’s a valuable new avenue for communication. And it’s all out in the open.”
Increasingly, readers are utilizing the bLetters feature. The Pilot has about 50 blogs, and bLetters is in the top echelon in page views and comments. It’s No. 1 in some weekly tallies. Shortly before noon Friday, the feature registered 23,325 page views, with 473 comments posted for 521 letters. The figures would be a lot higher if the feature had been activated earlier – such as before the November elections.
“But the software was new and untried, so we decided to bring it up when there would be a lot less traffic,” said Hartig, who had “nightmares of a meltdown.”
The Pilot was almost two years behind its sister paper, the News & Record in Greensboro, N.C., in instituting the letters blog. There, the feature gets more than 100,000 page views a month, with some letters getting 60 to 80 posted comments, according to editorial page editor Allen Johnson.
Johnson said his paper’s news department “mentioned some options” about blogging for the editorial operation. “That sounds pretty cool,” he recalls thinking, but he and others worried initially that the feature might reduce “real letters” to the paper.
That hasn’t happened. “Actually, letters trended up last year,” he reports.
Hartig was also concerned about print letters declining. And he worried “about the dialogue getting ugly, racist or profane, those sorts of things.” Hasn’t happened, he says.
There’s a different SOP for published letters and the bLetters.
Letters to the editor that are potentially libelous or mean-spirited are not published or are cleansed of their venom. Names and addresses (not printed) are verified. They’re sometimes fact-checked, and grammar and spelling are routinely corrected.
Posters for bLetters are advised to “keep it civil.” However, because the comments aren’t edited, “the expressions are a little more free-wheeling than the letters to the editor,” Hartig notes. One bLetters writer recently called a Virginia congressman “a jerk.” That, of course, would have been excised from a printed letter, but was allowed on the bLetters site.
That doesn’t mean anything goes, however. “If a submission is out of bounds,” Hartig explained, “we just don’t post it.”
Of more than 400 comments, fewer than 25 have been killed in a month. Some because they were potentially libelous, severely mean-spirited or they didn’t ” make any sense,” said Feigenbaum, who posts the comments.
The bLetters feature is the latest outreach by The Pilot editorial page. I wrote recently about our guest community columnists program, which Feigenbaum initiated. Add to that two features introduced since Hartig became editorial page editor in 2002: periodic student-penned editorials and the recently added “Last Word,” which allows readers to rebut editorials.
Such additions not only allow citizens to let their voices be heard, but, hopefully, build community good will. That, says Hartig, is the real bottom line.
A final point: The bLetters presence on PilotOnline.com needs to be elevated. It’s currently one line at the bottom on the home page: Letters to the Editor Blog.
