I have written in recent weeks about the vast increase in emails arriving at the Guardian — up to 2,000 or so in response to a single article — but there is a huge quantity of outgoing email too, which I shall tell you about in a moment.
First, a recent example of the kind of rapid response we now get. Our features editor at the end of last week wrote an article in G2, our tabloid second section, expressing some sympathy with the apparent inability of the prime minister Tony Blair to spell tomorrow. “Toomorrow,” he had written, in his own hand, in a slip of no more than infinitesimal consequence. The piece by the features editor said, in effect, there but for the grace of the deity of your choice (these are sensitive times) go I.
He could sympathise even with the former vice-president of the United States, Dan Quayle, who — my colleague claimed — misspelt tomato by adding a final e, another gaffe, if that is what it was, of very small dimensions. Except, of course, as an uncounted number of you emailed to point out, it was not a tomato to which the superfluous e was supposed to have been added, but a potato.
One correspondent, from Tennessee, suggested, in the first place, that our writer was so deficient in his ability to distinguish various fruit and vegetables that he should be suspended from his duties immediately; and in the second place, that the paper should immediately correct this “egregious error” or risk bringing its integrity into question.
Some correspondents from the US were harder: “When you smug Kyoto-loving socialist idiots over there at the Guardian decide to go on one of your typical Republican-bashing tirades, you ought to at least take the trouble to get your facts straight first…”
There was much more of this kind of thing, but a good deal too from other US correspondents (in Ohio, Florida, Washington DC and elsewhere) sympathising with those who found difficulty in assembling letters in the order required by the word.
I did, in fact, seek to preserve the Guardian’s reputation by pointing out the potato/tomato error in the corrections column. Alas, in doing so, I misspelt the word “misspelling”, leaving out an s. One reader — a reader of the paper Guardian, from Oxfordshire, England — wrote: “I think I have caught you out in misspelling ‘misspelling’ as ‘mispelling’ in a correction. Surely mispelling must involve pelling (whatever that is) in an erroneous manner. What do you think?”
So another correction, with the note: “One reader noticed.” This brought several (anticipated) admonitions of the following kind: “You don’t know how many readers noticed, only how many wrote to you about it.” This is a rather trivial example, but it describes the phenomenon: instant response that now comes from pretty well anywhere in the world.
But to go back to the beginning: our outgoing email. Discounting the vastly increased direct traffic between journalists and readers (although almost everyone finds it impossible to respond to everything), the Guardian now sends to subscribers of its various free email services a total of well over a quarter of a million emails a week.
The first, and still the largest of these email dispatches is the Fiver, started three years ago, and devoted exclusively to football. It goes to 30,000 subscribers at 5pm UK time every day. It is very keen on interaction with its readers and carries a lot of their correspondence. The great majority are in the UK but it has heard from fans in the Cayman Islands, Australia and New Zealand, Nigeria, Kenya, Hong Kong…
The Wrap, a round-up of the day’s newspapers, goes out in the mornings to about 23,000 subscribers — it jumped to that figure after September 11.
The Informer is a round-up of the day’s news that goes out at about 2pm each day, with occasional emergency editions, for example breaking the news of the air crash in Queens, New York.
The Backbencher is a fairly chatty survey of politics and parliament that began as a daily email service during the last election. It now goes to several thousand subscribers on Wednesdays and is put out after prime minister’s questions in the Commons. Then there is a media briefing, a society briefing, to be joined possibly in the near future by an education briefing, and perhaps one for travel too.
Although all the email services direct readers to the website or the paper for additional material, they are all designed to stand on their own. They reach some subscribers who do not have access to either the website or the paper, or who have much easier access to email.
You can sign up for any of these free email services at www.guardian.co.uk/index/services
Two-way traffic is the order of the day.
