Every day the letters come in by the hundreds. Long ones. Short ones. Dumb ones. Pithy ones. Laborious dissertations. In-your-face rants.
And, once in a while, someone sends in an exquisite gem. The cogent 200-word – and not one word longer – letter that is fresh, literate, convincing and entertaining.
Such is the universe of that venerable journalism standard, the letter to the editor.
Old maybe but not pass, given the volume of letters that pour in, occupying the one place in the paper each day where individual readers’ likes and dislikes are the star attraction.
What’s interesting is that in a digital world filled with highly personal and idiosyncratic blogs, online community billboards and an expanding Milky Way of Web sites, something as seemingly staid as a letter to the editor continues to thrive, at least here at The Bee.
The letters both reflect and construct, I think, the community-consciousness and community-building that is the unique strength and historic responsibility of newspapers, more so certainly than TV, radio or the Internet.
Collectively, they form a kind of community connective tissue on the issues of the day; highly individualistic yet communal in thought when placed together with like-minded strangers.
A week never seems to go by where I don’t get questions about our policy for publishing letters. Sometimes they are from readers disgruntled because their letters were rejected, or who disagree with the publishing ground rules, or who claim bias because their views aren’t in the paper, or who are mystified that editors aren’t agog over their 1,000-word political treatise.
One reader, Julie Dahl of Sacramento, examined all the letters in the paper between June 25 and Aug. 1 of this year. She found that men got their letters printed three times more often than women.
“One would think, looking at The Bee’s daily crop of letters, that few women in Sacramento write and think. And that’s hogwash,” she wrote in an e-mail urging “gender parity.” More on her claim later.
The paper’s gatekeeper, as he has been since 1987, is John Hughes. He is the one who whittles down the hundreds of submissions a day to the 100 or so that meet the paper’s publication parameters.
The Bee on average prints 14 letters a day. The most in the past month has been 38; the least eight.
Meeting the guidelines begins with writers providing the simplest of information, such as their name, address and daytime telephone number.
The letters have to be addressed directly to opinion@sacbee.com or, even better Hughes says, writers should use the paper’s Web site, at www.sacbee.com/content/opinion, and then select “submit a letter.” The Web site not only provides the correct form but counts the number of words, too.
That’s important, Hughes said, because of the paper’s strict 200-word limit. “If I have to slog through a letter, it won’t get in,” he said.
If the submission is part of an orchestrated letter-writing campaign, usually generated by Web sites such as moveon.org, forget about it. The letter is history. Hughes uses a number of internal filters that track letters to their original servers.
Letter writers also must live in the paper’s circulation area. Those who don’t are rejected, as attested to by out-of-state writers complaining to my office.
The circulation territory is roughly bounded by the Oregon border on the north, Lodi in the south, Reno to the east and Vacaville in the west.
If all the above conditions are met, then the selection process turns much more subjective, judging which letters are good enough for the paper. It’s more art than science, says Hughes’ boss, David Holwerk, editorial page editor.
“It’s about competing values of fairness versus being interesting,” Holwerk said.
If the letter is about something that appeared in The Bee, that definitely counts for bonus points, increasing its chances of publication. If the letter is also timely, well-written and presents a unique point of view, odds are favorable it will see print.
Hughes said that letters must be received within a week of the event or story that it comments on. Hughes tries to get letters into the paper within a week, but that process sometimes takes 10 days. Once a letter is published, the writer must wait 30 days before another submission is accepted, a countdown verified by The Bee’s computers.
When a topic is big enough and hot enough, such as the torrent of letters generated by the government’s slow response to Hurricane Katrina, the paper will place the excess online. These are letters that meet the paper’s criteria and are good enough to be published in the paper, but there are just too many.
The online venture is fairly new, and Holwerk anticipates putting more letters online in the future.
One of the tricky parts is verification of facts. “We don’t check every fact in every letter,” said Hughes. “We can’t do that.”
Instead, when he sees or senses possible problems, Hughes will ask a writer to qualify a fact. Letters that cite statistics that appeared in the paper are more valued than those whose source is vague or lacks authority.
As for reader Julie Dahl’s contention that the paper is biased against women letter writers, Holwerk said his office did a count in September and found that men outnumbered women two to one, less than the three to one found by Dahl.
Holwerk and Hughes don’t have an explanation for the imbalance, other than that’s the true proportion of the letters submitted. Hughes noted that on some topics, such as abortion, women letter writers typically outnumber men.
“I think it’s interesting and I’ll look at it,” Holwerk said. “But I’m confident we don’t have a bias against women writers.”
