Editing letters to the editor for publication is probably one of the most difficult jobs on the Guardian. The clamour for publication is understandable. Those who make it to the platform have the opportunity to address well over one million people. Since I last wrote about letters (January 31 1998), the potential audience has grown enormously with the development of the Guardian Unlimited network. All the letters that appear in the paper are on the website, one click from the home page
There is clearly room for further development here. In normal times about 300 letters a day are directed at the newspaper letters page and about 20 are printed, some of them quite brief. At the moment fewer letters are arriving, perhaps due to post-election torpor. The point is that all the letters to the Guardian intended for publication could in theory be posted on the website.
Nothing would more quickly earn the letters editor the grudging respect of the most frustrated letter writer than this. I say in theory, though, because in practice some would have to be withheld for legal reasons, some because they would expose a degree of idiosyncrasy rather greater than that to which readers of the page are accustomed.
But it would be an interesting exercise to try, if only once: to put up as many of one day’s letters as possible and invite you, the readers, to select and edit about 20 of them, giving prominence to the important topic of the day, retaining the salient points in the letters selected. You would then be able to compare your selection with the one actually published.
By the way, the editor of the Guardian, and the lawyer, see the selected letters before publication every day. You, though, would be looking at an array of 200 to 300 already “legalled”.
The letters editor, the mediator and custodian of the platform, has to be constantly vigilant for those who would use it for questionable purposes. At the same time, she has to allow the freest possible range of opinion and produce a lively and entertaining read. Complaints about selection, usually seen by those not selected as exclusion or rejection, and complaints about editing are not altogether rare.
Very rarely, however, a letter gets through which should not have been published at all. A recent example was one carried at the time of the riots in Oldham suggesting that young Muslims had been encouraged to attack Hindu homes and shops. I was alerted to this by a Muslim reader who felt that the letter, which appeared to be from a Muslim, in fact was not.
When I tried to contact the writer of the letter – which had arrived, as the great majority now do, by email – I found that the postal address he had given was false. I then emailed him inviting him to call me. On the telephone the following day he explained that, yes, the address was false – he had to be careful because he was a Christian Pakistani involved in anti-Muslim propaganda (I shall allow myself an exclamation mark)! Our own reporter found no evidence of the phenomenon described in the letter. A note appeared in the corrections column saying that publication of the letter was regretted.
I use it as an example of two things: the need for extra vigilance in particularly volatile situations, and the strength of attraction of the letters page as a platform.
There is little that is too controversial to be carried these days. In passing, I had a conversation this week with Mary Crozier, who edited the letters from about 1946 to 1956, through the editorship of AP Wadsworth into the early months of Alastair Hetherington’s tenure. Crozier and Wadsworth had preserved the custom, originating in CP Scott’s time, of not publishing letters of religious controversy. “They were always so ill-natured,” she said. Hetherington lifted the ban.
The letters page is among the more important parts of the paper. It has remained the paper’s principal forum of reader opinion despite the increase in direct email correspondence with journalists, and the growth in popularity of the letters pages in the Weekend magazine and in some of the specialist sections: Online, Education, and Society, which made room for letters on its redesign. Media, oddly perhaps, has yet to open this particular line of communication.
Letters for publication should not be sent to me. The front door is: letters@guardian.co.uk
Under the arrangement outlined in the readers’ editor’s column on December 9 last year, Malcolm Gluck, the Guardian wine correspondent, has made a donation of 6,971 royalty from the Superplonk wine he developed for Tesco, to the charity Keeping Kids. The sum after tax is reclaimed will be worth almost 9,000 to the charity.
