Revonnie Haynes of Bloomfield was adamant in her disappointment. The Courant had published only a photo and caption of a successful Black History Month program that she had organized at Weaver High School featuring football legend and motivational speaker Jim Brown. In addition, Haynes said, the students pictured standing with Brown were not Weaver students. She said she thought that Weaver had been slighted with the picture inside the Connecticut section.
However, The Courant had covered the event. Even if the coverage was a stand-alone picture, a story a day later was not likely. A better picture might have included Weaver students, but the caption was accurate, so no correction was in order.
Still, Haynes had a point: The Courant had missed an opportunity to give Weaver’s good news a worthy write-up while it seldom misses an opportunity to report trouble at Weaver.
City editor Andrew Julien said he understood Haynes’ disappointment. But editors make news decisions every day that don’t please someone.
What’s a reader to do?
This is when I turn to letters to the editor. A letter would allow Haynes to enlighten others about the Weaver program while pointing out the shortcomings of The Courant’s coverage. With letters readers can join and direct the public conversation in their community.
Lew Bresee is the editor for the letters that appear in the A section. Letters on the editorial page refer to everything from politics to business to statewide events to world events.
“We may receive as many as 400 letters a week,” Bresee said. “We print about seven letters on the page Sunday through Friday. We have a full page on Saturday to dedicate to letters. We use it to run longer letters, but we also try to get more letters on the page. … A conservative estimate is 2,500 letters a year. … That works out to about 17 percent of what we receive.”
Things are a bit different in the local sections. Bureau chiefs responsible for town news say they are happy to run most if not all printable letters they receive.
“I get letters in as quickly as I can,” New Britain Bureau Chief Stephen Busemeyer said. “Rejections are rare. Submissions are also rare, unfortunately.”
Letters are more of a regular presence in some Town News sections than in others. Letters from Hartford, Windsor or Bloomfield are uncommon on the local pages of the city edition. Besides rarely receiving them, “it’s more a function of staffing and space that makes it more difficult to run them,” city editor Julien said.
Election season brings an uptick in local letters from candidates and their supporters, but letters are the perfect place for any reader to challenge The Courant, to illuminate facts missing from a story or editorial or simply to share a passion or personal perspective about a news event.
For those who’d rather not deal with the U.S. Postal Service, there’s letters@courant.com and a link on www.courant.com; or letters can be faxed to 860-520-6941.
Wherever a letter appears in the newspaper – letters concerning sports and NE appear in their respective sections – there are a few rules that editors throughout The Courant follow:
Keep it short. The word count for most letters is 200 or less.
Make your point quickly. You know what they say about attention spans.
Make sure you have your facts right.
Save the personal attacks for your personal blogs. Editors prefer civility.
Most important: Include contact information so editors can verify that the writer exists.
For the most part, letters are appreciated. Annually, the editorial page department honors writers of letters judged to be the best published on the editorial pages over the past year.
Award-winners or not, letters make the newspaper more meaningful. The Courant doesn’t have to have the last word.
