Lynn Swanbom: Writers without readers won’t get far

If a letter falls on the Roundtable page and nobody reads it, does it really express an opinion?

In the position of letters coordinator, I use a reader-centered approach. That means every day is a new application of the same question: Out of the submissions we’ve received, how can we offer our readers the most interesting and informative range of material possible in the available space?

Does that guideline seem like a no-brainer? It should. As a reader, you probably agree that the reader is the one the Opinion section and this newspaper as a whole should serve.

In practice, however, there are challenges to that way of thinking. A recent thread on the editorial board’s blog, A Matter of Opinion, once again took up our letters policy as an issue of debate. In a discussion of the guiding philosophy of the letters page, it was no surprise that most of the participants were easily recognized as frequent writers for the Roundtable. In general, they appeared to appreciate both the printed page and the blog as forums for discussion.

One opponent of the 30-day and 200-word policy limits objected to the blog as a way around these restrictions: “Bottom line is this: what’s said on this blog and almost every other one is just a release valve for a lot of people. They can see their words in print, so to speak, and that alone can be gratifying to some.”

I heartily agree. I have often thought of the blog medium in that way myself. But I hesitate to think this phenomenon stops at the borders of the blogosphere. The writer-centered mindset is as substantial in print as it is in techno-communication.

Clearly some Roundtable writers write in order to “get it off their chest,” evidenced by the fact (among others) that some of them retract their letters later when I call for verification. They acknowledge that they were upset at the time and would prefer that we didn’t print their letters.

I don’t question the usefulness of both the blog and the Roundtable as a public forum in which it is “gratifying to some” to vent their frustrations. I suspect, though, that the writers that are not gratified by the blog forum would also not be easily gratified by the print one. Any restriction on length or date of publication seems inconvenient and unnecessary if only the writers’ immediate desires are considered.

In the end, though, writers’ concerns are secondary to those of the readers, and the letters policy, ideal or not, seeks to safeguard those concerns. The Roundtable may not be a scientific, representative sample of public opinion, but it would be much further from it, I believe, if writers weren’t given a few restrictions.

An even greater factor of editorial judgment would enter into the selection of letters if our industry- standard objective guidelines were replaced by a more subjective process. I believe our readers, some of whom already call that judgment into question, are better served by the consistency that necessarily broadens participation than by a discriminating selection process inherently weighted by personal preferences.

Thus the S-R offers numerous and concise letters from hundreds of writers every month. The readers I’ve spoken with who have voluntarily expressed their preference of shorter letters carry more weight than the gripes of the writers who believe a length revision request is tantamount to censorship.

Finally, I realize a large portion of our readers and writers are the same people. In light of this, I appeal to the reader side of our audience to work with the restrictions we must place on the writer side. If this page can hold the interest of a larger readership by its broad range of topics and contributors, then both writers and readers are better served. If nobody reads the page, writing for it will certainly be a futile endeavor.