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Read other letters about this article
Thanks for all the ideas and feedback. Here's a few thoughts in response.
One of the big inspirations for switching our Letters format was that, in the old days, we received a vast volume of letters from our readers -- far more than we could ever publish, when publishing meant an editor had to manually move the letter from an email program into our publishing system. Under the old system, we were sitting on a lot of great letters that never saw the light of day. And even publishing the ones we did choose took a lot of extra labor on the part of our editorial staff. For the majority of the stories we published, we never got around to publishing any letters at all.
We felt it made more sense to use the limited time of our relatively lean staff to report, write and edit articles than to cut-and-paste text from letters. We thought that's how most of our subscribers would want us to dedicate our resources.
But we also knew that, while some readers would enjoy the full, unedited Letters flow, others would miss the filter we'd always provided. So we designed the whole Editor's Choice thing as a way to keep offering that kind of selectivity. For those of you who feel it's condescending and "teacher"-y, well, that's hardly the intention! It felt better, and more in keeping with the way the Web operates, to give readers a choice -- read all the letters, the way Salon staffers always have, or read just the ones we've selected.
To those who see what smcrae calls "a problem of plummeting quality": if you're comparing the quality of the old, hand-sifted Letters pages with the "all letters" view of the new Letters system, then I think you're comparing apples and oranges. A real comparison would pit the old Letters against the new Editor's Choices.
As one editor who tried to read every single e-mail we received from our readers for nearly ten years (and succeeded much but not all of the time), I can tell you that the average quality of letters in our new publish-it-yourself Letters system is at least as high, if not higher, than the average quality of the old email-it-in system, if you actually read everything. Under the old system, readers just got to see a tiny fraction of those letters; under the new, readers can choose to see a similar small fraction, or see them all. It's hard for me to think that providing this wider choice is a bad thing! If you set "Editor's Choice only" as your preference, that choice should follow you around as long as you're reading our site (if you change computers or browsers, you'll need to set it again).
Then there's the complaint that we shouldn't call it Letters to the Editor but rather "comments" or something else. Well, obviously the new system has a lot in common with blog comments. "Letters to the Editor" is a metaphor. But it was also a metaphor when we used it for e-mail -- which shares some but not all of the qualities of offline "letters."
We chose to stick to the "Letters to the Editor" label for a handful of reasons: It underscores that Salon editors *do* still read the letters (we do!). It helps set the expectation that this is a place primarily to respond to our editors and writers about our articles. And it preserves the link between Salon's heritage -- as a magazine-style publication transplanted to the Internet -- and its present reality, as a Web site that aims to use all the potential of its medium in 2006.
As for the discussion about anonymity and signing letters: We're not trying to "punish" or downgrade letters that are signed with handles rather than names. As many of you have written here, and as I acknowledged in the letter I wrote, many people have perfectly reasonable grounds for not wishing to sign their letters. We'd like to encourage the use of real names where you feel comfortable, that's all.
We'll keep experimenting with ways to do that. But we don't want anyone to feel unwelcome. We're learning as we go along, too. We'll keep listening to what our readers tell us and fine-tuning the site -- we know there's still plenty to do there -- and if we can make Letters progressively easier to use and provide more choices and flexibility, we'll be happy.
