Letters to the Editor
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About the Missing SYA
Hi, about the published column and accompanying letters pages that were removed from the site -- I know it is off-topic, but since the question has been raised here, I thought I'd post here.
First, I'll just tell what happened.
The day after the piece went up I wanted to write to the letter writer personally, to say I appreciated her forthrightness and sympathized with her situation. Frankly, I felt that my response had been mean and sarcastic and wanted to sort of apologize. To find her original letter, I searched my mailbox for a bit of text. When I found her original letter, I sorted by sender, to see if she had written me anything else previously. I found that she had written me two letters closely together in time. The first letter was her question. The second letter, written quickly afterward, implored me not to publish the first. I realized I had missed her request not to publish. It was very clear what we had to do, from an ethical standpoint.
We very rarely remove material, and never simply because it offends; we only do it when publishing it is clearly indefensible. In this case, our obligation was clear.
People often write and then change their minds, and I withdraw their letters from the eligible pool. It presents a clerical complication. I have long been worried that this would happen. We are now planning to change our procedures so it doesn't happen again.
Now, someone mentioned that in writing to advice-at-salon.com there was a box that gave you a choice whether your letter is for publication or not. It's that way when you write a letter to the editors not for publication -- http://www.salon.com/about/letters/index.html. But if you write for advice, following the link on the column, you don't get such a box any more. I chose some years ago to bypass that box and have a direct "mailto" link at the bottom of my column. You can see it there, at the bottom, where it says "Ask for advice or make a comment to Cary Tennis." The word "advice" is a mailto link. It just opens an e-mail window. I avoided the other device because I wanted to make writing to me easier and less formal. But now we are rethinking that.
Strangely enough, I had second thoughts about this letter immediately after I put it in for publication. I sometimes do. It was an odd coincidence that the very letter I had second thoughts about turned out to be one which should never have been published in the first place.
But the content was not the issue. The letter writer asked us to withdraw the letter soon after she sent it, and I simply missed her letter. When I found it, we did what we had to do.
So now I have to be much more careful, until we have a new system in place.
We don't like to remove material, and only rarely do it. In this case, we had made a mistake and had an obligation to make it right.
If there are more questions about this, I will try to answer them.