Dear Sir/Mad
Letters pages may be on the decline but they give readers the chance to voice opinions, demand change and be amusing. Ruth Addicott looks at the history of letters to the editor and why readers choose to write in
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ind farms, Brexit, the Great Stink and how to find your spouse in a supermarket – these are just some of the subjects that have prompted readers to write letters to the editor over the years.
Letters pages have been an integral part of newspapers for decades, providing a platform for debate, contemplation and light relief. For some readers, following the May 2015 election, they even provided an outlet for post-election grief. They have been known to break news, spark controversy
and even persuade governments to apologise. However, in a digital age where Twitter, Facebook and online comments have become the norm, are they still relevant? In the early days of The Telegraph in 1855, the letters began with calls to clean up the Thames and complaints about the Great Stink, followed by demands for pubs to stay open later on Sundays and Jumbo the elephant to be saved from export to the US. A common question was: “Where are the police?” According to journalist and author Iain Hollingshead, readers are just as vociferous today. He was so inspired by the amount of material going to waste when he worked on the letters desk in 2006 -07 that he wrote a series of books, the latest of which, Stop the World, I Want To Get Off … Unpublished Letters to The Daily Telegraph, came out in October. “We had about 700 letters sent in every day, emails mainly and about 50 actual letters and faxes,” he says. “During MPs’ expenses and Brexit, it peaked to over 1,000. There was an awful lot of rubbish to wade through, but you grew quite fond of the regulars. They were often quite witty and saw it as a harmless hobby. They would have different takes on the day’s events, often more amusing or whimsical than the columnist or paid journalist, or go totally off topic, so you’d have this hilariously long-running correspondence about how to find your wife when you’ve lost her in a supermarket. You don’t get that anywhere else in a newspaper – it’s a kind of well-edited, curated Twitter feed.” While there were subjects he would dread (wind farms and global warming to name two), it would often be the most random topics that would trigger the greatest response.
16 | theJournalist School reports went on for months. Another was what to call your pet. “One guy wrote in and said his father called his cat Perkins “ ”
so when he called it in from the garden people would think he had a butler,” recalls Iain. An equal source of fascination was a group of colourful butterflies called painted ladies. People started tracking them all over the country and wrote in with sightings. “Some days, it’s hard to know when to call time,” says Iain. “I think that correspondence finished with someone saying he’d seen some painted ladies on holiday in Bangkok and they ‘certainly weren’t ladies’ or something.” At The Guardian, post reached a peak in 1977 after its famous April Fool’s Day hoax about San Serriffe, a fictional island that was celebrating 10 years of independence. It came complete with a seven page travel supplement and themed advertisement. Readers wrote in in droves. Ian Mayes, who was the first readers’ editor of The Guardian
They would have different takes on the day’s events, often more amusing or whimsical than the columnist or paid journalist, or go totally off topic
in 1997, says editing letters to the editor was probably one of the most difficult jobs on the paper. One of his favourites was a comment in 1988 when The Guardian announced its major redesign, involving a new masthead and the paper being split into two sections. Reader Robert Breckman, from London W1, wrote: “Sir, I understand that next February you are introducing a new modern typeface. May I be the first to say I don’t like it.” Amanda Greenley, letters editor at The Sun, says that online bulletin boards do not seem to have diminished the numbers writing into the letters page. The Sun now receives “99.9 per cent” of its letters by email or text (“very few by post”) and the current split is about 88 per cent emails and 12 per cent texts. “We receive hundreds a day,” says Amanda. “As people have
taken to email and text the letters sent in have become shorter, sharper and much more to the point, possibly because readers can edit their own work more easily and because individual readers send more often.” Andy Simpson, letters editor of the Daily Mail, says correspondence has also gone up and comes from a cross- section of people, contrary to the stereotype. He receives an
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