I heard somewhere that most questions “asked” in advice/help sections (etiquette, sex, cooking, etc.) of popular mags are simply written by the editors or columnists themselves and attributed to readers? Any truth to this?
(Apologies if addressed before, can’t seem to find it.)
Common sense tells us that not all letters are made up. The number that are fraudulent probably relates to the nature of the publication and its readership. Ann Landers, Dan Savage, and their ilk get zillions of letters and use the ones they receive, for the most part. They don’t really need to make up letters, given the wide variety of questions they get asked. Penthouse, et al, prints a lot of the letters they receive, although the veracity of those letters has been called into question for a long time.
Good point and I should have clarified. I’m asking about everyone who is not in the Ann Landers/Dan Savage category of famous columnists.
Somebody on the Dope has to have a background in magazine editing, right?
Most, if not all of the letters to National Lampoon were clearly made up. It was a running gag with the magazine.
I have a suspicion that they used to make up the letters to Penthouse to get the idea of the “reader-supplied porn” started, but that once that idea bit, they wouldn’t have to do it anymore. I know that some of the guys in my dorm made up their own letter to Penthouse, deliberately trying to be outrageous. They claimed it got published.
One of the things that made me question the authenticity of Penthouse letters/stories (in, for example, Penthouse Forum or Variations) is that so many of them seemed to conform to a particular writing style, right down to using the same odd euphemisms (for example, in hetero anal sex stories - just how many men actually call a butthole “her rosebud”?) I surmised three possibilities:
• The readers who were writing these stories noticed a certain style trend in the magazines and were, consciously or unconsciously, attempting to write in the same style.
• The editors were rewriting the reader-submitted stories to conform to the “house style”.
• The magazines’ editors/writers were just making stuff up and attributing it to readers.
I noticed the same thing in Reader’s Digest, in their various reader-submitted joke sections - all of the jokes and anecdotes seemed to be told in the same style, as if they were all being delivered by the same standup comedian. While I never doubted that they were reader-submitted, I suspected that they were all massaged by the editors for clarity/brevity.
So who writes all the questions on the SDMB?
Ed Zotti, I suppose.
The longer Penthouse letters along with the similar ones in the other “sex-letter” magazines were written by freelancers. At one point it was common in the science fiction community to make some extra money by regular contributions. Much wailing occurred when this reliable market was knocked out by the internet. I’m sure that some of the shorter letters were sent in by readers. Maybe some of them were even true. But as you can see here and on every other comment page on the internet, only a tiny percentage of the population can write a coherent paragraph, let alone a complete narrative account. Editors do lots of massaging and rewriting to make letters publishable. And they need to fill x amount of pages, which they will do by any means necessary, including writing stuff themselves.
For other kinds of columns the answer of how many are real range from almost all to a few. I’m pretty sure that the celebrity questions in USA Today magazine or Parade are half made up, just because they always are able to tie them to a current project that’s just about to debut. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
An advice columnist who’s been around for awhile will get enough letters to fill a short column. Lots of letters sent to them are obvious phonies. Some are very good phonies, though. Read the comments on Slate’s Dear Prudence advice column and see how many times the letters are denounced. Most of them sound like plots for Lifetime movies rather than real life. But they are certainly all rewritten because they do all sound the same.
Most, if not all? The column was titled “Letters From the Editors”.
On a related note, what about “Frequently Asked Questions” on web sites? I’ve long suspected that “Frequently Asked” actually means “Here are some questions we anticipate being asked a lot, and their answers”.
A lot of FAQs are questions that they want to be asked, not questions that acually would be.
Frequently anticipated questions. 
In case anyone takes this seriously, no, the letters here are real ones or at least most of them are. I believe they are all real. We have board members that joined after theirs was answered in the column.
I have sent letters to the editors of magazines and seen some of them published. If the magazine is a popular one, they probably won’t have room to publish all the letters they get. National Geographic is a favorite of mine for reading the letters because the people who write them usually know what they are talking about.
Others, such as fashion rags, not always. A friend of mine did confess that one of her early jobs had letter-writing under “other duties as assigned” if the mag didn’t get enough letters for the month. She also said that one of her favorite tasks was creating the monthly horoscopes. She said the whole editorial staff had fun with that feature. She still works for the same publisher so I won’t mention the mag name, but it wasn’t a top-of-the-line rag.
Read The Master’s responseto an allegation that the letters were made up.
On the other hand, you know how Reader’s Digest has “reader submitted” joke sections (“Humor in Uniform” or “These United States”) and little jokes at the bottom of the pages, which I’ve always assumed are professional? Once, and I swear on anything you want me to swear on this is true, one of those end of page jokes was “Why does Snoop Dogg carry an umbrella? Fo’ drizzle!”
Now, surely that isn’t the Reader’s Digest “house style”, if not grammatically then demographically!
Hah! Reminds me of another one:
Q: How does Snoop Dog whiten his laundry?
A: With bleayotch!
A friend who once worked as ‘Editor’ of a group of gay porn magazines told me that he wrote all their letters to the editor, both the letters and their answers. Often, he also wrote the ‘interviews’ with the models. And he wrote the short Q-A sections (favorite color. favorite snack, favorite movie star, etc.). “Wrote” in the sense of made it up completely. Often he also authored many of the fiction stories in the magazines, using various pen names.
Partly this was because the publisher of these magazines was extremely cheap. My friend was way overworked (and way underpaid) – he was doing a lot more than normal duties for an Editor. So some of this was just efficiency (it was faster to just make up letters to the editor rather than to read all the actual letters looking for ones good enough to publish). And he re-used the good ones later in different magazines*, making slight changes to the names & addresses. But some of this ‘ghost-writing’ was common practice in the industry.
- He mentioned a couple of times when readers noticed similar letters. But he was surprised, because he had been careful to re-use them in quite different magazines: the first time was in a magazine featuring blond twinks, the next was a few months later in a magazine showing muscular black men. So he was surprised that someone read both of those magazines (and read them that carefully!).
I once had a reader submitted joke published in Playboy, perhaps 1973. Several months after my submission my joke was printed, verbatim, with somebody eases name given as the contributor.
Many years ago I posted to a programming magazine and asked if my solution to a problem was the best way to solve it.
I was a little hot when the magazine came out and they had reworded my question to make it seem as if I were asking how to solve the problem, then they used my solution as the answer.
I’ve noticed in “Reader” questions from publications like the Parade Magazine are conveniently timed to a celebrity’s newest venture.
Q. What ever happened to <insert celebrity name here>?
A. After retiring from show business in 1980, they have just published their newest memoir available tomorrow.