To the woman who was angry about letters to the editor...

The BBQ Pit
1

Fuck off. Seriously, don’t you have better things to do with your life than chew up 30 minutes of my time (that’s $5 you owe the newspaper I work for, incidentally) arguing with me over my job?

I’m the Letter formatter. I am the one who formats the letters, types them in when they come in hardcopy, and confirms them. What does that mean? That means I have to call Every. Single. Person. Who. Writes. A. Letter and make sure they’re not using a fake name and they actually wrote the letter.

You know, there may be some vast media cover-up going on in the country. Honestly, I have better shit to worry about than tossing out letters to the editor about the mayor, whom I hate. I, and apparently most of the town, don’t give a shit that he got arrested for drunk driving for being .01 over the legal limit (the equivalent of having something like a half a beer too much…easy mistake to make, IMO) I’m honest to God telling you the truth that I got a total of about 10 letters on the subject, and half off them I was unable to verify and therefore could not publish. If you choose not to believe me, fine, but do not, under any circumstances, insult me by assuming that I am lying to you, or that I am taking part in the vaaaaast cover-up of the LOCAL NEWSPAPER, or that just because I’m a young’n I’m fucking retarded. No, fuck you.

And I hope you feel so good about yourself, lady, because not only was I extremely polite to you (“Ma’am, if this is going to degrade to you insulting my intelligence, I certainly have better things to do with the time the Appeal is paying me for than talk to you about how to do the job I have been doing competently for well over a year. Have a nice day!” click) but because of the way you treated me, my boss, the editor, has blacklisted you from ever writing a Letter to the Editor, posting a message on our Web site, or basically having anything to do with the involvement of our paper - because honestly, lady, if you’re going to fight sugar with fire, at least don’t sound like a raving lunatic while you do it. And don’t you dare pull that “The customer is always right” bullshit with me, because it is, indeed, bullshit. We’re a newspaper, not Del Taco.

Really, how stupid are you? You’re lucky you dealt with someone who has something resembling sanity; if I were just a little more homicidal you’d be dead, because you stupidly told me that you send in your physical address with every Letter to the Editor that you write. Nice. Now I know your full name, address and phone number. You’re lucky I have something resembling morals, too, because if I were any less scrupulous, all I’d need to do is some very easy lookup and subterfuge, and I could steal your entire retirement pension a 'la identity theft. You’re lucky, ma’am, that you got me and not some other people in the newsroom who would have no problem fucking your life up.

That said, I’m going to reiterate: Why the fuck do you bother with this shit? It’s a small-town, three-section local newspaper, for fucks sake! Do you really have that little of a life that you have to harass an underpaid lowly newsroom clerk for thirty minutes?

If so, then I pity you. No wonder your husband left you, you old harpy (and really, I could have done without the ten-minute diatribe on how all men are evil because your husband left you 20 years ago, but you’re a good Catholic so you refuse to sign the divorce papers, but he went under you because it’s Nevada, herald of all sin!). Please, just do the world a favor and either stop talking, or meet your maker.

I can’t wait to write your obituary. (God, I wish I’d said that.)

~Tasha

2

Well, I was going to commiserate, but you didn’t publish my letter either.

3

Since you’re here, some questions:

Do you fix spelling errors and punctuation? Do you need to get permission to do so?

Same with shortening, do you pass the edited version past the writer?

When you select letters, are you ever tempted to choose ones that make the opponents to your own position look stupid?

4

I can relate on two levels:

  1. Going back many years to when I worked for the local weekly paper. We originally had a policy of printing every Letter to the Editor (what can I say…it was a small paper).

Eventually, the local nutcases caught on and started peppering us with three of four letters per week on the same topic. Then, when they didn’t all get printed, the phone calls started.

Sorry, dinkus. No, actually, you’re not going to sue us because we didn’t print every single letter you sent in promoting militant Seventh Day Aventism or how we can’t trust them damn dirty Japs after Pearl Harbor or whatever your particular wackjobism is.

  1. (Reader’s Digest version, since I’m now late signing out from work) – The customer who called me yesterday, spent 15 minutes bitching at me, and then gave me her credit card number to pay her bill. Damn lucky I let your bitching roll off my back, lady, or you’d be paying for quite a large number of 15-year-olds porn right about now.
5

tash, I used to live in your town, and quite a few others between Hawaii and Georgia. For some reason, by comparison with the other cities, the letters to the editor in the Carson City-Reno area are the craziest, most enjoyable ones I’ve ever read! I remember one right-wing screed where, out of nowhere, the writer summed up his case with the 3-word sentence “Clinton is Serb.” as if that made everything so obvious.

6

My local newspaper has a “one letter per month” policy. I think it was instituted because of two particular letter writers: a lesbian who was using the letters column as her personal soapbox to rant about discrimination against gays (whether or not it was a topic currently being covered by the paper) and an elderly man who was writing one letter after another about bicycles on the sidewalks and how he got knocked over by a kid on a bicycle (it was never clear to me if he was being knocked down repeatedly, or if he was carrying on for more than two years about the same incident).

7

No, no. Her husband’s name was spelled Harold. Harold of All Sin. :smiley:

8

To the OP: I’m still a little confused. Was this woman complaining about letters you did publish, or letters you didn’t? And if the latter, how did she know (or think she did) that you had received them?

9

hehehe. I recently dealt with an angry, ranting consumer. I repeatedly called her “Ma’am” because otherwise I would have called her “Fuckwit”. She eventually said, “Stop calling me “Ma’am”, I’m younger than you”.

I said, “Don’t flatter yourself, honey”.

Things deteriorated at that point. :smiley:

10

Do you mean porn with 15yo’s or porn for 15 yo’s?

or 15 yo porn?

11

I should think so. It’s “Don’t flatter yourself, sugartits.”

12

I feel for you, tashabot. I edited a local newspaper for about six months and I know what you must be reading. The way people react to things in the local paper - not just letters - can be deeply bizarre.

DanBlather: papers don’t need permission to fix anything in a letter. Newspapers always reserve the right to edit for length and for clarity, since the letters appear in their pages. They usually run ads that say so.

13

I think you got it right with the last one. 1992 was an exceptional year in the pornyards. Excellent vintage (porntage?).

14

ah yes, 1992 presented us with a veritable pornucopia of fun!

15

I run spell check. That’s about it. We generally don’t bother editing them. Our rule of thumb is “If you want to make yourself look like an idiot in a public forum, we are willing to let you.” We can and do, however, reserve the right to edit Letters as they become the property of our newspaper upon submission.

As I said, we generally, unless it’s a REALLY good letter, don’t edit them except by running spell check. If it’s too long, we just don’t run it.

Not really. For the most part I don’t even pay attention to the content of Letters because if I did it’d probably shoot my blood pressure through the roof. Haha.

Hal Briston - Yeah, we have an approximate once a month policy here, like Phase42 mentioned, because of some crazy nutjobs who write in once a week. I’m under instructions to take the first letter they write and either hold the other ones or toss everything in their name if they have too many. Occasionally, when we have writers who are eloquent and fair but write a lot, I will call them and inform them of that policy so that they can hold their letters themselves.

Slithy Tove - Oh, man, don’t get me started. There’s this guy who constantly writes in about how we’re serving our Jew Overlords. We rarely print his letters, but we post them in the break room for a chuckle. The people here are nuts. It’s great.

**Thudlow Boink **- Sorry, I should have clarified. Our mayor was arrested about a month ago for drunk driving. He was only slightly above the legal alcohol limit, and was only doing 5 over when he was pulled over for speeding. His court date was this last Thursday and he rode a bicycle in because his license was taken away. He accepted 100 percent responsibility and has not drank since, although I firmly believe that it’s really easy to go just a little bit past the alcohol limit and still be capable of driving, depending on individual tolerance. Apparently most of my town agrees, because no one seems to care. I have not received hardly any letters on this subject, and this lady was insisting that we had and that I was just covering it up for the mayor (who, despite being on his side in this case, I loathe). Essentially, my boss has told her that unless she’s willing to come and do my job for free so that she can see how the process works, she is unable to make any accusations, as she has no proof.

Wow, maybe this should have been an “Ask the Newsroom Clerk/Obit Writer” thread. Haha.

Seriously, I know this woman’s name because she’s a rabid Letter writer. She writes in at least once a week. I’ve explained the policy to her time and time again about how you do not get letters published but once a month. She doesn’t believe me. :rolleyes: I seriously can’t wait to write her obituary, and I told my boss this, too. She has nothing better to do with her life than accuse a small-town newspaper of a conspiracy that doesn’t exist. It’s retarded.

~Tasha

16

Since starting to work with newspapers about five years ago, I have discovered that a great number of people know very little about the way the business works (not to imply that I know everything about how it works, only that by working in the business, you become privy to a lot of things that it quickly becomes obvious the public is not privy to).

The paper I work at now has a letter taped to the wall that begins “Hey Ass Holes!” (directed at us, the paper) and is filled with the sort of things you might expect a letter beginning with that is filled with (bad grammar and spelling and all). It was signed in a manner to make the author anonymous, but what is interesting to me is that there is a return address on the envelope it arrived in.

Takes all kinds of people…and most of them talk to, read or want to be in the newspaper, it seems like.

17

Exactly. The BIG problem I had with this woman was that she wanted an answer, but when I’d try to explain the way the system worked, she’d say “I don’t care about that!” And I would say “Well, if you don’t care about that, then you’re not going to get an answer that you understand.”

Also, she claimed to be 83 years old, and taunted me about my name (“Natasha”) saying things like “What are mothers nowadays thinking?” To which I said “It’s a Russian/Polish name. It’s not a new name. My family is Polish.” And then she started taunting me about my name! An 83 year old! Excuse me, but if I want people teasing me about my name, I’ll go hang out with the first-graders again.

~Tasha

18

How do you know it doesn’t exist?

That’s how secret it is, man. You’re smack in the middle of it, man, and you can’t even see it. See? That’s how big it is, man.

19

Let me rephrase. :slight_smile: She was accusing ME of a conspiracy. I did inform her that if she wanted to discuss that, she’d have to talk to the editors. I’m just a lowly newsroom clerk, way too low on the chain of command to know about any conspiracy.

~Tasha

20

Perhaps you could write her several letters a day, then complain if she doesn’t answer all of them promptly. Plus claim you’ve written many others, and she hasn’t answered those either… :eek:

No, that’s a bad idea! :smack: