" Letters to the Editor are fading away " And so is " OUR democracy "

Letters to the Editor are Fading Away Post Alley https://www.postalley.org › 2023/02/22 › letters-to-the... Feb 22, 2023 — Papers like The New York Times, Washington Post, Philadelphia Enquirer and Minneapolis Star Tribune run letters to the editor, and they actively ... Missing: acknowledge ‎anymore ? [ " One of my first jobs at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was editing Letters to the Editor. In those days (’70s and ’80s) the P-I was the city’s only morning daily and the letters ranked as one of the paper’s most popular features — better read than the editorials, only surpassed by sports and comics. Each day we would print five or six LTEs (letters to the editor). I had to balance my time between selecting and editing those letters and other duties including writing headlines for opinion columns, laying out the op-ed page and reading page proofs. But I loved the letters despite having to condense the longer ones. I still recall the newspaper’s irascible editor walking past my desk and yelling, “More letters, more letters! Keep ‘em shorter!” Yet for all their value, letters to the editor may be endangered. A recent edition of Cascadia Daily News, the year-old Bellingham paper, took aim at the move to abolish LTEs. Writing in his weekly column, Cascadia editor Ron Judd, noted that a rival paper (the hedge-fund-owned Bellingham Herald) was jettisoning letters to the editor as “a thing of the past” and as “too difficult to verify and generally rife with misinformation.”]