We get letters. Boy, do we get letters. We're getting so many letters right now, because of the election, that we had to resort to a special full page of extra letters today, the second time we've done that recently. Here are the links to the special page, and to the regular letters section.
I've been handling the letters to the editor here at The Bee for about 14 years now, and I've never seen volume like this. Much of it is driven by Proposition 8, which has excited passions on both sides of the issue. The McCain-Obama race is a close second.
We've always received more letters than we've been able to print; in normal times we manage to get between 35% and 40% of them into the paper. Now that percentage may be down around 15% or 20%, just because the volume is so much higher and the space is essentially the same. We'll get an accurate count sometime after the election.
We've always invested a lot of time and effort into letters. They are an important part of the newspaper's mission to serve as a place where public debate can take place. And the letters pages are always among the highest in readership, not just at The Bee, but at most newspapers.
Fresno's population has grown more than tenfold? since 1952, but the Fresno Bee's letter space has not grown at all. Would adding another page be that expensive? Reading the letters is my way of keeping my finger on the pulse of the community.
Also, has the Bee reduced the word count from 250 to 200 in recent years? That really hurts.
It just means you have to be concise and choose your words carefully.
Isabell: I may have misled in my post. Our letters space actually has grown in recent years. We changed our editorial page to a horizontal format a while back; that expanded the space for letters. In the first nine months of this year we published almost 200 more letters than in the same stretch of 2006, when we were still using the old format.
Rich: Yeah, dropping the word count to 200 was a hardship for some, but it bought us space for an average of one more letter per day. That's 365 more letters each year.
Adam: Thank you. Shorter is better.
"Shorter is better." (Russ Minick)
"...However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situation..."
(Aldous Huxley "Brave New World Revisited")
And that, Isabell, is why you're allowed to write 12 letters a year. =) Think of it as 2400 word essay.
Come on Russ,
You say, "shorter is better" because it is less editing for you guys.
It makes more sense to sacrifice that extra person for the sake of all the others who write 250 words.
Let the Fresno Bee promote the side of freedom of expression rather then freedom of LIMITED expression.
Other then that, thanks Fresno Bee for being a part of our Community.
Actually, Rich, forcing letters to be shorter means more editing, not less. We spend more time trying to trim 15 or 20 words from good letters than we used to.