It’s a good rule of thumb that the one of the easiest ways to take the temperature of a community is to pick up the local newspaper and scan the editorial page. This being the place where the newspaper usually makes a public statement of its concerns, and where the readers express their opinions; it’s a fairly quick sketch of what people are currently talking about.
It is a fairly standard practice to cherry-pick letters for print based on one criteria or another, but traditionally, here at LCN, our practice has been and will continue to be, publishing almost everything we receive.
We feel strongly this is your newspaper: We can’t exist without you and, as much as possible, this is your page. This is your soapbox and we encourage you to use it to have your say.
Like all publications, we reserve the right to accept or reject any submission for any reason or no reason, and we reserve the right to edit for style and content anything we receive.
As a rule, we don’t print form letters, mass mailings or third party letters mailed to us. We feel strongly about that. This is your page and we want your opinion, not somebody else’s, even if you do agree with it.
Owing to our most recent experience in the last election cycle, we have also adopted a policy that pure attack letters aren’t acceptable. We ask you to write in and tell us why your candidate or issue is the one to vote for, and we invite you to compare and contrast for our enlightenment, but we don’t accept promoting one side, solely based on the shortcomings of the other.
Most controversial, it seems, is our stance toward thank you letters. Thank you letters are tricky because we get a lot of them, they mean a lot to the people who compose them, and they don’t all fall in one neat little category.
Suffice to say, a letter thanking a lengthy list of business sponsors, donors and volunteers by name is clearly not an opinion, it is a list and we feel there are more appropriate venues for that than our letters page.
We are inclined to accept a brief general thank you letter to a group or the community at large as in “Thank you Community Energy Fund for helping me get through the winter,” “Thank you fire department for saving my home,” or “Thank you everyone for your cards and letters of support during this difficult time.”
We are generally inclined to accept such letters from individuals or nonprofit groups. Private thank yous publicly offered for private actions are the stuff for a paid ad called a Card of Thanks.
We are not inclined to accept a thank you letter from a for profit enterprise. If Hannaford’s wants to thanks its customers for something, or if Sysco Foods wants to thank a local restaurant for being its number one customer, that is an ad.
Finally, please save the cyber shorthand for cyber space. Language is perpetually evolving but until Webster’s formalizes the latest changes “thru” is still spelled “through;” “prolly” is still spelled “probably” and there is simply no excuse for ever using “LOL.”
Another good rule of thumb: When in doubt, write it up and send it in. We read everything we get and we print almost all of it.
We hope this helps.
Keep those letters coming.
