THE CYNICAL VIEW IS THAT editors say they read every letter sent to their “Letters to the Editor” section but don’t because that would be an even bigger waste of time than writing one of those letters. This leads to a Groucho Marx punch line—the one about not wanting to join any club that would have you as a member.
How quaint they seem now anyway, even in fast-forward magazines like Wired and the Atlantic that still run “Letters to the Editor” pages in their print editions. The theory is that letters from readers amuse other readers, and at the same time corrections and mea culpas in print can satisfy people with serious bones to pick. So “Comments” in Wired and “The Conversation” in the Atlantic are there every month as long-trailing echoes of the ideas amplified relentlessly by their branded Internet chatter connecting people with similar mind-sets. All of it reminds me of the early days of Rolling Stone, where the eclectic copy chief Charlie Perry determined that most of the reader mail came from prison inmates. Or the letters written in purple crayon or the ones with primitive swords down the side…I’m talking about 95 percent of the mail—even to intellectual bastions like Harper’s. Lewis Lapham, who edited it for twenty-eight years, joked that 95 percent of his magazine’s letters to the editor were from “academic twits or commie pinkos.” But then he said: “I’m not joking.”
My approach was to read and answer any letter addressed specifically to me instead of “Editor.” If a reader had the enterprise to look me up on the masthead, I wrote back with something personal and sometimes, if the letter had made sense, I sent a book or T-shirt or whatever logoed trinkets we had run up to give to advertisers. At Sports Illustrated I also wrote letters back to children and to readers who were not well. It was a small thing to do when they seemed to care so much about the magazine.
Letters threatening legal action or demanding corrections went immediately to the lawyers, and I often wound up negotiating with them as they negotiated with whomever was coming after us. We seldom ran a correction, more likely just a letter from the discontented party, with a note at the bottom that said SI stood by the story. Occasionally I called people up and talked them down, although that never worked with any number of troubled athletes and their handlers—Barry Bonds, Tiger, Lance, A-Rod—who always wanted me to fire a reporter.
My first year at SI, 2002, the magazine received more than thirty-six thousand letters and employed a three-person Letters Department led by a senior editor to answer almost all of them. Tick-tock.
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