With every newspaper closure, merger and layoffs, the business model of journalism gets discussed everywhere from on the CBC to Facebook and the occasional water cooler. Topics quickly delve into declining ad revenue, declining subscribers or readers, declining classifieds, Facebook and Google.
Amidst it all, there’s one thing, that’s not received nearly the attention it deserves; declining letters to the editor.
The opinion page is by far my least favourite page in the paper we produce. When I first started at the 100 Mile Free Press, I would somewhat regularly get annoyed callers asking me why I wasn’t running more local letters. I would tell them I didn’t have any (more) local letters to run.
I can’t remember a single instance of acceptance when I told them I’d happily take their letter if they wrote me one. There was clearly a desire for local letters, people were just not willing to write them.
I walked into our archives today, pulled out a random year, flipped to a random opinion page and counted the number of local letters for a total of six. The year I pulled was 1997. Furthermore, many of the names on the letters in the 1997 issue I flipped to, were names that were familiar to me. They’re people who still live in the community today. Now, most weeks I’m happy if I get one local letter.
This is a problem for numerous reasons. First of all, having a vibrant opinion page is important to give some voices and perspectives that don’t usually get to be heard a platform to do so. Usually, the newsmakers in a community are consistently the same people.
This means that week after week, the same people end up being interviewed for stories such as the local MLA, the local mayor, council members or the district chair. Members of the public might have opinions and perspectives that differ greatly from the usual suspects. The letters page is supposed to act as a counterbalance.
The second problem is that in a void of letters, if you’re local and send in a letter unless it’s particularly egregious it’s almost certain to get run. This limitation of editorial choice means the letters page consistently features the same fervent local letter writers and overrepresents the issues they care about, as well as making it extremely difficult to provide a balanced community perspective.
It’s not hard to guess where many of these opinions have gone to but social media is not an adequate replacement. We often end up in echo chambers that only fuel the type of extreme partisan divide seen in the U.S. Furthermore, with the lower barrier to share, arguments are often less well-thought-out and, in the absence of an editor, less factually correct.
Not only is journalism important to democracy, well-informed public discussion is too; and unlike the state of journalism, it’s gotten barely any attention.
