Dear Sir, where have the letters gone?

There seems to be something wildly illogical about the New Zealand Herald’s decision to slash the space it devotes to letters to the editor.

Just when media are striving to find ways to engage with their audiences, the largest newspaper in the country devalues one of the few ways readers can engage with the print publication.

From November 20, the space given over to letters was reduced almost by half in the Monday-Friday editions, with the co-opted space given over to a pretty, but pretty forgettable, image labelled ‘Photo of the day’. What has not been lost in the change is the cross promotion for NewstalkZB’s Kerre Woodham. It remains a fixture on the page, taking up space that would have accommodated another letter.

The photograph is a cheap way of diminishing the call on the reduced resources now devoted to the print publication under NZME’s new ‘digital first’ strategy. The cost of a photo from the Herald’s existing Associated Press syndication deal is negligible compared with the extra time an editor would have to spend processing letters to fill the same space.

No doubt NZME has a carefully crafted piece of obfuscation to explain the change, but the fact remains that public discourse has been reduced by the move.

Last Friday I had lunch with a regular Herald letter writer, and she told me her group of faithful correspondents was outraged by the change. They had written to express their displeasure but none of those letters had been published.

I do not for one moment accept that Aucklanders do not want to write letters to the newspaper and, to prove the point, I compared the Herald before and after November 20 with the country’s other metropolitan newspapers.

However, before I did so I looked up the latest population statistics for each region to determine the size of the catchment from which letter writers are drawn.

The Auckland region has a population of 1.7 million (leaving aside the fact that the Herald circulates both north and south of it). The Canterbury region (served by The Press) is next largest at 666,000, which is less than forty per cent the size of Auckland. The Wellington region (The Post) is a little over thirty per cent the size of the northern behemoth and the Otago region (Otago Daily Times) is half that again.

Between Monday November 27 and Friday December 1, the Herald published 37 letters. In the same period The Press published 51 letters, The Post 33, and the ODT 32. A month earlier, the Herald was matching The Press, and devoting the same amount of space to letters.

In other words, the Herald is now serving its correspondents little better than newspapers with populations less than a third the size of its basic catchment area.

A reduction in the number of published letters has been matched by the amount of space devoted to each correspondent. Before the change, the average letter to the editor in the Herald was 23 lines. Now it is 17 lines, less than the average of any of the other metropolitan dailies. While the ODT has the smallest number of letters, they are on average the longest at 29 lines each. The average length of a letter in The Post is 23 lines, and its Christchurch stablemate averages 18 lines but compensates with the number of letters published.

Letter length is an important consideration. Yes, the single sentence witticism is a welcome addition to breakfast, but serious subjects may require space in which correspondents can develop their argument. It is this argument, rather than the contention it supports, that is an important contribution to public discourse. It tells us why someone holds a particular opinion.

Letters for publication differ from comments posted in an annex to an online news story. The latter tend to be conversational in tone and, as the number of comments mounts, become reactive and sometimes discursive. Immediacy seems to breed an informality that is not seen in printed letters to the editor. In some it prompts a form of madness.

Now, I know that the nutters of this world continue to send letters to the editor. I’ve dealt with more than my share of them. The ones written in crayon or coloured pencil were particularly galling. There were times when I would have liked to send them the rejoinder to a disrespectful correspondent attributed to Voltaire: “I am seated in the smallest room in the house. I have your letter before me. Soon it will be behind me.” But I couldn’t be bothered.

More seriously, the processes of determining which letters merit publication, and then testing one against another as they vie for space in the next day’s edition, has a disciplinary effect that is not lost on serious correspondents. They know the mediation is before publication, whereas online it is usually after the fact. For that reason, they think before they send.

The fact that publications demand the name of the letter-writer for publication and an address for verification gives further pause for thought. Being held accountable for what you say is a sobering prospect compared with the reckless freedom that comes from online anonymity.

The printed letter also has a permanence that does not attach to comments at the end of an online story and even less to a post about that story on social media. So, for as long as printed newspapers exist, it is important that they not only be accommodated but encouraged.

I pity future historians who, centuries from now, try to piece together 21^st century society. The artifacts may be few and far between as digital data degrades and is lost. Today’s scholars may not have complete records of the past, but they do have the tattered remains of more than three centuries of letters to the editor.

When Richard Steele founded Tatler in 1709 and was shortly thereafter joined by Joseph Addison, the coffee houses of London were abuzz, and it wasn’t long before they started publishing a selection of letters to the editor. The short-lived Tatler was replaced by the Spectator and Steele and Addison placed a lion’s head over an aperture in the wall of Button’s coffee house. Correspondents posted their letters to the editor of the Spectator through the lion’s mouth, and it has remained a fitting metaphor ever since.

German philosopher and social theorist Jurgen Habermas regards the development of journals like Tatler and the Spectator, and the emergence of newspapers, as critical elements in the creation of the modern public sphere. Although much supplemented since the eighteenth century, publications that print the views of their readers remain both a contributor to public discourse and a record of contemporary thought.

Resource constraints mean we have already lost these services in many of our regional newspapers that have dropped or reduced the frequency of their correspondence columns. Even the Waikato Times – officially a metropolitan daily but, in an operational sense, the largest Stuff regional – only publishes letters a couple of times a week.

It is vital that we see no further inroads into the space devoted to letters in our metropolitan newspapers and the New Zealand Herald would better serve its social purpose by dispensing with its indifferent ‘Photo of the day’ and publishing readers’ views in its place.

Recognition

It is extremely rare for me to write a letter to the editor of a publication. I have ample outlets for my meagre thoughts. However, I was moved to write to the Herald after it spent a week reminding readers that it was now 160 years old.

This was the letter:

   The Herald has marked a wonderful anniversary, but one element has been missing from its recounting of the past 160 years. There has been no recognition of the two families who risked all in a young colony where newspaper titles came and went with frightening regularity. 

   William Chisholm Wilson founded the paper in 1863 and in 1876 it merged with Alfred Horton’s Southern Cross. Together, the Wilson and Horton families steered the Herald through decades of triumph and adversity. 

   Michael Horton was the last family member to lead the company, and the Wilson & Horton tradition lives on in the present NZME chief operating officer Matthew Wilson. Both families can stand proudly at the forefront of Herald history.

Dr Gavin Ellis, Lynfield

The letter was not published. I would like to think it was simply a victim of the reduced space and not a rejection of the past.