Dave Stafford
Letters to the editor are one of the best ways for you, our readers, to advocate for or against something, or simply to have your say about something important to you in a forum that reaches thousands of people in our community. At their best, letters to the editor can be eye-opening and rally support (or opposition) to a worthy (or maybe sometimes not so worthy) cause or idea.
At The Democrat, we want your letters on our Opinions page. We want our letters to provide a vibrant and valuable public forum for community concerns and discussions — in your words, not ours. Send us a letter to the editor by emailing [email protected], or mailing it or dropping it by our office at 153 E. Main St., Nashville, IN 47448.
In order to better facilitate letters to the editor and provide equal opportunity for all voices that wish to be heard, we’re instituting some commonsense rules that we believe will achieve this goal and, we hope, result in more letters to the editor being published in our pages.
Going forward, the following rules will apply:
- Letters are limited to no more than 800 words. Most word processing software has built-in word-counting tools, but as a general rule, if a letter is more than two pages of 11-point standard-spaced type, you’re probably pushing the limit. This column, for example, from the beginning to the end on Page A5, counts out in our computer system at right around 600 words. I try to keep these ramblings about that length because I realize that you and I both have other things to do.
- Letters must be signed by only one author, and a telephone number and/or an email address must be provided so that we can verify letters.
- Letters must be received no later than noon Friday to be considered for publication in the following week’s edition of The Democrat.
- The Democrat retains the right to edit letters for grammar, clarity and accuracy. As editor, I don’t and won’t make substantive changes to your letters without consulting with you before publishing it.
These are fairly standard practices for letters to the editor, as is fact-checking. So if someone sends us a letter that says Christopher Columbus’ voyage to the New World happened in 1962, we are going to correct that.
In this social media age, anyone can post anything at any time, and many do. We have no beef with that. It’s a free country.
Yet anyone with clear eyes understands that the freedom of the social media age also has resulted in an erosion of trust in the veracity of verifiable facts, if not reality, among so many people. (Columbus did so sail in 1962! Click here for the shocking new evidence they don’t want you to see!)
But that’s a column for another day.
The point is, newspapers and publishers are held to a different standard than Big Tech internet giants such as Facebook and the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. For newspapers, standards of truth and fairness apply even in regard to the content of letters to the editor that we publish. We are subject to canons of media law that impose on us a responsibility to not knowingly or maliciously publish falsehoods or libelous commentary.
We don’t take those responsibilities lightly, nor should we. Ultimately, that makes the letters we publish more honest, insightful, reliable and relatable.
So keep sending us your letters. We’re grateful to provide this forum, and we appreciate hearing from you and sharing your views.
Dave Stafford is community editor of The Brown County Democrat. Contact him at dstafford@bcdemocrat.
