Letters to the editor

Letters to the editor of traditional or online newspapers can be valuable tools for journalists, giving them an insight into which topics are stimulating grass-roots debate, offering the possibility of dialogue between the newspaper and its readers and also providing the readers with a place to put forward their opinions or vent their frustrations. Writing a letter to the editor requires little special training and thus, in theory, is accessible to both the ‘man on the street’ and the expert, although selection by the editor can not be guaranteed for either and clearly letter-writing is limited to those who have the skills to shape a letter and marshal the necessary arguments to make their point (Smith et al., 2005). Although the majority of writers of letters to the editor are deemed to be occasional writers, reacting to a specific topic that has attracted their attention, more recent research has confirmed what the editors of letters pages have long known by identifying a group of regular writers, a minority of whom are fixated on one single topic. This small group may be perceived by newspaper editors to be mad, obsessional or even dangerous (Raeymaeckers, 2005; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2002). It should be noted that another section of letters comes from orchestrated media campaigns by particular social or political pressure groups – referred to by some journalists as ‘astroturf’ because of the fake grass-roots nature of such letters (Reader, 2008).

Only a limited amount of academic research has been undertaken on letters to the editor, and of that research, an even more limited selection has focused on the motivations of correspondents. During the 1970s, US researchers attempted to define the average letter-writer to newspapers, in particular during presidential election periods (Buell, 1975; Grey and Brown, 1970; Lander, 1972; Volgy et al., 1977). They tended to use evidence gathered for other purposes by bodies such as the Center for Political Studies and, because of the nature of this evidence, focused on the writer of letters on political subjects. From such research, the average letter-writer emerged as predominantly white, male, middle-aged or older, with an above-average education and income. Different groups of researchers found him to be a liberal Democrat voter or a Communist-hating, CIA-supporting Republican. However, all agreed that his interest in politics was above average and he was more likely to participate in other political activity than the average registered voter. Although the age range is different, there is a similarity here to the descriptions of the average blogger. Early research suggested that bloggers were primarily current or recent students living in the United States (or Western Europe) and blogging in English (Schiano et al., 2004). The characteristics of bloggers did not appear to significantly differ from the demographics of users of other public Internet communication tools; in other words, young adult men residing in the United States. More recently, Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2009 reported that two-thirds of the respondents to its survey were male, 75 per cent had a college degree and 40 per cent had a graduate degree, although other research on American bloggers has suggested that, in fact, half of journal bloggers are female (Herring et al., 2004a). As we have seen, female bloggers are more likely to write a journal- or diary-type blog rather than use their blog to publish more widely their opinions about external events and, at least in the mainstream media, political bloggers tend to be characterised as male. For instance, in 2006, an article on ‘top blogs’ in The Independent mentioned six bloggers, four of whom were male (Caesar, 2006), while a similar article in The Guardian on the top British political bloggers mentioned seven bloggers, six of whom were male (Burkeman, 2005).

Several basic motivations for writing letters to the editor of a newspaper have been identified. The primary motivation is, of course, the wish to participate in public debate by sharing opinions and experience. Other letter-writers might be driven by an impulse to educate the public or to call for action on a particular problem. Many letters are triggered by another letter or piece of editorial in the newspaper and might thus be seen as ‘secondary’ letters (Smith et al., 2005). In addition, letters to the editor can be seen as a kind of ‘safety valve’, allowing angry or upset readers to ‘get something off their chest’ in a harmless but therapeutic way. Linked to this motivation is the fact that many letters are written in a negative tone, rather than a positive or neutral one. Other common reasons for writing include requests for information or clarification and warnings. Just as for blogs, more than one motivation can be found in most letters (Pounds, 2006).

Again, comparisons can be made here with the blogosphere. The linking that is such an essential part of the filter blog can be compared to the way in which letters to the editor are triggered by material reported earlier in the newspaper. Bloggers’ posts can be triggered by material found elsewhere on the Internet – either on other blogs or among the online presence of mainstream media. Thus, blog posts can be seen as a more immediate response than letters to the newspaper editor – and a response that does not have to rely on acceptance and selection by the editor. An overall negative tone can also be found in the blogosphere. Asked whether they agreed with the statement, ‘I use blogging to vent my emotions or frustrations’, 33 out of 48 respondents in the 2006 survey and 44 out of 90 respondents in the 2007 survey agreed that they ‘sometimes’ used their blogging in this way. In their answers to open questions about motivations, several of the respondents mentioned using their blogging as a way to ‘vent’ or ‘blow off steam’ about issues (and it was interesting to note how many times the idea of blowing off steam about issues arose in the respondents’ answers, suggesting that they had bought into certain frequently used definitions of blogging current in the mainstream media):

The concept of ‘blowing off steam’ also suggests a certain subjectivity in the way in which a blogger writes about a topic. Such a subjectivity is certainly a difference between the blogosphere and the mainstream media, which (at least officially) aims at objective reporting and reserves subjectivity for editorialising. Readers of news-related blogs can appreciate the way in which blogs represent the personal opinion, and even the emotions, of the blogger rather than a corporate line. Investigating why readers read news blogs, Pedersen and Chivers (2007) found that it was the personal content, tone and language of a news blog that kept readers returning to the site and this was favourably compared to mainstream news sites. Although acknowledging that blogs were subjective sources of news and commentary, the readers did not see this as a failing. Instead, they compared bloggers’ open and avowed subjectivity – often termed ‘passion’ – favourably to what many perceived as a pretend-objectivity on the behalf of the mainstream media.

Although most researchers on newspaper letter columns felt that such a ‘safety valve’ role was harmless and ineffectual, Byron Lander’s (1972) research on letter-writing following the shootings of the Kent State students in May 1970 suggested that such letters could have an effect on the political environment in a community. Although the editorials of the Kent Record Courier and a minority of letter-writers expressed horror and shock at the shooting of students on their own campus by the National Guard, the majority of correspondents did not follow the editorial lead of the newspapers. Instead, their letters were overwhelmingly hostile to the students and called for further repressive action. Lander suggests that such a response went well beyond the ‘harmless safety valve’ function since such an open approval of the killings could encourage further action against the students in the future. In this case, he suggested, letter-writers could well have been shaping future events by their encouragement of the National Guard’s actions.

A couple of respondents made the same links as Lander’s in their comments that blogging was ‘mob violence for cowards’ (male respondent, 2006) and ‘political shin-kicking and eye-gouging’ (male respondent, 2007), suggesting that contributions to debate, whether they are in the newspapers or online, are not always necessarily positive ones. The survey respondents were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the statements given in Table 3.1 (page 32), designed to investigate whether their blogging might sometimes be a disagreeable experience.

As can be seen from Table 3.1, only a small minority of bloggers (equal numbers of men and women for both years) felt that they became upset because of heated exchanges and a larger minority actually gained stimulation from such exchanges. However, a larger group for both surveys agreed that they had experienced feedback that seemed intended only to cut them down. Presumably, however it might be intended, such a feedback upset only a small minority of the respondents and did not impact on their decision to continue with their blogging – at least in the short term. Thus, the respondents did not seem to equate blogging with hurtful argumentation and only a minority equated it with stimulating argumentation either. This is interesting when compared with the larger group that stated that they used their blog to vent their emotions and frustrations and thus it must be concluded firstly, that such a venting was usually connected to personal rather than external issues and, secondly, that it was usually not responded to by commentators on their blogs in a negative way – or not responded to at all.

Interestingly, there seems little suggestion in the academic literature on the subject of letters to the editor that the appearance of blogs has caused the number of letters to the editors of print newspapers to fall. In fact, an increasing proportion of readers appear to be writing such letters and it is suggested that new technologies such as e-mail and the Internet have rather helped improve the topicality and speed of response of such letters instead of diverting them to other online media (Raeymaeckers, 2005).

Making your voice heard: citizen journalism

Letters to the editor of a newspaper can provide researchers with a useful ‘thermometer’ with which to measure the amount of ‘heat’ – in terms of critical debate and discussion – a particular issue is arousing in the locality (Foster and Friedrich, 1937). In particular, research into the contents of correspondence columns in local newspapers can offer a different perspective from which to approach issues usually examined on a national or regional basis. In a similar way, the team led by Mike Thelwall has undertaken interesting research on bloggers’ reporting of and reaction to events such as the London bombings and the Danish cartoon controversy, demonstrating that blog search engines offer a unique retrospective source of public opinion (Thelwall, 2006; Thelwall and Stuart, 2007; Thelwall et al., 2007).

One motivator for blogging can be a desire to redress perceived distortions or failures in the mainstream media and this view of the blogger as a kind of ‘fifth estate’, monitoring and commenting on the output of the news media, is perhaps the most familiar image of the blogger served up to us by the media. Such a picture usually makes reference to the bloggers who are credited with bringing down Senator Trent Lott and the A-list blogs such as The Huffington Post, Instapundit.com or The Daily Dish, which may be staffed by a number of full-time bloggers or citizen journalists and are seen as being particularly influential in, for example, American politics. Although blogs may only be read by a minority of the American public, certain blogs are particularly influential because of their interaction with national mainstream media (Adamic and Glance, 2005), with a high readership among journalists and other political elites (Drezner and Farrell, 2008).

Blogging as journalism or as a form of reporting has been a much-debated topic. Commentators such as Dan Gillmor (2006) see bloggers at the forefront of a revolution whereby a new breed of grassroots journalists is taking the news into their own hands. Gillmor’s Centre for Citizen Media (http://citmedia.org) supports what is described as ‘citizen or grassroots journalism’ as a way of encouraging participation in current events by an educated populace. ‘Citizen journalism’ describes a form of media that involves moderated reader participation and is a response to what critics such as Gillmor see as the ‘one-way journalism’ of the twentieth century. Citizen journalism sites seek out people in the local community to write contributions and are happy to interweave opinion with fact. Such sites tend to be multi-authored but may involve editorial guidance and moderation. Not all blogs can be described as citizen journalism blogs, particularly because few single-authored blogs are editorially moderated, but these two forms of online writing do share some characteristics, such as the personal, opinionated nature of some of the writing and the ability to focus on a particular aspect of a news story. Blogs offer their readers an ability to interact with and discuss the news, to follow sources and to have world and local events filtered to remove material that is not of interest to them. Blogs also offer their readers expertise in areas that may not be of interest to, or are not covered widely in, the mainstream media. The back story of a particular event can be explored in detail and opinions from a number of viewpoints can be given. In addition, blogs, and now the micro-blogging phenomenon Twitter, offer the possibility for anyone at all to broadcast news to the world whenever they see it happening without having to go through official news channels, where they might possibly meet with delays, editorial interference or even censorship (Shirky, 2008: 186).

Mainstream media response

One way in which the mainstream media has responded to the possible threat posed by alternative news sources such as blogs has been to increase audience participation in the journalism process, particularly online. Using an ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ approach, many mainstream media newsrooms now employ staff to edit, manage and write their own interactive online content. Such a content can include chat rooms and forums, the provision of journalists’ e-mail addresses so that readers can ‘talk back’, links to sources and personalised news selection on the Web. Many have also set up blogs in which individual journalists can write in a more personal way, albeit still as employees of the company, about their take on a particular news story. By 2007, 95 per cent of the top 100 US newspapers offered at least one reporter blog and, in the United Kingdom, the number of blogs in leading newspaper websites jumped from seven in 2005 to 118 at the end of 2007 (Hermida, 2008). Hermida suggests that, for the BBC, the push to adopt such blogs came from a need to win the public’s trust back after a period of turmoil in 2004, when its reputation for accuracy and impartiality was questioned. It also fulfils demands for accountability, as ‘Letters to the Editor’ pages are deemed to do for print newspapers (Raeymaeckers, 2005). But at the same time, the BBC is seeking to normalise blogs within existing journalistic frameworks. Such an activity shows how journalists are striving to stay as gatekeepers, ‘normalising’ the blog as ‘a component, and in some ways an enhancement’ of traditional journalism (Singer, 2005).

For some journalists, blogs offer a chance to say what cannot be said on the news page or in a brief three-minute report to camera or to be creative beyond the newsroom – they can represent ‘an assertion of the value of the personal in the public sphere’ (Matheson, 2004: 452). Kahn and Kellner (2004: 93) argue that the commentary on and contribution to news stories by blogs has revolutionised journalism, giving non-journalists ‘the realm of freedom, community and empowerment’. In her discussion of the use of blogs during the second US war with Iraq in 2003, Wall (2005: 153)suggests that blogs are a new genre of journalism that ‘emphasizes personalization, audience participation in content creation and story forms’. She also argues that such characteristics suggest a move away from the modern approaches of journalism and that this new form can be seen as post-modern. However, Lowrey and Anderson (2005) suggest that the consequence of such audience participation in the journalism process may be a further weakening of the mainstream media’s exclusive authority in the eyes of the public and that the more audiences use the Internet in participatory ways to obtain news, the more likely they are to think that they could master the journalism knowledge base. In particular, with a broadening of the definition of journalism to include commentary and opinion rather than straight fact reporting, the traditional concept of news is being blurred and redefined to include the use of alternative sources such as blogs.

On the positive side, blogging can offer opportunities for professional journalists to ‘keep their hand in’ during periods of unemployment. One of the respondents to the 2007 survey had been a newspaper columnist at her local paper in the Shetland Islands, writing mainly about events in her local area. When the paper folded, she was encouraged by her readers to carry on her column as a blog. Another respondent, a freelance journalist based in New Hampshire, United States, used her blog to help her ‘keep track of what I’ve written for the local newspapers, with links to the articles and columns … and I share them with a wider audience than would read them in print’. Interestingly, she found that her blog had grown to become more personal – ‘because people like to read that and I like to write it’. Thus, these two journalists had found that their blogs offered them an opportunity to both expand their readership and offer their readers what they wanted and what the journalists themselves wanted to write, whether or not they were commissioned by an editor. There was also the possibility that a particular story might be picked up by an editor and that they would be commissioned to write a piece based on a blog post, which had happened to the New Hampshire journalist: ‘One of my editors has read things I’ve written and suggested articles for the Sunday newspaper’. Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2009 reported that 35 per cent of its respondents had worked at one point in their lives in the traditional media, for example as reporters, writers, producers or on-air personalities, whereas 27 per cent of respondents were currently both bloggers and workers in the traditional media.

However, the participatory nature of blogs can offer additional challenges that not all journalists are keen to embrace – and motivation can be a key factor in how committed journalists are to their blogs. Schultz and Sheffer’s (2007)investigation into the motivations of US sports journalists who blogged made a clear distinction between those journalists who blogged because they had a personal commitment to the new media and those who were impelled to blog by their employers. Of their sample of 124 sports journalists, only 27 per cent had initiated the idea of a blog themselves and 52 per cent had been told to blog by management. There were significant differences between the group motivated by management and other groups, with this group being more likely to view a lack of training as a problem, less likely to believe that blogging made them better journalists and less likely to believe that blogging had increased the size of their audience. It tended to be the journalists with more than ten years of experience who were reluctant bloggers, and this group was also more likely to be concerned about issues of credibility and ethics related to blogging. Schultz and Sheffer reported a feeling among these older journalists that media managers had rushed into blogging without a good understanding of how it worked or the dedication of resources to make it effective. Such a reluctance to join the blogosphere may explain why some media sources choose to employ bloggers themselves rather than encourage journalists to embrace blogging. For example, in March 2004, The Washington Monthly hired Kevin Drum, a CalPundit blogger who had been attracting over 1.2 million unique visits per month to his blog, to write a blog on its website entitled Political Animal (Drezner and Farrell, 2008). One of the respondents to the 2007 survey explained how she was approached by a newspaper company after her blog of film reviews became a popular hit on the Internet:

Redressing the mainstream media

The research discussed in this book is more focused on individuals who saw themselves as bloggers rather than citizen journalists. Having said this, some of the respondents did see part of their motivation in blogging coming from a desire to comment on or even to influence public opinion on political matters and possibly to redress the reporting of such matters in the mainstream media. However, this was a motivating factor for only a minority of the participants. In listing the satisfactions that they obtained from blogging, 12 respondents in the 2006 survey and 30 in the 2007 survey agreed with the statement that they were redressing the distortions of the media and similar numbers (15 in the 2006 survey and 26 in the 2007 survey) agreed that they gained satisfaction from blogging because they were participating in a democratic movement, but, overall, these were much less popular choices in comparison with other options (see Table 3.2), suggesting that for these respondents, at least, their blogging satisfactions were mainly related to internal rather than external impact.

However, explicit connections were made by some respondents, mainly men, between their blogging and the role of the ‘fifth estate’ – to keep an eye on the mainstream media as well as politicians. One male respondent, on being asked why he blogged, tersely replied: ‘Rupert Murdoch’.

Another stated:

He also claimed that ‘I am influencing the decision-making process within our local council. My blog has many influential readers including journalists, councillors, council officers, and members of parliament’ and that ‘disclosing information caused trouble for local politicians and held them to account in a more immediate manner!’ Others saw blogging as an opportunity to influence public opinion on issues that were important to them:

However, for the majority of the respondents, blogging about external, political events took second place to blogging about their own lives and experiences. Neither were they alone in this navel-gazing. In their investigation of the Polish blogosphere, Trammell et al. (2006) comment, in some surprise, on the lack of interest their sample of Polish bloggers paid to issues outside their own experiences. Their research sample included posts written during the time of the enlargement of the European Union and Poland’s accession to the European Community, but these events did not receive any attention from the bloggers analysed, who preferred to blog about their own lives and experiences instead. It thus seems that, despite the coverage in the mainstream media about citizen journalists and the impact and importance of political bloggers, these remain a small sub-section of the blogosphere. When investigating the ‘long tail’ of the rest of the blogosphere, we generally find more personalised motivations and interests. Although the respondents were happy to see blogging as a form of journalism, just as it might be a form of creative writing, diary-keeping or publishing, it seems that this association had a personal impact on only a very few of them and that, for the most part, the respondents were not eager citizen journalists motivated by a desire to keep politicians and the mainstream media on the straight and narrow. Instead, their view of blogging as a form of journalism seems to have been influenced by media coverage of the A-list blogs’ perceived news agendas and the blogs provided by mainstream media sources rather than their own personal experience of blogging.

Blogging politicians

If we are investigating the motivations of those who blog in order to influence the opinions of others, then we might briefly want to consider the motivations of those UK politicians who blog. Politicians who blog first attracted attention when Howard Dean made use of a blog in the US presidential primaries in 2003 and this was also the year when the first British MP Tom Watson (Labour) started a blog. His stated motivation was not, as Dean’s was, to use the blog as any sort of campaigning tool. Instead, Watson proposed to use the blog to make himself more accountable to his constituents. Jackson (2008) agrees that the limited number of British politicians who do blog do not choose to do so in order to campaign. His research into seven MPs’ blogs in 2005 suggested that MPs were attracted to blogging because they hoped it would give them a more human, personal face and that the blog would be a useful tool to establish dialogue between themselves and interested members of the public. There has also been the motivator of external pressure from organisations such as the Hansard Society. However, Jackson suggests that the readers and commentators of such blogs may not necessarily be members of the MP’s own constituency but rather members of a new ‘e-constituency’ that can grow up around the blog. Thus, blogs might help MPs to gather information and develop their policy ideas in specialist fields, but might not help them in their communication with their original constituents – and such a division between these two constituencies, one online and one offline, might lead to problems.

It is worth noting here the reasons why some MPs choose not to blog. Nineteen MPs told Jackson that they had considered blogging and decided against it, firstly, because of the pressure of time – they did not believe that the benefits of blogging would be worth the amount of work they would have to put into it – and, secondly, because of a fear of possible consequences. They feared that a blog’s comments section could be abused or taken over by their opponents. There was also reference to the belief that comments made by Judy Dunn, the Liberal Democrat candidate in a Hartlepool by-election, on her blog caused her to lose that election.

One of the respondents to the 2007 survey was a 26-year-old female district councillor who described her blog as ‘a way to connect with the electorate’. The three satisfaction descriptions that she chose agreed with Jackson’s findings: helping to clarify her thinking, giving her approval and giving her support for her ideas. She also suggested that another positive benefit of her blog was that of raising her profile in the Labour party. She had started her blog in 2005 to support her parliamentary candidacy. After the election, her blog became more personal, but was transformed again into what she described as a ‘councillor-blog’ after her election to the city council in 2006:

This respondent is thus a very good example of the way in which bloggers’ motivations for starting and then continuing a blog can change over time. Her desire to give a female politician’s view echoes the motivations of the MP blogger Sandra Gidley, who stated that she had started her blog in order to give the female view of Parliament as well as give an insight into the local things that an MP does, which are less reported in the mainstream media (Jackson, 2008). However, echoing the fears about public servants blogging mentioned previously, the councillor blogger had got into trouble through her blogging:

This is a good example of an occasion on which a newspaper journalist has found a story by paying attention to the blogosphere. Although this respondent had found that the immediacy of her blog led her to publish material that she had not fully considered in the way she might have done had she been writing for a more traditional form of publication in a newspaper, she still considered blogging to be useful for her political career. Another male respondent in 2006 found that it was actually his blogging that gave him enough confidence in himself and his own opinions to stand as a candidate for Parliament in a recent election:

Thus, the respondents were comfortable with the idea of blogging as a form of journalism, but only a minority appeared to see their own blogs in this way or attempted anything that might be described as citizen journalism. This group included both men and women, although there were fewer female bloggers than male bloggers and, as we have seen from the example of the female councillor, when women blogged about politics, they might do so because this would help them stand out as different. There also appeared to be more of a desire to use a blog to comment on and criticise local or national politicians than the mainstream media itself; thus, the idea of bloggers as a fifth estate is not particularly useful when analysing this group of bloggers. For the majority, their blogging was not journalism – it was a much more personal and internal affair, focused on their own lives and experiences rather than attempts to influence others or become embroiled in a debate about public affairs. For these respondents, their concept of blogging as a form of journalism must therefore be deduced to come from media coverage of other, A-list blogs rather than their own experiences. As one British respondent commented, distancing himself from that kind of blog: ‘It’s all things to all people, really – in the US it’s mainly journalistic.’

Blogging as creative writing

Although around a quarter of the respondents saw blogging as a form of journalism, a similar number of respondents stated that they considered blogging to be a form of creative writing (34 in the 2006 survey and 76 in the 2007 survey). In fact, the creative writing option was the most popular option in the 2007 survey and the second-most popular option in the 2006 survey. This popularity can also be linked to the popularity of the satisfactions relating to the display and exercise of talents given in Table 3.2. The respondents were also asked why they found blogging useful and the results are given in Table 3.3.

It is obvious that the respondents closely associated blogging with the provision of an audience for their creative and intellectual work. As we saw in the quote from the would-be male politician mentioned previously, blogging is seen as a more immediate way of publishing your thoughts and opinions than writing in an exercise book and then keeping it in a drawer or attempting to persuade gate-keepers such as editors to publish them:

It also became obvious that the blog was not seen as an end in itself but rather as a staging post on the road to more public (and hopefully remunerative) fulfilment:

We will investigate the possibilities of a blog leading to a publishing deal in more detail later.

The idea of blogging as a form of creative writing thus seems to have been a more accessible concept for these respondents than the idea of blogging as a form of journalism. While only a minority of bloggers consider themselves to be acting as journalists, far more are open to the idea that they might be publishers (Shirky, 2008: 79). The motivation of self-expression, linked to the need to articulate ideas and emotions through writing, is evidently an important element in blogging – and the desire to gain an audience for one’s creative and intellectual work can also be linked to ideas of voyeurism and exhibitionism (Gurak and Antonijevic, 2008). Indeed, as blogging tools have become easier to use, it seems that self-expression and social interaction have become the dominant motivations for blogging, moving away from the earlier information gratification motivation (Trammell et al., 2006).

Thus, an investigation of the journalistic motivation suggests that this was a strong motivator for only a minority of our group of bloggers. Although they identified with the idea of blogging as a form of journalism, few saw their own blogging in such terms and the majority focused their posts on internal rather than external events. Venting and ‘blowing off steam’ were important factors for most respondents, but most of these types of posts were about their own lives rather than public affairs. Neither did many get involved in debates about public affairs on their blogs, although those who did tended to perceive them as stimulating rather than upsetting. However, if we widen the scope of our enquiry to include the concept of blogging as a form of creative writing, we find not only a similar high level of acceptance of this concept among our respondents but also more evidence of creative writing being part of their own personal blogging rather than merely an acceptance of the mainstream media’s definition of blogging, as seems to be the case with journalism. The respondents found a great deal of satisfaction in the thought that they were displaying their creative and intellectual work through their blog and were also hopeful that the oxygen of such publicity might lead to the possibility of a wider acclaim. One hope that was frequently expressed was that their blog might lead to a publishing deal and this optimism will be further investigated and assessed in Chapter 6.