A Comment, if I May

Interrupting your regularly scheduled programming for just a moment.

This Sunday night I introduced a new feature to the site: Letters to the Editor. I wanted to spend a few minutes explaining the addition and why this route was chosen specifically.

First, the what: Letter to the Editor is a simple form letter for sending your follow-up, rebuttals, corrections, etc. You fill out the form, click send, and I get a letter in my inbox to read. I’m making a commitment to read every piece I may or may not receive, and if I think the thoughts expressed are particularly interesting and informative, I may use the letter as a jumping off point for a post, and I’ll also publish the entire letter in full, separate from any commentary I may have on it. Even if I don’t write an entire piece, I may still do the latter, especially if it’s well-written. So please, make my life easier and write well when you write in.

But hold on a second: this is the Internet. What the hell are we doing using this time-intensive process when I could save a lot of work for both parties and just add comments to the site? Allow me to explain.

Commentary

Origin stories are fairly uninteresting, but I think it’s important to know where I come from as a writer/editor, so I’ll try to keep it brief as possible. I grew and honed much of my writing skill, if you can call it that, working as an editor of the Commentary section for my high school newspaper, in what seems like far too long ago (granted, it was only little over four years). If ever there was a good place to become a good critic and an even better editor, I think high school is certainly in the upper echelons: there’s really no other place where you find such a breadth of ability, personality, and grammatical grasp than in that four year period.

One of my major responsibilities for the paper was handling all the replies and responses we received. We wouldn’t have a reply every issue, but with some regularity we’d receive a well thought-out letter about a story we had run in a previous issue. I’d be responsible for selecting a letter to run, if we ever received multiple for an issue, trim, with approval from the author, to make sure the letter fit on the page (this was dead-tree publication, remember), editing for grammar, and writing any rebuttal the staff may want to run with the piece.

Was it a lot of work for something that may not have had a lot of value? Possibly; we were devoting space to a reply to a piece that only a portion of our readership may have originally read, and if they hadn’t, they’d have little ability to read it now. Maybe that meant this was wasted space.

And yet, it also kept us honest to our writing, just knowing there was a possibility for our work to be publicly critiqued. And it also meant that an alternative opinion could be heard, rather than a mostly singular viewpoint from the editorials that we regularly published.

A Comment on Comments

But even if there is value in having a means to send in feedback, it doesn’t explain why comments can’t be used to accomplish this.

First, let’s get this out of the way: comments and commenting platforms are ugly. Just head to a controversial article on any site, and you’ll quickly lose faith in humanity. Most commenting systems are designed in such a way that it’s incredibly easy together ailed from the original intent - providing meaningful feedback about an article or editorial - to engage in a partisan debate with other vocal opinion holders. Reply threads, upvoting, mentioning, all of it contribute to engaging in fighting amongst each other rather than discourse about the topic. It’s a real shit show.

What it really boils down to is full editorial control. I actively want thoughtful opinion on my site, because. It makes my writing, and my argument, my opinion, my think, better, and it makes for a more interesting read. But I also have ownership over every word, letter, and pixel on this site. And as long as that is the case, I will be incredibly protective of what I publish. Is that controlling and dictatorial? Yeah. I also happen to believe that it makes for the best reader experience. Feel free to write in if you disagree.

A Final Comment

I’m not so arrogant to believe that having a Letter to the Editor section is the best way to engage in discussion on a particular site, or even if it is the right choice in my particular case. Heading to a separate section of the site, and filling in additional sections of a form raises the barrier to entry in no small way. There’s knowledge, too, that what you right may never see the light of day. Without a doubt, these are real deterrents.

I can certainly argue that these barriers make sure that only the best opinions, and the most thought-out arguments, will find their way to me. But no matter what, there will be great opinions, additional information, and just plain interesting conversation that will be missed out on simply because of the extra trouble.

For the moment though, I think that risk is worth taking.