Despite the abundance of opportunities for readers to get their voices heard and their opinions aired today, through blogs and online comments, there is one age-old forum that is as fiercely contested as ever – the letters page.
Staff on the Guardian’s letters desk assess 250 to 300 a day to decide which will be one of the 15 or so that make it into print. One reader was keen to discover why his letter didn’t make the cut: “On Friday [26 September] parliament held its most important debate and vote in years, about another Middle East intervention. However, on the Guardian letters page this week – the runup to the vote – only four letters on the subject appeared, three on Tuesday and one more (a group letter) on Wednesday – all against the intervention. Today (27 September) the proverbial horse having bolted, there are eight more letters similarly against the air strikes.
“As the Guardian is well-established as the newspaper of choice for the overwhelming majority of Labour and Liberal MPs – and influential as such - why did it choose to withhold its letter-writers from this crucial debate in its Thursday and Friday editions?”
I talked to letters desk colleagues about the selection process and what editors try to achieve in each day’s selection. Good letters – pithy, original, to the point, of about 250 words maximum – were not held back in the week before the vote. They just weren’t there in great numbers.
The letters editor of the day, when putting together a package of letters, is trying to tell a story, and avoid striking just one note. Israel/Palestine issues always produce a big postbag, as did the Scottish independence debate in the runup to the referendum. Sometimes whole pages are given over to a particular subject, and this was done twice in relation to the vote in Scotland. But even then there were hundreds more good letters on the subject for which there was no room in print – although dozens of these were published as online-only letters in the weeks before the vote, including packages on “Ten reasons Scotland should vote yes” and “Ten reasons Scotland should vote no”.
The letters desk doesn’t always have the resources to publish extra online-only letters, but all of those that appear in the print edition also go on the website. While they don’t always gain a large online readership, occasionally they do.
Those “yes” and “no” packages on the Scottish independence debate gained a combined total of more than 77,000 page views, with the help of a link from the Guardian homepage. And one package about the conflict in Gaza and the BBC’s coverage of it – including a letter by the musician Brian Eno – garnered nearly 60,000 page views after it was shared heavily on social media.
Of course there are some letter writers who make frequent appearances on the letters page. Among them are Fr Alec Mitchell, Bob Holman, Rev Paul Nicolson, Jeremy Beecham and Keith Flett. Is that because of favouritism? No, say the letters editors – persistence, brevity and good style wins them their places.
One problem, however, is a lack of female letter writers. The editors say only around one in five of all letters received for publication are written by women. That makes it difficult to ensure an appropriate gender balance on the page.
According to some quick research work done by colleagues in the Guardian’s Consumer Insight department among 1,323 members of the Guardian’s research panel of readers, known as The Crowd, in a 24-hour period, more men read the letters pages than women. This sample comprises people who read the Guardian in print, digitally or both, and has been weighted on age and gender to represent our core monthly audience.
Our core readership profile demonstrates a slight male skew (53:47). However, those who “make a point” of reading the letters pages in print are more likely to be male (61:39). Online, the male skew of regular letter readers is even more pronounced (64:36).
One problem that emerges clearly is that many fewer people read letters online because they can’t find them. Indeed, 30% of website users said they weren’t even aware that letters are published online. In total, 74% of print readers look at the letters page at least occasionally. Among website users, 66% never read the letters on the site. While 34% read them at least occasionally, only 4% of website users “make a point” of reading letters on the site.
Finally, the research suggests that 15% of our core readership has, at some time, written a letter to the Guardian.
