the regional variations in his study.
In addition to sorting and choosing letters, letters are sometimes edited and their
meaning altered. Raeymaeckers (2005) demonstrates editorial bias in a creative research
design which includes interviews with editors and the controlled submission of letters to
the editor in a range of publications in Belgium. Of the 101 letters she sent across the
three week period, 25% were published, with various forms of editing present. The letter
topics ranged from the Iraq war to a heavy snow fall. While she made no attempt to
assess whether some issue topics were more likely to get published than others, her work
illustrates how the meaning of letters are altered with editing and headlining and how
dialogue is constructed in the process of publication.
Karin Wahl-Jorgensen’s recent work on the discourse quality of editorial pages
also emphasizes the construction that accompanies published letters. She conducted
qualitative interviews in 1999 with 23 editors in large and small papers in and around the
San Francisco Bay area. Her aim was to understand editorial decisions that represent the
“construction of the public that takes place on letters pages” (2002:123). She finds
editors prefer letters that are more individualistic and emotionally charged (2001). In
addition, she finds support among her interviewees for a “normative-economic
justification” for public discourse, one that combines a sincere interest in the paper’s
community role to foster dialogue with more commercial concerns of readership and
revenue. Thus, when editors privilege “readers” in their choice of letter writers, focus
more exclusively on local issues, or prioritize letters that respond to the paper’s prior
coverage or editorials they are, in effect, making an economic-based calculation that
narrows the public interest and community their papers embrace.
Convention