BEHIND OUR DECISIONS

The hardest part about deciding which letters get in the paper and which don’t is knowing a lot of well-written submissions never make it, through little fault of their writers.

These are the ones about a great teacher that made a lasting impression. The ones that look back on a fond memory about San Diego of old. The ones that express affection for a partner, spouse, parent or sibling.

No subject, be it the width of parking spaces at the mall, the size of type on consumer packaging or “kids these days” is too small a topic for letter writers. They are a creative bunch, and we are happy to receive every letter, but they can’t all get into The San Diego Union-Tribune. At least not the print version. There are a number of reasons for this beyond our policy that letters be relevant, civil and accurate, but the leading ones are space limitations, suitability for a local newspaper and timing constraints.

When we get dozens of letters on some subjects, such as the recent mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, we can only print so many of them. There is just not enough room in the paper even on the occasional days when we devote a full page to your letters.

When the words people choose cross the line into incivility, profanity or obscenity, those are passed over for ones that adhere to our publication standards.

And when we get letters about an event or anniversary on the very day it occurs, the clock itself is the enemy. This makes them too late for timely publication in the print edition.

Sometimes the news of the day is moving so quickly, the window to write closes as the story has changed or the world has moved on to a new chapter. Instead, we post as many online letters as possible in a timely fashion, as was the case with the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on abortion, the shootings, the assault on the U.S. Capitol and any number of other breaking news events. Then we populate the print edition with letters that are more reflective and have a longer shelf life.

But there are other reasons letters get passed over.

Some letters are too long for our 150-word limit and authors decline to shorten them. In particular, long quotes from famous authors, no matter how aptly they illustrate a point, likely won’t get in as writers only have so many of their own words to make their points. We try to include as many voices as possible, and that usually means eight to 10 a day on days we run letters in print, which is Thursday through Sunday. We do run longer letters in our Saturday

Your Say feature, but there writers must stick to a suggested topic.

Poems, limericks, acrostics, letters written to the tune of a popular song and other creative forms of writing also don’t tend to make the cut because, while they can be wonderful, we don’t want to set a precedent that too many readers might want to follow. For example, we get at least a dozen “T’was the night before Christmas” parodies each year around the holidays. Our sense is people come to the letters section for dialogue, which really should take conversational form, as if our readers were actually talking to one another over coffee, or something stronger.

Sometimes we get a wave of letters from students who have been given an assignment by a teacher, and while we love connecting with young writers, there’s rarely

Here’s why some letters make the cut — and some don’t.

room for so many letters on the same topic, so we tend to choose one that best represents them all.

Similarly, we sometimes get what we call “AstroTurf,” a blast of letters about a certain candidate, topic or business — identified as such because they contain the same lines featured in cut-and-paste fashion from some template that’s been circulated among the faithful. In this case, too, we may pick a representative letter or we may reach out to one writer to see if he or she can put the message in his or her own words.

We also get letters from people complaining about specific businesses that let them down, messed up their order, overcharged or underperformed, but we really can’t be the referee for such specific disputes.

And while we do run letters on obscure, underreported and even quirky topics from time to time to keep things interesting, most of the letters we run reflect the breadth of submissions we receive. There is always a lot going on in the world, and we hear from many of you who read about it in the rest of our newspaper.

Ultimately, what you see in print is a fraction of the letters that we get or that run online, and we try to give readers a feel for what most writers are most concerned about.

The wider the appeal, the more likely it is that your letter will be printed.

Kleske