With cuts coming, what about the letters?

Times change, and lovers of newspapers know it all too well. With what seems like the constant downsizing at The Denver Post, some of our most beloved features become memories.

As we prepare to shed more than two dozen journalists starting Monday, with more cuts coming through July, we’re in the process of rethinking our offerings. We have to.

And that rethinking applies to our editorial and opinion pages, as we are losing staff in our tiny department as well.

What to do? The gung-ho strategy — do more with less — was the one we employed the last time.

Our letters to the editor become an obvious target. Given that we provide our readers opportunity for almost unlimited online commentary for the news articles and opinion pieces we publish, one might credibly ask: Why also offer the letters?

After all, letters to the editor take an enormous amount of time and resources to select, fact-check, edit, verify and produce for publication.

When I became The Denver Post’s editorial page editor, following staff cuts midway through 2016, I wondered about the usefulness of maintaining them. But doing so felt like sinning.

Letters to the editor represent so much of what is laudable about newspapers. Every time we publish one in our pages means something tremendous. Their publication proves the organization’s deep desire to remain accountable to our readers, for we publish even those writers most critical of our work.

Let us now celebrate our letter-writers! Their contributions are incalculable, big chunks of our DNA. Their blood and sweat and tears mix every bit as deeply in our ink as that of our paid professionals.

Letter-writers can call us out for getting it wrong, or — just as galling — getting it only sort of right. They can praise reporting and writing that matters to them and their community. They can grouse about a botched headline, point out a cartoon that crosses the line, question why we didn’t cover an important story, or neglected to weigh in on the latest scandal or big idea coming out of City Hall, the Colorado Capitol and all the way up to the president of the United States.

Our letter-writers have as much access to the full spectrum of subject matter we afford ourselves — and more.

Reading through them day after day is like doing a devotional. Here are the real voices and ideas of Coloradans. So often, the ideas and insights and questions within them lead to or inform stories, columns, editorials and our view of things.

What about social media? Haven’t those platforms obviated the need? Can’t folks just call us out on Twitter? For they surely do!

It’s a fine point. Never in the history of publication have readers of newspapers had more opportunity to make their voices known.

Given that reality, aren’t we just being quaint maintaining the same old letters to the editor feature we’ve been offering for decades and decades?

Maybe so.

But cutting them would be a shame, and a significant absence in the public square.

While online and social media commentary has a world of advantages, and may in fact be the better route going forward, there is just something about a letter to the editor.

Readers of our letters know they hold before them the work of real, verifiable human beings, professionally vetted and edited. They enrich our grand democratic experiment.

There’s a gotcha coming here. Arguments for maintaining the letters also apply to maintaining our newsroom and opinion staff, but budget realities mean we get less of both.

It’s one of the reasons big cuts to a local newspaper hurt in the ways that they do. You can’t even fully comprehend what is lost, because it simply isn’t there anymore. The possibilities shrivel and blow away.

We’ll do our best, but changes are coming. We will be offering less.

Hopefully you’ll still be able to write in and let us know about it, and we’ll still be able to keep finding a place on the page.