A moderator of great debates
I began working at The Sun in November 1998 and took over the Letters to the Editor pages in March 1999. I supervised and edited those pages for 10-plus years until those awful days in April 2009 when Sun management decided to do so much to so deeply damage what was left of a once-proud newspaper by peremptorily dismissing so many talented people. But despite the ugly end, I had quite a run with the editorial board through turbulent times. The job proved much more challenging and engaging than I had expected and certainly ended up giving me more of an education in public affairs and journalism than I had dreamed it could. And for years we had a wonderful community of writers on The Sun’s letters pages and
managed to host a lively and diverse forum that really did, I think, play a meaningful role in the public life of the region.
Being Letters Editor sounds like an easy job: find a few letters, do a little editing and put them in the paper. I may have thought the work would be rather simple when I took the job. But I soon learned that doing the job well would be quite challenging and time-consuming. There were always so many letters to go through. Identifying the good ones and making sure we got as many of them published as possible, to say nothing of seeing to it that each letter was cogent, concise and accurate, and that each sentence of each letter actually made sense, took a great many hours. But most of the time it was satisfying and edifying work.
The remarkable thing about being Letters Editor is that it puts you right in the middle of all the public debates of the day. Reading hundreds of letters forces you to see very
clearly what the public is passionate about; intelligently editing scores of them each week requires you to have quite a command of ongoing events and the details of policy and governance.
I often described my role as Letters Editor as being the referee of a public forum. But that image is only partially accurate. I did, of course, act as a referee: deciding what to rule in and rule out, enforcing rules of civility, cogency and accuracy. But a referee merely supervises and makes rulings. I spent much of my time trying to work with the writers to help them improve their letters for publication and to make the strongest and most effective argument possible.
Indeed, the greatest satisfaction of being Letters Editor is that it gave me the opportunity to help ordinary folks, people who hold no public office and may not be particularly well-educated, have the chance to make their views part of the public debate, perhaps in a more compelling form than they could have prepared on their own. Helping give people a voice this way was truly satisfying and seemed to me to be a real contribution to public life.
I edited and helped publish thousands and thousands of letters over the years – perhaps 35,000 (about 70 letters a week for about 50 weeks a year over 10 years). We had letters from all kinds of prominent people,
Photo by Elizabeth Malby
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