We love it when people e-mail us their letters to the editor, rather than mailing them conventionally or bringing by the office, because then we don’t have to type them into the system. It saves time and gets folks’ letters into the paper faster.
However, this whole Internet thing isn’t perfect. Once every couple of months somebody will e-mail me a letter to the editor, and for whatever reason it’s unreadable or corrupt or there’s some sort of odd technical issue (Right now, I’m trying to deal with the whole issue of reading .docx files because I’m on a Mac — they claim the built-in text reading file should open it, but I just get gobbledy gook). I e-mail the writer back to let them know there’s a problem, but sometimes I get no response. I got an unreadable letter to the editor last week, but the sender has not responded to me and so his or her letter can’t be published.
If you’re sending a letter to the editor through e-mail, make sure you’re using an e-mail address that you check on a regular basis. If there’s an issue with running your letter, you’ll never know otherwise and wonder why we haven’t run it. Failing that, if you e-mail in a letter to the editor and don’t see it in about two weeks, give us a call to find out what’s going on. Sometimes letters get lost in cyberspace and we never receive them at all.
