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.



The role of the media and economic development
September 28th, 2008, 12:33 pm by Scott ShackfordCarol Randall’s response to my editorial regarding the city’s role (and lack thereof) in economic development contained a couple of sentences I found a little concerning:
I’d just like to make it very clear to Ms. Randall and to anybody out there who might think that this is case, that it is absolutely not the job of the Desert Dispatch to promote Barstow in a positive light.
Our job is to provide information to Barstow residents to help them make decisions about their own lives. Our job is to help Barstow residents understand what is going on in their community. We absolutely cannot do our job if we take on the role of city cheerleaders.
We’re a business, too, and what makes our information valuable is the trust readers have that we are fundamentally honest. If readers perceive that our newspaper serves the interest of city leaders and not the readers, they will not trust us, our newspaper will not be seen as valuable to this community, it will not provide certain information that readers need to know, and they will probably stop reading.
I always find it a little saddening when anybody in the business community suggests that we should turn a blind eye to our problems. First of all, they’re asking for us to hurt ourselves as a business in order to make the “community look good” in the belief that this will benefit them (it won’t — people aren’t blind). Second, bringing problems to light is a pretty darn good way to start fixing them. The public discussion surrounding Measure D and our safety needs has no doubt been fostered in part by our willingness to put all the information out there that we’ve got, pro and con.
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