Editor’s Note
Back in the old days — that’s less than a decade and before there were such things as blogs and interactive conversations with readers — editors used to respond to their newspaper readers with an “editor’s note.” Sometimes it clarified a point made in a letter to the editor. Sometimes it offered a correction. Sometimes it was just a simple explanation. An editor’s note was a handful of sentences; maybe a four or five paragraphs. It was always a personal link between the editor and the reader. Only difference between it and today’s blog is the immediacy and the platform. Welcome to Editor’s Note.

Archive for June 10th, 2008

On writing columns, blogs and editor’s notes

2 comments June 10th, 2008

When I started in the news business in 1972, we did these things called “editor’s notes.” Small, two or three sentence responses to readers’ letters to the editor, a short explainer of why a story was important, or just a comment from the editor on a particular subject. It was a personal connection that for some reason disappeared from newspapers over the next decades. An editor’s column just wasn’t quite the same as those short, quick notes. Then, along come blogs, and while the young ones think they’ve discovered something, blogs are pretty much a digital editor’s note.

I’ve missed — sorta — writing my weekly column for the Sunday Opinion section, but after at least 25 years of weekly columns, I was tired of doing them so I took a couple-year break. I’ve written on other rrstar.com blogs, and now I want to experiment with my own. Might work; might not. We’ll see.

Can I post from my Treo?

1 comment June 10th, 2008

I’m sure I can but doing it for the first time is always interesting. Let’s see if it is efficient enough to do regularly.