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.

On writing columns, blogs and editor’s notes

June 10th, 2008 at 09:32am Linda Grist Cunningham

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.

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2 Comments Add your own

  • 1. Pat Cunningham  |  June 12th, 2008 at 9:54 am

    LGC: Welcome to the wild and wooly blogosphere. It gets a little snarky in here at times, but I’m sure you can give as well as you get. As we say in Latin: Illegitimi non carborundum.

  • 2. Linda Grist Cunningham  |  June 12th, 2008 at 5:23 pm

    Tnx, PTC. I figured if you could do it, heck, why not give it a whirl. On the other hand, your traffic will leave me in the dust.

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