Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with letterstotheeditor

Sending emails through a nonprofit's website

acridrabbit — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 09:47:54 -0800

How to set up a way for my non-profit's supporters to send letters to the editor and to elected officials online? I'm looking for a way to set up an online letter-writing campaign. Ideally, a supporter would be able to visit our website, select from a list of recipients, customize the body of the email, and hit send.

My non-profit group's website runs on Wordpress and Drupal, but I haven't been able to find a plug-in or module-based solution through either of those platforms. Is there a stand-alone solution or an easy way to implement this?

Letters to the Editor Protocol?

billysumday — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:26:44 -0800

Is there a journalistic protocol that newspapers adhere to when printing letters to the editor? The small town newspaper from where I grew up typically just posts a random assortment of letters from old codgers. However, in the last 3 years or so it has been posting, on an almost weekly basis, letters written by a local man who founded a very prominent White Nationalist organization, and who at one time was one of the most prominent neo-Nazis in America. Most of these gentleman's letters rail against the government in general; occasionally however he will spew a bit of venom at illegal immigrants and African Americans. A couple of months ago he called Barack Obama's Kenyan father an animal. The letters include nothing but the content of the letter and the man's name. There have been a couple of times when members of the community have written in to "expose" this man, and their letters are printed as well. My question though is this: does this newspaper have an obligation to identify this man when he writes in? Some sort of "editor's note" that accompanies each letter? Is providing this person with free editorial space some sort of tacit approval?

I realize that printing letters to the editor is not illegal - we've got a first amendment for that kind of stuff. But I am wondering how letters are sorted through and printed on a more general level - obviously not all letters are printed (most have policies regarding limit of letters per week or month), and if a prominent or unseemly person were to write in, I feel as though typically that is addressed through an editor's note. Thanks for any clarifications or insights you may have.

Decent Letters-to-the-Editor pages?

UbuRoivas — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 19:12:04 -0800

Any recommendations for decent Letters-to-the-Editor pages? Before MetaFilter was invented, the best way I knew of to get my daily fix of what the more intelligent or humourous members of the general public thought about stuff was by reading the Letters to the Editor page of any quality newspaper.

The Times' letters page is probably the venerable grandfather of all, but for parochial & cost reasons I would normally stick to the Herald, if anybody needs any guidance to the kind of thing I am looking for.

My question is this: can anybody point me towards similar sites from American newspapers? Last time I checked the only two I know of that are worth reading (NYT & WaPo), the letters pages seemed very meagre indeed, and quite undemocratic: it seemed that you already had to be a senator, ambassador, hospital director etc to be chosen as worthy for publication.

If anybody knows of any particularly insightful, witty & well-edited letters pages from elsewhere in the world, I would also like to hear your recommendations.

Looking for a "Letter to the Editor" function for a nonprofit web site

potsmokinghippieoverlord — Wed, 03 May 2006 14:56:01 -0800

Letter to the Editor creator for websites? My organization will be building a new web site. The powers that be have decreed that it has a "build your own letter to the editor" function, similar (if not exactly like) the one here.

Now, personally, I question the value of such a tool, since it smacks of "astroturfing," but I have been overruled. In fact, it is so important to the muckety-mucks and pooh-bahs that without it, they may forgo the site.

I have investigated "Political Outreach" (which powers the function in the example site, and is the one I'm leaning toward), and "Capitol Advantage" (aka CapWiz, which has the function but doesn't sell it separate from its suite of packages).

Are there any other LTE widgets out there? My Google-fu is failing me -- when I try "Letter to the editor" and "javascript" I just get a lot of newspaper sites.

Thanks!