A very nice woman came into the office recently and asked if she could write. She’d had a nice experience with a local non-profit group and wanted to publicly thank it.
I suggested she send a letter to the editor because she had some interesting details of her experience, but the Cortland Standard has a policy: We don’t publish thank you letters.
The policy was instituted long before I was managing editor, in fact, long before I was ever hired. And even if I had been around when it was created, the fact remains that I don’t actually set Opinion page policy. The opinion side of the newsroom is overseen by the Opinion page editor, who nowadays doubles as the publisher, Evan Geibel.
But I understand why it exists. Years ago, people would send thank you letters for every little thing, and we’d get long lists of names and agencies and whatnot by the organizers of the Belly Lint Festival, or the Cakewalk Cornucopia Celebration or any of a number of other things. But lists of names are boring, and they take up a lot of space, space better used to give you your neighbors’ insights into ongoing issues, from national politics to local policies regarding billboards, LED signs, education policy or whatever the issue of the day might be.
The news side of the newsroom has similar policies. We don’t do stories of ribbon-cuttings, check-passings, ground-breakings or grand-openings. They’re all the same story, the same quote, the same photo. News should be about interesting stuff.
So I’m not sure if the nice woman’s letter will be suitable for publication, but it’s worth a try.
However, there are work arounds — ways to make the letter or the story pitch interesting, and not simply a recitation of a list of names of people to thank or a command that we show up to your dog-and-pony show.
Don’t make the letter about the gratitude, make it about the experience, the insight. The perspective.
If, for example, you went to the high school staging of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” (in which I played Peter Quince), don’t just say the actors, the tech people all deserve a round of applause — they got that at the performance — give readers some insight into why the show was good.
Likewise, nobody cares that your business is opening/you’re getting a donation/you’re breaking ground. What they care about, if they care about anything at all, is what makes it unique. A new pizza joint/sandwich shop/bodega is going to have to clear a pretty high hurdle to show us something unique. A never-before seen business like a children’s play space, for example, actually is unique. We don’t care about the ground-breaking, but the $10 million cancer center to come out of the broken ground sounds pretty newsworthy. See where I’m going here?
Former state Sen. Jim Seward was great at that sort of stuff. He didn’t bother bringing a 3-foot check with him, he’d bring himself and a lot of curiosity. I watched once as he came to the newly renovated Homer Town Hall, for which he’d wrangled a grant. He didn’t pass a check; he asked for a tour and seemed genuinely excited at what the town had done and then-Supervisor Fred Forbes’ enthusiasm for the antiques discovered in the building’s nooks and crannies. It was fun to watch, and to read about.
If you’re writing a letter, do keep the fundamental policies in mind: Keep it to 300 words or fewer, or 200 for a political statement. Please use language suitable for a family newspaper. Include your name — we don’t publish anonymous letters — your home address, and a daytime telephone number. Your address and phone number aren’t for publication, but we do list the municipality in which you live, and may need to contact you should we have a question or concern.
You can email letters to opinion@cortlandstandard.com or use the form on our website, at www.cortlandstandard.com/forms/letters/.
We’re really not so excited about your lists. But we, and we think our readers, value your insight and perspective.
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Todd R. McAdam is managing editor of the Cortland Standard. He can be reached at tmcadam@cortlandstandard.com.
