Thursday 14 June 2007

Letter To The Editor

My mom and I were discussing an article in the Globe and Mail the other day (yes she still gets a paper every morning) and at some point she said to me

"you know what, you should write a letter to the editor"

Letter to the editor? What's that?

It's funny that in her world blogging doesn't mean anything to her. She is 68 and the only blogs she reads are when i forward her something of note and then to her, it would be the same as getting any website url. It could be the Globe and Mail online or it could be Joe Schmo's blog. It pretty much looks the same to her.

So I laughed (with her, not at her - she's my mom after all) and said, yeah mom, those are called blog comments now.

Reminds me of when my daughter saw an old electric typewriter on the side of the road in a garbage pile and asked "what’s that mommy?"

Letter to the editor. Soon to be a thing of the past.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Letter to the editor. Soon to be a thing of the past."

This seems like a pretty sweeping statement. Blogs have undoubtedly changed the way that a lot of people communicate, but I'm convinced that editorial letters (in both newspapers and magazines) still get a hell of a lot of eyeballs.

I write editorial letters and I write blog comments. What's the difference? I'm commenting on articles in different media. People are still going to write/read editorial letters as newspapers and magazines continue their transition online. (Or are you making a bigger argument that professional writing in these types of publications is going to go away too?)

I think we're both just expressing personal opinions. Unless you have some empirical data to back up your death watch! :)

Anonymous said...

Thing of the past? Only if you mean in the newspaper/hardcopy format... I bet their online brothers thrive wrt "letters to the editor".

 
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