Letter to the editor

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“Open answer to a letter to the editor”. Berliner Zeitung 1946

A letter to the editor is a written expression of opinion or information on a specific topic. He usually reacts to newspaper and magazine articles (or contributions from an Internet forum , blog or newsgroup ). He picks up on a contribution, agrees, adds or disagrees and corrects it.

Readers usually sent their letters by post , later by fax and, since the beginning of the 21st century, more and more often by email . You are thus aiming for publication in the corresponding section of the publication. Very few letters to the editor are printed, if only for reasons of space. The counterpart to the newspaper's classic letters to the editor is called listeners' mail on radio , spectator mail on television and reader comments in the world of blogs . Radio editors dedicated their own programs to the listener mail. In the meantime, this has shifted to the Internet: newspaper editors and broadcasters run blogs with a comment function parallel to their contributions.

history

Letters to the editor began to appear in the second half of the 18th century, coupled with the spread of the newspaper . They were seen as an important tool for political discourse. In the Anglo-Saxon-speaking area, all letters to the editor began with "Sir" because the letter writers were addressing the editor directly. Early German letters to the editor can be found in the newspaper for cities, towns and villages, especially for the dear country folk old and young , which the Protestant pastor Hermann Bräß (1738–1797) published from November 1, 1786 in Wolfenbüttel .

In the early days of the newspaper, letters to the editor had correspondent functions. They were often the only ones who witnessed a relevant process first hand. The editors reserved the right to trust this message and to print it. There have been cases in which writers to the editor have even been rewarded. With the advent of news agencies and telegraphy in the 19th century, letters to the editor took a back seat because the topicality of events overtook them. It was not until 1970 that theoretical research into the letter to the editor began and that more importance was given to it again. Linguistics assigns letters to the editor to the “judging text types”, literary studies to the aesthetics of reception . With the advent of the blogosphere around 1996, letters to the editor shifted more and more to the comment function of the internet portals of media companies.

selection

Editor-in-chief often selects from the number of correspondence according to media-specific criteria ( news ratings - i.e. topicality , prominence and author's competence, etc.). When printing, they adapt the customary spelling and formalities (e.g. abbreviations, rearrangements, substitutions, for example, of numbers) with a view to their editorial principles. Calls from listeners and viewers to ongoing radio programs , also known as join- in programs , are often of a similar nature and, like letters to the editor, are partly citizen journalism . However, broadcasts only about listeners and viewers' reactions are rare.

Serious and dubious practices

Dubious editors occasionally write themselves letters to the editor in order to pretend public interest for an article or a topic or to start or lead a campaign, but not to bear full responsibility for it, but to pass it on to fictitious readers. Guideline 2.6, which the German Press Council issued in its press code and last updated on December 3, 2008, says in detail what editors have to consider when writing letters to readers. As a rule, editors ensure that they know the authors of the letters by name and address. In sensitive cases, comments such as "The writer is known to the editors" are added to a print. However, some editorial offices are also increasingly publishing blogs and e-mails, which only mention abbreviated names, nicknames and pseudonyms as authors. Instead of letters to the editor, the satirical magazine Titanic has a “Letters to Readers” section in which it comments on the behavior of celebrities and public life in letters to its alleged readers. B .: “You, Ulrich Tukur , confess in the mirror : 'I just know: something is not ticking right for me .'...”.

literature

  • Karin Stockinger-Ehrnstorfer: The letter to the editor. Landespressebüro, Salzburg 1980. (= Salzburg Documentations, Vol. 48) (abridged version of a phil. Diss., Salzburg 1979)
  • Sabine Lorek: Letters to the Editor as a Niche in Public Communication. An investigation from a learning theory perspective. Lit-Verlag, Münster 1982 (= university publications, department of educational science), at the same time phil. Diss. Münster.
  • Markus Schnurpfeil: On page 1! Plea for an offensive letters to the editor. / Hergen Eilert: Two to three thousand a month. Editorial handling of letters to the editor. In: medium, 19th year 1989, issue 1, pp. 72–75. ISSN  0025-8350 .
  • Julia Heupel: The letter to the editor in the German press. Nomos, Baden-Baden 2007. ISBN 978-3-8329-4355-4 .
  • Andrea Mlitz: Dialogue-oriented journalism. Letters to the editor in the German daily press. UVK, Konstanz 2008 (phil. Diss. Eichstätt). ISBN 978-3-86764-050-3 .
  • Wolfram Bayer et al. (Ed.): Thomas Bernhard - On the trail of truth. The public appearances. Speeches, letters to the editor, interviews, feature sections . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M. 2010, ISBN 978-3-518-42214-4 .
  • Alfons Rujner: Interfered! Letters to the editor and memoranda from 1996 to 2010 . Hendrik Bäßler Verlag, Berlin 2010. ISBN 978-3-930388-59-2 .

Web links

Commons : Letters to the Editor  - Collection of images, videos, and audio files
Wiktionary: Letter to the editor  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Berliner Zeitung initially had no letters to the editor. However, the editors kept responding to readers' mail and quoted them. In this example, a reader complained about the poor supply situation in Berlin a year after the end of the war. The editorial team replied that in view of the devastation caused by National Socialism, there were other priorities than sewing thread.
  2. ↑ In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, for example, this section is called “Letters to the Editor”; In the Austrian magazine FORVM , letters to the editor could be found for a while under "Letters against the editor".
  3. ↑ Eckart Roloff : Hermann Bräß: A country pastor creates the letter to the editor. In: Eckart Roloff: Divine flashes of inspiration. Pastors and priests as inventors and discoverers. Verlag Wiley-VCH 2010, pages 183-196. ISBN 978-3-527-32578-8 .
  4. ↑ The American standard work on the renaissance of the letter to the editor is Norman N. Holland's The Dynamics of Literary Response , Oxford University Press, New York 1968. ISBN 978-0-393-00790-9 . Full text on Holland's website: [1]
  5. ^ Eckard Rolf: The functions of the useful text sorts , De Gruyter, 1993. ISBN 978-3-11-012551-1
  6. ↑ Gaby Sohl: The readership is the mirror of the newspaper. (Guest contribution by the editor-in-chief of the 'taz'. In: ndCommune, supplement to the newspaper Neues Deutschland , March 28, 2020, p. 10)
  7. ↑ Eckart Roloff : Fashion with striking defects . In: New Germany . October 13, 2012 ( neue-deutschland.de ).
  8. ↑ From Titanic 11/2014