Introduction
As Wahl-Jorgensen (2007) has noted, letters are often disregarded by editors as peripheral to the main business of newspapers, their role often to signal a connection with the public and provide an, albeit sometimes limited, platform for their views and opinions. Despite the blurring of identities in early print publications and newspapers, letters have more recently been used to reinforce professional boundaries between journalists and the public—to demarcate the boundaries of the professional and amateur communicator. However, letters also contribute to the identity of the publication by expanding the varieties of argumentation and playing a role in defining the scope of readers’ responses to news; morally orientating the reader with the editorial position of the newspaper, while also serving as a space for a wide variety of opinion. Letters therefore provide a window on the reflexive relationship between editorial identity and readership—scoping out the legitimate discursive parameters of both readers and the identity of the publication. Letters are also of course a forum through which the personal and the political intersect, a space where the implications of contemporaneous events are worked out by citizens and public figures alike. Letters can therefore be understood as a space in which the meaning and significance of unfolding narratives and events are contested. They can be used to understand the continuity of concerns over time, the multiple and overlapping ways in which particular concerns and issues recur over sometimes widely removed periods, and the changes in the ways those concerns have been articulated and framed. All of these concerns shaped our sense that there are still significant stories to tell about the role, function and impact of letters to the editor within the public discursive realm.
The intellectual seeds for this edited collection were initially laid at a seminar organised by the editors at the University of Sheffield in July 2015. The seminar brought together a number of leading scholars of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century press to evaluate the current state of research into letters to the editor and to develop new ways of exploring this aspect of newspaper history. The seminar was timely, given that large scale digitalisation of these sources has opened up this potential field for further research and scholarship. The seminar therefore also sought to showcase approaches to the use of letters to the editor as a resource and consider new empirical and theoretical applications of this rich resource. The workshop was intended to explore the terrain of research in this area up to that time and to consolidate and re-think ways in which questions relating to letters to the editor might be explored further. Following the success of the workshop, a panel proposal was put together which was based around the themes emerging from the workshop for the International Communication Association conference in Fukuoka, Japan, in 2016. The panel proposal took a similar approach to the initial seminar in seeking to explore the current state of research on letters to the editor but broadening out the scope to include wider international perspectives. We were particularly happy to include work that provided cross-national or cross-cultural perspectives on letters to the editor, and work which interrogated the changing role and function of letters, situating them within the context of other social institutions and practices. We were also concerned to understand the ways in which news environments, political systems and readerships interact in the production of rival understandings of the affordances of letters to the editor as a component of the public sphere, all of which are key concerns which inform this collection.
The chapters in this edited collection therefore follow on from this earlier collaborative work and are an attempt to showcase current work on letters to the editor from a range of different national, cultural, conceptual and methodological perspectives. The volume begins with Marisa Torres da Silva’s analysis of regular or ‘professional’ letter writers in the Portuguese press and draws on survey research to explore letter writers’ motivation and intentions in their letter-writing activity. This chapter deals with notions of participation and engagement as feedback loop towards professional journalism. Considering the changing environment for audience and reader feedback, in relation to digital news, the chapter highlights the continued significance and importance of letters to the editor as a component of, or ‘hybrid’ notion of citizen engagement and participation in public discourse as differentiated from online comment. Engagement here is demonstrated not solely in terms of letter writers reacting to events in the press. For so-called professional letter writers, da Silva emphasises how such activities can stimulate collective action and real-world political participation as the letter writers organise themselves collectively in their endeavours. Civic participation is also a key theme in Sarah Pedersen’s chapter which focusses on how the issue of women’s suffrage in Scotland was articulated in letters to Scottish newspapers between 1918 and 1928. Pedersen foregrounds how this period saw women’s citizenship became validated through partial access to voting rights—something not complete until 1928. The chapter emphasises the complex nature of political and civic participation through letters to the editor and how a range of different political constituencies sought to shape the nature of their citizenship through political action that was supplemented and justified in these letters. The chapter puts forward the notion that the letters created and constituted a ‘feminine public sphere’ which sought to fully establish women as part of the whole political and civic community. It also emphasises the extent to which letters were also about women speaking to each other, rather than just to men, within their own public sphere.
Perkins, Thornton and Varma’s chapter examines issues of marginalisation and race through their exploration of letters to the editor in the Chicago Defender during the great financial crash of 1929/1930. The chapter highlights how Robert S. Abbott’s Defender, one of America’s leading black newspapers of the time, sought to make the case for African Americans in the South to leave the brutal racism of the southern states and head north to make a new life for themselves. The chapter focusses on the responses to this call in the letter’s pages in the midst of the crash and its aftershocks. Signalling letters here as the ‘voice of a voiceless’ constituency, their chapter explores readers responses to the financial crash after the promise of a better life in the north. Instead of escaping racism, the letters examined here emphasise that the racism they experienced in the south was also present in the north. Yet the authors indicate that letters in this chapter also highlight how constituencies can come together in times of great adversity. Chapter 5 in our collection explores how letters to the editor can represent a range of emotional repertoires amongst national publics at times of national crisis and hardship. Focussing on letters to the editor in two major Colombian newspapers—El Heraldo and El Tiempo , Barrios and Gil explore how national identity and a collective patriotic spirit is configured through letters to the editor in ways that express a range of emotional sentiments and concerns. By drawing on Ekman’s (2008) notion of afflictive and non-afflictive emotions, their chapter signals how letters to the editor provided space for Colombians to reflect on the complex social and political issues of the day, and in doing so, foreground an aspiration for justice and desire for peace in highly turbulent times.
Allison Cavanagh’s chapter returns to the notion of civic engagement and how such engagement emerges with conceptions of citizenship during the Victorian era in Britain with letters working as an ‘operative public space’ in which multiple forms of empowerment are expressed and performed. Drawing on digital archives of The Times , The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail , Cavanagh examines the ways in which letters to the editor in these newspapers provided a formal ‘modes of public engagement’ and positioning themselves as forming an explicit political citizenry at that time. Jane Chapman focusses on a specific period following the Great War when the various struggles of working-class women were made more visible through the pages of Labour Woman , originally the organ of the National Women’s Labour League. Chapman highlights how letters to Labour Woman signal both a ‘genuine idealism’ as well as significant anguish amongst women at this time. Moreover, these grounded accounts of women who, whilst on the one hand were full of optimism given the newly gained political empowerment some women enjoyed, also found themselves experiencing economic hardship following their ‘dismissal’ from the roles they took up during the war. Chapman’s chapter therefore details the ways in which the women of the Labour movement sought to express their growing political agency alongside deepening social and economic hardship following the war.
Clearly, the provenance of letters and their authenticity as meaningful articulations of a public voice or a form of social agency can only really be verified by the letters’ authors and the editors in whose newspapers they appear. We have to take letters at face value as a genuine expression of the newspapers’ voice. As such, regional letters in the Victorian era, as Andrew Hobbs’s chapter emphasises, are highly mediated forms of expression and exist as a ‘distinct type of journalism’ which signal aspects of ‘performativity’ in the identity of the publication. Rather than readers’ letters to the editor representing a form of political agency or growing sense of civic identity, Hobbs’s chapter addresses the sometimes confected nature of readers’ letters and their role in shaping the identity of the publication to its readership. The final chapter in our collection also engages with questions of journalistic intervention, this time in the deliberative spaces that online journalism provides. Drawing on their longitudinal study of below the line comment in the Guardian online, Todd Graham, Daniel Jackson and Scott Wright highlight how the traditional gatekeeping role of the journalist, in this newspaper at least, briefly opened up opportunities for a more participatory and active engagement with its readers. Rather than a focus on readers’ responses to journalistic content, this chapter examines how journalists have conceived and engaged within these spaces and the factors that shape their engagement with their readers over time. As such, this concluding chapter addresses questions of the changing nature of deliberation within online journalism and the way in which journalistic ‘boundary work’ itself has been reconfigured, albeit briefly, to encompass a more open and deliberative environment. However, the authors go on to highlight how online engagement has placed new pressures on journalists and, more saliently, the growing role that Twitter has as a platform for journalists to respond, though not necessarily engage with, their audiences.
Contemporary interest in changes wrought by a shift towards multiple overlapping and disjointed news environments, concerns for example around authenticity and ‘fake news’, the shift from traditional models of journalism and the breakdown of barriers both between mainstream and niche journalism and those betw...