Addressing recent letters to the editor

by Sara Swanson and Marsha Chartrand

We describe the Manchester Mirror as hyper-local. It’s news for Manchester, about Manchester, written by Manchester residents. Years ago we set a policy that we would only run letters to the editor covering local topics. If we receive a letter to the editor about a national or state issue affecting something locally specifically, we would run it, but otherwise we declined to run them.

These types of letters elicit strong emotional reactions and in general don’t change people’s minds on the topic. We always like to believe our readers are savvy enough to know that a letter to the editor is one reader’s opinion and not a position endorsed by the Mirror; however, that doesn’t stop readers from avoiding reading the Mirror consciously or unconsciously as a response to these letters and that is the last thing we want. Our goal with the Mirror is to get local information out to Manchester-area residents, and if we find a barrier to that goal, we do our best to try to remove it.

Over the last few weeks we’ve run a number of letters to the editor on national issues. This started because our above-stated policy has a loophole that allows people to write in responding to an article we published. A few weeks ago we ran a syndicated state news article about forest service workers in Michigan being fired which mentioned DOGE and received a letter to the editor in response to that. We also allow people to write responses to other people’s letters to the editor and that has started the current chain of letters to the editor on a national topic. We’ve received multiple complaints about the contents of the letters and many more letters in response.

First, we would like to apologize. Two weeks ago a letter entitled “Elon Musk is a patriot” contained the statement that Elon Musk’s team is not being paid for their work for DOGE. This is incorrect. Last week the letter entitled “Elon Musk is a traitor” contained an accusation that Elon Musk gained power through corrupt means. This drifts into the realm of character attack. We are sorry about both of these instances and thank our readers for holding us to our stated standards.

We’ve made the decision to close this loophole in this longstanding letter to the editor policy. Going forward we aren’t going to run letters to the editor that aren’t about local topics even if they are in response to articles we publish. This doesn’t mean we don’t want to hear from you if we get something wrong in an article! Please absolutely let us know (and if it is a state news article, you can let Bridge know as well). As always, we will make changes and run corrections as needed.

We acknowledge that what is happening at a state and national level affects us here in the Manchester area and it makes sense that you want to talk about it, but you don’t need the Mirror for this. There was a time that letters to the editor were one of the few ways to get your message out to your neighbors. Today, social media provides a vast array of options for this.

Please keep sending us letters to the editor on local topics.

For as little as $1 a month, you can keep Manchester-focused news coverage alive.

by Sara Swanson

Sara Swanson is an editor, writer and founder of the Manchester Mirror.