Back in my newspaper days, most places I worked ost of the newspapers I worked at had a policy against anonymous letters to the editor.

If you allowed it, people would get in nastier and nastier fights and pretty soon you didn’t have any place to jump the front page news. 

Funny how different things are now. Anonymous people are still stirring up trouble. At the same time we’re not anonymous enough.

Every time I open YouTube, I get an ad for the thing I was just talking about. Creepy. 

Back then I just thought anonymous letters were chickenshit. I had to sign what I wrote.

If you got mad at something I wrote, you could call me up and chew me out.

Once a preacher got so mad at me, he preached a whole sermon about me. (He invited me tok the service, but I smelled a rat.)

One day I opened an anonymous letter that really pissed me off. They were mostly mad at us for making them buy political ads a month before the election.

Candidates had been getting their buddies to send letters to the editor so they didn’t have to spend money. They also thought I was slacking on local news and they hated my “worthless” features. 

I was mainly pissed because they were right. I did write a lot of features. I liked ‘em and they helped fill up the paper. 

Truth be told I liked covering the news, but I liked features more. If someone raised llamas or raced pigeons or flew a bomber during WWII, I could nerd out and produce a lot of copy. Plus pictures take up a lot of column inches. 

At least I never did like an old editor of mine, who wrote features so long they had to be continued, sometimes over six editions.

One day a lady from the Republican Women came in and chewed me out over our letter policy.

She had an expensive cane she probably wanted to hit me with. She said something that sounded a little  too familiar and suddenly I was hopping mad.  

I heard my mouth say, “So you’re the one who sent me that anonymous letter!” I thought, Oh shit, I said that out loud. I am so fired.

But she grinned real big and said, “If I have something to say to you, I’ll sign my name to it, don’t you worry about that!” I think she liked my gumption. Ended up kinda sorta friends.

I still think she wrote that letter though.

#Stories, #Newspapers, #Journalism, #Anonymous, #ThieveryCorporation