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Marketplace: The Journal wants to hear from you
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Published: November 23, 2008
I feel honored to be writing in this space. Sunday Op-Ed, or opposite editorial, is pretty valuable real estate -- more valuable these days with our smaller newshole. It's the place where, historically, newspapers allowed those who opposed their views on the issues of the day to disagree. It can still serve that purpose, but mostly it is where we bring together differing views to create the proverbial "marketplace of ideas."
For many years, you've heard each week from the Journal's editorial-page editor on this page. Until her retirement last week, that editor was Linda Brinson. Readers came to know Linda -- and perhaps a little more about themselves -- from her plain-spoken perspectives on life and its challenges, and from her colorful tales of living in rural Stokes County. Her column will be missed.
You will not see me writing in this space every week. While I have taken over Linda's duties as editor of editorials, I remain the Journal's executive editor with responsibility for all news operations. So, my role is different.
It is in some ways a balancing act. Managing Editor Ken Otterbourg will direct daily news coverage, which allows us to maintain the traditional separation between the news side of the house and the opinion side.
I'd like to use this column to describe some new initiatives we have that we hope will open up our editorial pages to you. We give you some access now, through letters and guest columns. But we want to do more.
Here are some things we're working on:
□ Open editorial-board meetings. We want to give readers (one or two at a time; the room is small) the opportunity to sit in on our weekly editorial-board meeting. This is where we decide what issues of the day the newspaper should comment on and what our institutional view should be. If you come, we may just ask you what you think.
□ Readers Forum. This is a fancier name for Letters to the Editor. We actually don't get many real letters anymore. Most come in by e-mail these days. Of course, we're planning to do more than change the name. We want to motivate readers to write more letters and we have some ideas that we think will reward our regular letter writers as well as encourage more readers to participate. More about that later.
□ North Carolina Voices. We plan to expand our Guest Column feature to include a wider variety of voices, prominent or otherwise, from our city, the region and the state.
The theme here should be clear. More voices, more perspectives. We never claimed to know everything. Well, maybe some of us did. Newspapers have for years encouraged the perception, by our lack of openness, that we are impenetrable institutions, ivory towers. We want that to change.
You'll see a new design of our editorial pages in the next couple of weeks that will showcase these ideas. And you'll hear more details from me.
Let me know what you think.
Carl Crothers is the Journal's executive editor. He can be reached at 727-7277 or at ccrothers@wsjournal.com.
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