Last Updated: May 26, 1999
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‘Letters to the editor’
‘Letters’: All news is really, really local
Play written from letters to Pennsylvania editors serves
as a reminder that many readers are more interested in missing laundry
and broken traffic lights than world problems
By Jane Scholz
As newspaper editors gathered to discuss the weighty issues confronting
the industry today, "Letters to the Editor" was a refreshing reminder about
what community newspapers mean to the communities they serve.
Held in the beautiful National Building Museum, the 45-minute excerpt
from a longer performance by the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble explored the
thoughts of readers from several small central Pennsylvania towns as culled
from letters to the editor of seven local newspapers over more than 200
years.
Editors looking for lessons in how to engage readers would have done
well to take a history lesson from the performance. The residents of Bloomsburg,
Pa., and the surrounding burbs appeared passionately involved with their
hometown newsprint in the series of sketches, though not usually over the
events that history books recall as the momentous issues of the day.
Most of the reader heat was expended on food prices, bugs, traffic lights,
space aliens, with a passing nod to more serious topics such as the Clarence
Thomas hearings and the O.J. trial.
"Letters to the Editor" was a fast-paced and entertaining reminder that
dullness isn’t a necessary byproduct of recording the day-to-day travails
of small town America.
On a more somber note, it was also a reminder of the cultural artifacts
that are imperiled by the current attack on government funding of the arts.
"Letters to the Editor" was a product of a $5,000 grant from the National
Endowment for the Arts, one of the last grants given for expansion of the
arts.
Scholz is editor of Knight-Ridder/Tribune Information Services, Washington.
