Letters to the Editor

Allison Cavanagh is Lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds, UK. Her work focuses on media in both historical and contemporary contexts and she has a particular interest in comparative research.
John Steel is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Journalism Studies at the University of Sheffield, UK. He has produced more than 30 publications with leading international publishers and in major peer-reviewed journals on topics including media history, journalism and political communication.

This book provides an account of current work on letters to the editor from a range of different national, cultural, conceptual and methodological perspectives. Letters to the editor provide a window on the reflexive relationship between editorial and readership identities in historical and international contexts. They are a forum through which the personal and the political intersect, a space wherein the implications of contemporaneous events are worked out by citizens and public figures alike, and in which the meaning and significance of unfolding media narratives and events are interpreted and contested. They can also be used to understand the multiple and overlapping ways that particular issues recur over sometimes widely distinct periods. This collection brings together scholars who have helped open up letters to the editor as a resource for scholarship and whose work in this book continues to provide new insights into the relationship between journalism and its publics.

Links together diverse theoretical and empirical approaches to Letters to the Editor

Chapter 1: Introduction.Chapter 2: Regular letters-writers: meanings and perceptions of public debate.Chapter 3: Speaking as citizens: women's political correspondence to Scottish newspapers 1918-28.Chapter 4: Letters to the Editor in the Chicago Defender, 1929-1930: The Voice of a Voiceless People.Chapter 5: Letters to the Editor in Colombia: a Sanctuary of Public Emotions Marta.Chapter 6: Letters to the Editor as a tool of citizenship.Chapter 7: The Struggles and Economic Hardship of Women Working Class Activists, 1918-1923.Chapter 8: Readers' letters to Victorian local newspapers as journalistic genre.Chapter 9: The possibilities and limits of 'open journalism': Journalist engagement below the line at the Guardian 2006-2017.