Newstradamus

Rogelio Naranjo/El Universal

Blogs serve many purposes. Some of the loftier ones are sharing links to interesting stuff, showing off your analytical brilliance, generating Drudge-like “scoops” from tipsters. There are lower motives to blog, too, like dissing your enemies — especially if you do it anonymously. And don’t forget the opportunity to let off steam about pet peeves before — like a ticking bomb — they blow up in your face.

I’ve started a list of pet peeves that will be updated here on occasion — not that I expect anyone else to care, but just to get them off my chest.

“Get this in yesterday” — People who send in a letter to the editor or a public service announcement when it’s way too late for it to be published, even though they’ve had weeks to get it done. Then they call the next day, angry that they didn’t see it, and have no interest in hearing explanations about production schedules.

“Put me at the front of the line” — This is the person who sends a letter to the editor and demands it go in the next day, when there are 20 other letter-writers ahead of them. We try to publish all the letters we get, as long as they meet the word limit, don’t contain foul language, don’t say anything libelous, and actually make sense to a rational reader. If it deals with some impending event, I probably will let them jump the line — but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

“But this is deathless prose!” — People who write a 300-word letter and insist it can’t be trimmed to 250. Or a My Word guest opinion column that arrives at more than 1,000 words, even when we print the 750-word requirement virtually every day on the editorial page. When I tell them I won’t have any trouble cutting it down (that’s why they call me “The Editor”), through the deadly silence I can hear them thinking, “Surely he doesn’t mean it?”

“I sent a letter last year, but I haven’t seen it in print” — Hmmm. Maybe we didn’t receive it. Please send it again, and I’ll look for it. Usually a letter will be published within a week to 10 days or less of being sent in, even during busy times. If we reject a letter, we tell the writer why. So if you don’t see your letter, call us. I’ve occasionally found e-mailed letters caught in the spam filter, so now I check that regularly, too.

Thanks… I feel much better.