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Opinion L.A.

Opinion: The Letters Top Five

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After two relatively slow, Thanksgiving-induced weeks for Letters to the editor, traffic has returned to a brisk pace.

For the week ending Dec. 13, The Times received more letters in its top five topics -- 509 -- than it received usable letters altogether during the week ending Dec. 6 -- 508.

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Last week The Times received 968 usable letters, 509 of which were in our Top Five Topics.

  • Trouble in Detroit: 135 letters;
  • Billy the elephant, including responses to this news story about halting construction on the L.A. Zoo’s new elephant enclosure and new columnist Hector Tobar’s piece arguing that elephants should stay: 113 letters;
  • Proposition 8 -- it’s baaaack!, thanks to this Jonah Goldberg column and this Op-Ed by former Psychology Today editor in chief Robert Epstein: 95 letters;
  • The departure of Los Angeles Schools Superintendent David L. Brewer: 65 letters; and
  • The Times’ three-part series on Pamela and Robert Griffin: 51 letters.

Just for kicks: Because we received large numbers of letters on more stories than usual this week, we’ve also compiled a Top Ten chart, which also takes into account mail The Times received about:

  • Illinois Gov. Rod. R. Blagojevich: 47 letters;
  • The O.J. Simpson verdict: 38 letters;
  • Bush’s legacy: 36 letters;
  • Patt Morrison’s column on legalizing and taxing marijuana: 28 letters; and
  • The Tribune Co.’s bankruptcy: 28 letters.

Most weeks, any of these might have had a good chance of making it into the Top Five.

How the Top Five is tabulated: Each week, your letters maven receives thousands of e-mails, dozens of letters through the good old U.S. postal service, and even a few faxes here and there.

After she cuts out spam, obscene mail, letters addressed to more than one recipient, letters that seem to be the fruit of letter-writing campaigns--more on that later--and letters with attachments (which gum up our computer systems,) she is usually left with several hundred eligible items, represented in the Letters Top Five tally. From these, she selects the somewhere around 100 that get published in the newspaper. Faxes and snail mail are not reflected in the chart.

Opinion L.A.
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