Opinion: The Letters Top Five
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
California’s budget crisis overtook the economic stimulus package to lead the Letters Top Five tally last week.
During the week ending Feb. 21, The Times received 1,040 usable letters, 535 of which were in our Top Five Topics.
- California’s budget: 256 letters, reacting to the drama in Sacramento;
- Stimulus: 118 letters;
- Octuplets: 69 letters;
- Israel’s election: 64 letters, reacting to Times news coverage as well as this editorial; and
- Evolution: 28 letters, commenting on this editorial commemorating Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday.
How the Top Five is tabulated: Each week, your letters maven receives thousands of e-mails, dozens of letter 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 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.