Newspapers are now making their readers pay to publish some letters to the editor | City Pages
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The problem the Tribune and countless other community papers face is that concerned citizens aren’t the only people using their opinion pages to express themselves. Around election time, Frederick and his fellow opinion editors get showered in generic campaign letters. Many of them are signed by residents, but look, to put it kindly, strangely similar.
“They’re the same exact letters,” Echo Press opinion page editor Al Edenloff says. Campaigns mass-produce them and have supporters send them in, sometimes, he says, with a monetary incentive. It basically amounts to taking out an ad without paying the newspaper for one.