Dear readers,

We know you’re out there. Our server says we’ve been getting thousands of hits per day during our weekday peaks, and, along the way, we’ve been getting notes and emails from you. Most of those notes have been encouraging, others on the derisive side. To put it less mildly, we’ve had our share of hatemail and even a nice threatening note from a lawyer. But the important thing is that people throughout the Milwaukee area are reading WatchdogMilwaukee.com, and thinking about their news and politics. While we enjoy and appreciate the feedback, the bulk of the notes we’ve received have been informal, not presented as writing we can publish on the site as letters, which is what we would like to do.

Here are a few basic publishing guidelines for letters to the WatchdogMilwaukee Mailbox, so that you can help us build an active “Letters to the Editor” section.

1) Address letters to the editor or to the publisher so that we know you want them published as letters. When in doubt, of course, we’ll ask.

2) Be brief and to the point. If what you need to write is a longer essay, we would prefer to publish it as a featured essay or news story and not as a letter.

3) Be factual. Opinions are welcome but please back them up with facts and information that we may have overlooked. This is not a conservative blogger site: We won’t publish fiction.

4) Please include a name/phone number for verification. Pseudonyms and anonymous letters are not encouraged, but we do understand that for job-related or other reasons they are sometimes necessary to protect the writer. However, we will still need to verify, in full confidence, that you are who you say you are. For example, if you are a Milwaukee County employee who needs to write anonymously to protect your job, we have to be able to verify that you are a county employee.

5) Your voice and your perspective matters, but we will edit letters for clarity and copy edit for style. One of the advantages of the internet is that we won’t cut your words because of space constraints.

6) We reserve the right to defend ourselves when necessary. Fire away and keep it issues-based. Political discourse is good for you!

by John-David Morgan
May 10, 2005

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Note: e-mail correspondence can go to Publisher at WatchdogMilwaukee.com or alternatively jim_mcguigan@yahoo.com

UPDATE: Comments are now approved automatically after the first comment is approved manually. Abusive commenters will find all of their comments they have ever posted erased for even a single use of profanity or clear or excessive abuse. Commentors who use the “notify” function must keep their email address up to date or their accounts and all comments by them will be erased.