People my age (late 70s) grew up in a world where newspapers were important and letters to the editor (LTEs) carried a certain kind of weight. If you managed to get an LTE published, you knew it would be seen by large numbers of readers. And those readers might be predisposed to take your letter seriously, knowing that it had been through some kind of editorial selection process that weeded out vicious or silly content.

Those days are mostly over. What are the options now for publishing LTE-type material?

This was the subject of a conversation that Walt Herbert and I had over lunch the other day, and I realized that there might be many of us for whom this is a useful topic. I have had some (limited) experience with social media, including this blog, and I did some more research before sitting down with Walt. This post is a distillation of some of the results of that work and that conversation.

I need to emphasize that I am not a social media expert. I expect I will have made some errors in my analysis, and I urge readers to correct me in the comments. If there are errors, I will update this blog post as needed.

 What’s included in “social media”? I’m using a broad definition of social media here. It includes features of the internet that wouldn’t fit some definitions (such as Listservs and YouTube). If it has the potential for LTE-type material (or even if it doesn’t, but it is generally thought of as “social media”) it is included here.

Forms of social media that don’t warrant consideration. Let’s assume you want to express an opinion on a serious topic, and your argument requires more than a handful of words. If that’s your interest, the following forms of social media will not be helpful.

  • TikTok. TikTok is immensely popular with the under-30 crowd, with billions of users each month. But the focus is on videos, often selfies, that you record and edit on your phone. The emphasis is on music and dance, and activities of your daily life. It is not a likely forum for LTE material.
  • X. since it was taken over by Elon Musk, X (formerly Twitter) has become a haven for right-wing trolls and disturbing content. Posts (“tweets”) are limited to 280 characters (roughly 40 words). Not promising for serious content.
  • Competitors to X. There are two major competitors to X: Threads and BlueSky. These are better in some respects but they both severely limit length of messages. For Threads, the limit is 500 characters; for BlueSky it is 300. The short message length probably encourages participation, but it may limit the amount of thought that goes into responses.
  • Snapchat and Instagram. Both of these emphasize videos and photos. Snapchat’s key feature (and limitation, for our purposes here) is that the viewer only gets one chance to see a “snap” (photo or video) or “chat” (short text), after which it disappears, hence its description as “fleeting videos and pictures”. Similarly, Instagram is mostly short videos of daily activities. These don’t immediately disappear on viewing (as they do for Snapchat) but they are only retained 24 hours. I don’t see either of these as a forum for serious discussion.

Long shots with some potential. The following social media services could be an outlet for LTE material in some cases.

  • Pinterest. This is a photo-oriented service, where you can post (“pin”) photos for others to find and comment on. The topics are very diverse, and often have to do with popular culture, fashion, and the like. But the many photos of “monks walking for world peace” (for example) indicate the breadth of the possibilities here. If you have an LTE topic that lends itself to photos, perhaps Pinterest could be useful.  
  • LinkedIn. LinkedIn is mostly a career-related service where you can highlight your resume and perhaps get noticed for a new job. But you can post articles to your LinkedIn account, and many people do. The content is often related to the specific industry that the account-holder is active in, but it doesn’t need to be. LinkedIn users can search other LinkedIn accounts, and kindred spirits can be found in this way. Anyone, including retired people, can have a LinkedIn account.
  • Reddit. Reddit has thousands of “subreddits” (essentially discussion groups) about a wide variety of topics. Hobbies and non-work pastimes seem to predominate. In many of the discussions, there seem to be just as many responses that are simply attempts at cleverness as there are responses that further the topic under discussion. But you can find serious exchanges. Users are encouraged to vote up or down on each post or comment, and the more “up” votes your post gets, the more people will see it.

Opportunities for discussion of serious topics. Finally, we come to the real opportunities to publish things that are somewhat like letters to the editor. The downside is that they usually require a lot more work than sending off a letter (or an email) to a newspaper that someone else is already publishing.

Blogs and their ilk. Writing a blog is like having your own newspaper. You can publish whatever you want. This blog is an example: I write about Kendal, about energy, about world affairs, about coffee, or whatever else I feel like writing about. Others can comment on the blog, and I can control what comments are viewable by my readers, which limits trolling.

Like some bloggers, I welcome “guest posts”, which are about as close to LTEs as you can come in social media. (Let me know if you have something you would like to write about!) Only a small subset of bloggers are willing to publish guest posts.

If you find guest posts aren’t an option, you may want a blog of your own. The easiest way to get started in blogging is probably using Substack. There is a simple process for signing up, after which you just start writing posts. The user interface is simple, and the display provided for users is simple, but if you are mainly thinking in term of text documents and you don’t care much about design, Substack is a great option. Substack is free, unless you start charging your readers for a subscription.

Many prominent bloggers use Substack. If you are a subscriber to the blogs of Heather Cox Richardon or Robert Reich, you are using Substack. Kendal’s “Forward Together” organization has a Substack blog. (https://4wardtogether.substack.com/)

The blog you are reading, On the Kendal Journey, makes use of WordPress, which is a very common blogging package. It is cheap and versatile, with lots of layout options. It’s not free, but it is inexpensive, depending on the options you choose. I have an upgraded version that costs about $100/year. With WordPress, you have the tools to make an entire website if you wish, not just a blog. There is a significant learning curve.

Listservs. Listservs are old-school text-only systems for getting questions answered and holding on-line discussions. Kendal-Crosslands has a listserv that gets relatively little use, but it is handy for getting recommendations for a dentist or finding a good home for an unwanted set of shelves. (Residents will find it under “4-Campus Chat” on the KRA website.) This type of software can be used for discussions of serious topics, such as those that might be addressed in a “letter to the editor”. Listservs have fallen out of fashion of late, but you may be able to find one dealing with your topic of interest by Googling.

Videos and podcasts. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention video services and podcasts. To use these, you’ll probably need to learn how to record and edit video or audio. YouTube is by far the most popular video service, and you can easily set up a “channel” of your own videos. You can record yourself reading your LTEs and, if you do it often and your material is interesting enough, you can build up a large audience. Heather Cox Richardson is a good example: at least twice a week, she turns on her computer’s camera and talks to her audience, and hundreds of thousands of people watch the resulting YouTube video.

Podcasts are the same idea, but using audio (some use video as well). Podcasts are often interviews, but they can be almost anything. They can be elaborately edited (“This American Life” with Ira Glass, for example) but that is certainly not necessary.

To prepare a video or podcast that goes beyond a simple reading of your LTE text, you’ll need to learn some video or audio editing software. I can’t help you there—I have had only cursory contact with video and audio editing.  

To summarize: most of today’s social media emphasizes interactions that are far removed from reading (or writing) a letter to the editor. The closest analogy, I believe, is a guest post on someone else’s blog—if you can find a blogger who is willing to publish your post.

If you have trouble getting a guest post published but have opinions that you would like to get out in front of an audience, why not try starting a blog yourself? It’s easy enough to get started, especially using Substack, but it will probably take a while to build up the sizeable audience that you want for your messages.