Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Will Old Letters Haunt Me Online?
Q. Since high school, I'd been an avid writer of letters to the editor. There's something about the format that just makes them my favorite genre of newspaper writing.
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And I'd probably written hundreds -- and even gotten four or five published in big papers like
The New York Times and
The Wall Street Journal -- when I stopped after beginning a professional career as a reporter. I'm a young general assignment reporter in New York City now, so I figure it's a bad idea to publicize my personal opinions for many reasons -- airing potential conflicts of interest, being lampooned on blogs, to name an obvious few.
But I miss my letters!
Writing partisan letters on hot-button issues is probably a bad idea, but will penning letters on uncontroversial subjects hurt my job prospects in the future? (I want to continue as a daily print reporter.) And will the letters I wrote when I was a teenager and in college (and are now easily accessible on Google and Nexis) hurt my career too? If so, how do I do triage?
Pencil and AxA. You need to become an editorial writer, where people will pay you to be an opinionated writer.
Build a bridge from news reporting to commentary. Use your reporting job and some letters -- if your editors are good with that -- to establish credentials as a thoughtful person who is well-grounded in some key subjects. While you enjoy reporting, it sounds like your true passion is commentary. So take some steps in that direction. Ask to fill in for vacation absences on the editorial page. Ask the editors what the qualifications are for a job there. And do an excellent job as a reporter.
Don't waste your time chasing feathers -- that is, trying to get publications and Nexus to purge their files of your earlier writing. It won't work, and I am not sure that previous writings are as dangerous as contemporary ones in places like Facebook. I'll write about that tomorrow and about political activism on Thursday.
Coming Wednesday: He has found Facebook to be a good way to find sources, but gets twitchy when they ask to join his social network.
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