NewburyportNews.com : Blogs : Ask the Editor

As of today (Wednesday, May 27) we have temporarily disabled the Disqus widget on our Website. You can still post comments on stories, however the widget that tells you which stories have the most comments and the most recent comments has had some technical problems. We shut that widget down to avoid confusion.

We’ll put it back up once it works correctly.

We use a service called “Disqus” to host reader comments on our Website.  Disqus occasionally changes features, usually adding something that improves the service.

However, recently Disqus made a major change in its posting policy that has left many of our posters in the lurch. Comments made by first-time posters are no longer automatically posted, even if you have a verified email account. We have asked Disqus to return to its previous policy.

A note to our readers: We’ll be adding more local blogs soon to our site. In the coming days we’ll be adding content that has a high quotient of fun/hobby/socializing.

It’s election time in many of the towns around Newburyport, and that means you’ll be seeing more letters to the editor about the candidates.

We encourage people to write about issues, politics, candidates and politicians. We do, however, restrict who can write. We don’t accept letters from the candidates, their immediate family members or their campaign staff.  My feeling is that it’s paramount that a newspaper give each candidate an even platform, and we can do that through news coverage. Letting candidates have free reign over the letters page can skew that balance badly.

What if a friend of the candidate, or a cousin, wants to write? What  about a neighbor? Well, that’s OK. You could make a legitimate argument that no one who personally knows a candidate should be allowed to write a letter, because that letter could be part of a letter-writing campaign orchestrated by the candidate. That’s an argument that works well in thory, but in practice it’s hard to draw the line, especially in small cities and towns.  So we try to make our policy as specific and understandable as possible.

Lastly, one more thing about election-related letters: We don’t accept letters that arrive less than 6 days before the election. Most elections take place on a Monday or Tuesday, so that allows us time to publish letters up to the Friday before the election. Why do we do this? Because races for political office can become heated, personal and nasty, especially in the few days before the election. “Dirty tricks,” like the mass mailing of flyers that have explosive accusations,  sometimes happen on the weekend before the election. It’s a strategy that can suddenly put one candidate on the defensive with no time to respond, thus the term “dirty trick.”

We don’t want the letters page to be used to launch “dirty tricks,” and so we publish our last letter at least 3-4 days before an election. If in those last few days we publish a letter that has some accusations, the candidate who is the target has a decent chance to respond.

There’s few events we cover that generate more anger and accusations than elections. Democracy can be ugly sometimes.   But it’s still better than the alternatives.

We’ve been getting a lot of letters and feedback of late on how our local towns spend tax money. A lot of people are asking questions or making comments.

We’ve been putting together a series of stories that looks at how Amesbury and Newburyport spend their money. The two cities are very similar in population and spending, making for a fairly valid comparison. I think the issues that we’ve been looking at (and will present in the series) will be enlightening to our readers. There’s some significant differences in some areas of how they do business.

I expect the series will start in the next few days; we’re just wrapping up some of the details now.