The study “ Selecting and Editing of Readers’ Letters in the Late 19th-Century Finnish Press” by Satu Sorvali from University of Turku looked at an under researched topic: reader’s letters to newspapers, specifically reader’s letters  in the Grand Duchy of Finland in the late 19th century.

Finland in 1895 was a bilingual autonomous part of Russia with 65 newspapers, 59 of which published reader’s letters. 37 of these were Finnish, and 22 Swedish – showing that at the time Swedish was overrepresented in comparison to the amount of Swedish-speaking Finns.

As mentioned, previous research on the topic is a bit scarce. Allison Cavanagh suggests that the details on how reader’s letters were selected may be lost. Ralph Shaffer, studying newspapers in Los Angeles in the 1880s has covered the topic briefly, as have Sarah Pedersen and Andrew Hobbs in their research on 20th century Scottish newspapers and 19th century English newspapers, respectively. In addition, the folklorist Laura Stark covered the topic in Finland briefly when discussing selecting and editing choices of local letters in 1860s.

Closer to this day, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen has identified four rules used to select letters to the editor in the newspapers of the late 1990s. They are brevity, relevance, entertainment, and authority. The author argues that these categories also largely apply in the 1890s, her area of research.

The rejection of letters was also fairly common, although there were also laws that obligated newspapers to publish letters that were sent in response or correction to claims made in the newspaper. The most common reasons for rejection were lack of space, then non-relevance or lack of interesting information, then anonymity, inappropriateness, lack of evidence, the fact that it had been sent to a wrong paper or has been published already elsewhere, with other reasons covering 6,9%.

The editing process took into account several factors. Brevity was one – too long letters were rejected outright or edited to be shorter by summarizing or simply cutting parts off. Relevance was a factor, sometimes the editors felt that a topic had already been covered extensively, or the matter was too trivial. Class also may have mattered, although the author found no evidence for this and some newspapers explicitly stated that they would publish from both lower and upper classes – and many letters were anonymous or pseudonymous to begin with.

In the 1890s, in contrast to the 1860s that Laura Stark studied, editors were not inclined to change the content or censor letters that did not line with the paper’s ideology. However, they would annotate these letters with comments and ‘reading instructions’. Thus, the author concludes that the era was a turning point between partial press and objective press of today. 

The contribution of the article is that it shows that editing in the late 19th century was more varied and thoughtful than previous research has suggested. The selection rules of Wahl-Jorgensen applied there, showing that it was similar to modern. The author also suggests an extra criterion: the legal one, where newspapers would be forced to publish or omit a letter due to requirements of the law.

The results are in Finland, but it is likely that the Finnish press was not an exception and similar results could be seen elsewhere, too. More studies on the subject would be of value.

The article “ Selecting and Editing of Readers’ Letters in the Late 19th-Century Finnish Press” by Satu Sorvali is in Media History. (open access).

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