ABSTRACT
Letters to the editor play an important role in the marketing and circulation success of a newspaper (Mayes 2001). As well as encouraging the kind of reader-initiated marketing described above, letters to the editor help to communicate a newspaper’s brand identity through representing the quotidian preoccupations of its readership. Further, since readers ‘place a high priority on interactivity in their relationships with the traditional newspaper press’ (Bromley 1998, p.147), various readership surveys ‘have found that newspaper letters sections are popular with readers, with readership rates of at least 50 per cent’ (Gregory and Hutchins 2004, p.189). In sum, the letters pages have great importance for newspaper and reader alike, since they ‘enable both the press and the readership to keep an ear to the ground and listen in to some of the leading themes of local conversation’ (Jackson 1971, p.174).
