Empty inboxes

We welcome all criticism – especially in the form of a letter to the editor.

“Why do you never publish a Mailbox?”

One Red & Black editor was asked this question by a classmate recently.

The honest answer: we rarely get any legitimate letters to the editor. We publish practically every relevant e-mail we receive – and if you’ve been reading this page all semester, you know letters to the editor have been few and far between.

Sure, people comment on our Web site all the time. And we welcome all forms of expression online – especially those criticizing this newspaper of exhibiting poor journalism ethics.

But if you’re truly upset, why not use this very page to convey your message to a community of more than 30,000 people?

It’s easy to have “keyboard courage” – that wonderful feeling of knowing your vitriolic comments are anonymous and will never be traced back to you.

One online poster, who wrote in response to Tuesday’s Our Take, expressed certainty that The Red & Black always receives mail criticizing its journalism.

“Of course, it’s easy not to print something that calls them out for being irresponsible,” the anonymous poster wrote.

We would love nothing more than to print negative responses to our news, variety and sports stories, as well those criticizing opinion columns and editorials.

Although our Web site fosters valuable debates, it often is much more fulfilling to respond to us in print. The Opinions page would be nothing without readers who contribute columns and – very rarely – letters to the editor.

We want this page to be a worthy place of expression for our audience. Without you, it would fail.

Our writers and photographers publish their real bylines with all content that appears in print. Send us letters with your real names, too, and we’ll do our best to fit them on this page – no matter how critical you are of this newspaper.

This is our open invitation to you. Send us e-mails to opinions@randb.com saying how horrible our news stories are. Criticize us all you want. But don’t do it under a cloak of online anonymity. And we’ll let our readers see them, too.

Bring it.

- Shannon Otto for the editorial board