Monroe County residents aren’t shy about their opinions.

The addition of this blog comes at a time when both the letters to the editor in The Monroe Evening News and the forums on monroenews.com are booming.

We printed record numbers of letters during the election season, and the pace has hardly slowed since the election. Last week Editorial Page Editor Tom Chulski was on vacation, so I handled the letters process. The variety and quality of opinions was impressive.

Also last week we made the decision to end pre-moderation of our forums. Traffic to the forums - both people commenting and people just reading the forums - has grown steadily since they were launched a year ago. The forums receive upwards of 5,000 page views a week, and there have been few problems with inappropriate language.

The two different venues - printed letters and online forums - tend to attract different writers/readers, focusing on different topics.

One fascinating thread on the forums over the last few days has been friends and acquaintenances of Sonya Moussaed, who was convicted of first degree murder in the death of her boyfriend’s baby. Click here to go to forum. A  juror in the trial even weighed in with her thoughts, responding to questions about whether the trial was fair. The strength of the forum is the ability of people to talk back and forth to each other, commenting on each others’ posts.

The letters to the editor, on the other hand, take much longer - usually a few days - before they’re printed. But they have a sort of permanence; after all, they are printed on paper.

It’s fascinating that in 2006, after more than 10 years of the Internet, both venues are thriving.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 20th, 2006 at 8:20 am and is filed under The Evening News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.