First Amendment Writes

During the 1980s I edited the letters sent to the LA Times' Sunday Calendar. I did my best to entertain, inform and please 1.1 million readers. I had fun. Made trouble. Never sent to Journalism Jail.

For almost nine years I spent a lot my time opening, choosing, verifying, editing, laying out and headlining the 50 or so typed, scrawled or crayoned letters we received each week at the LA Times’ Sunday Calendar arts & entertainment section.

Aided and abetted by my colleague and friend, ace copy editor David Shear, I was supported and protected by the great Calendar editor, Irv Letofsky. I had one over-riding goal for the Letters Pages — to entertain, inform and arouse the readers of the Times’ huge and hugely popular section. All 1.1 million of them.

I’m proud to say David and I did exactly that each week — much to the ire of some brilliant critics who were not interested in pleasing ordinary readers or allowing them to criticize their exalted opinions in a public forum.

More info about our Letters Page crime spree is here.

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As letters editor I broke as many rules of newspaper journalism as I could get away with.

Our common “crimes” included running letters upside down, obviously doctoring photos, soliciting readers’ letters, doing year-end wrap ups, brandishing our First Amendment absolutism, doing our own reporting and, most dangerously, giving celebrities like Cher and ordinary readers from Los Feliz a chance to talk back to the Calendar’s powerful critics.

We once ran three letters from the same guy the same day -- Marvin Leaf, a persistent anti-rock ‘n roll nut. When he sent us a letter from his deathbed, literally, we ran it immediately.

We built our little empire to please readers. We made fun of the Sunday LAT’s gigantic heft and let clever readers blast away — often unfairly -- at the critics and writers.

Giving the Letters Page a wise-ass but reader-friendly voice, I often inserted italic editor’s quips or facts after letters. But I never made fun of readers. I exalted their work and rewarded them with the best layouts we could give them.

When the Nuremberg Journalism Tribunals are held I will be brought up on charges for violating 231 dumb or arbitrary newspaper rules. I will defend myself by saying I was never an enemy of the reader. In a box I have nine years of rolled up Letters Page tear sheets to prove it.

In the 1980s the Sunday Calendar section was arguably one of the best and most influential newspaper entertainment sections of all time. Its Letters Page — and the Letter Annexes we created in the daily Calendars to carry the overflow during the week — was a small but important part of the reason.

Sadly, starting in 1990, after I left LA to return to my native Pittsburgh, Calendar was turned into a place that was as boring as the rest of the stuffy, slowly sinking super paper -- the Daily Titanic, as I now like to call it.

I also had a lot of fun — a dirty word in post-Watergate journalism — for which I have no regrets nor shame.

We had no rules.

Another randomly selected Sunday Calendar Letters Page fished from my bottomless archives …

The end-of-1986-page reprinted below included my unsigned summary of what we dubbed the “Year of the Celebrity.”

It does not just prove that I was a mad man of letters who was using my friends and colleagues in the Calendar section as cannon fodder for the enjoyment of ordinary readers. It also proves that — without knowing it then — we were decades ahead of the Internet in democratizing journalism.

Just as the Internet would emancipate millions of readers by letting them freely and almost instantly express their First Amendment rights in online comment sections, the Calendar’s Letter Pages provided valuable space to hundreds of ordinary readers and celebrities who each week showed how smart, dumb, funny, nasty and perceptive they were in letters that — remember — had to be written, stamped and mailed days in advance.

As the 1986 wrap-up also shows, the Letters Page was a popular platform. Many inane and serious subjects were publicly aired, argued and hashed out by journalists, celebrities and readers whose voices — brilliant, silly or mean — would otherwise never have been heard. It was journalism by and for the people.

1986

Letters wrapup

1985

Letters wrapup

1987

Letters wrapup

Imperfections

Not only did we builders of the Calendar Letters Empire democratize the commenting process, we invented modern fact-checking and a level of customer service that Amazon’s Mr. Bezos clearly plagiarized.

Traditionally, the “For the Record” alerts, or corrections and clarifications, were usually small, usually buried somewhere at the bottom of a page and usually (deliberately) incomprehensible.

Written by lawyers or copy editors whose first rule was “Never repeat the mistake,” they were token admissions of error that were so garbled and legalistic they were largely useless to any readers not intimately familiar with the original story or the mistake.

To correct this 400-year-old journalism process of fact-fixing, in 1985 we created the “Imperfections Box.” Initially, it was innocently designed to call attention to the few big and little errors and gaffes made in the daily and Sunday Calendars.

But it evolved — or devolved, depending on whether how much money you had wasted attending a journalism graduate school. We not only set the factual record straight, we had some fun with our mistakes — which was either a mortal sin or a serious crime, depending on how religious you were about upholding the sacred tenets of serious journalism.

Here’s a straightforward Imperfection Box:

Here’s a sillier one.

And here:

Google and AI are born

Oh, yeah. We also semi-invented Google search and ChatGPT and Grok decades before they were born, as this Nov. 1985 fun we had with cricket proved.

We openly exploited our million readers.

We realized they were a valuable and nearly infinite resource who were willing to be baited and eager to join the fun. They learned their letters would be considered no matter what they said or whether they were typed or written in crayon.

Decades before the digital age destroyed print media’s dictatorial control over the number and flavor of reader comments, we — not Al Gore — invented interactive media.

We democratized the letter-writing process. We proudly pushed the First Amendment “writes” of our readers.

We tried to create a page of letters with an irreverent, teen-age spirit of trouble-making that wasn’t afraid to break the stuffy and rigid rules of proper journalism or mercilessly criticize the Times reporters and critics — a rogue page that readers could count on to inform, entertain, please or annoy them. It worked.

The Times, like most papers during the last Golden Age of Print, didn’t do much marketing research. But I heard once that the Letters Pages were the most-read thing in the Sunday paper except for the pen-and-ink drawings of Al Hirschfeld, the legendary caricaturist whose iconic pen-and-ink drawings of theater and Hollywood stars occasionally appeared.

Young Matt Welch of Long Beach, who would grow up to be an editor at the times and the editor of Reason magazine, once told me he and his teen-age friends looked forward to the Letters Page each week.

It made me proud. That endorsement would have made the Big Editors on the Serious Side of the Los Angeles Times Building ill, but for nine years they paid little attention to the sins against good journalism being committed on the second-to-last page of the Sunday Calendar.