San Francisco, California
October 2, 2000

Dear Readers,

What is the theme of this week’s letters? Well, if you look at them one way, it could be NAFTA week: we’re publishing three letters this week: one from Mexico, one from Canada, and one from the United States. But like everything in this hemisphere, it’s complicated: the Mexico letter is by a Canadian, and the Canadian letter takes place mostly in the United States. The American letter, though, it’s all-American: it’s about a run-in with the IRS.

Yes, just three letters, though we’ll be serializing the two longer letters over two days, like we did with Samantha Shapiro, and thus continuing to post new material every day. Tuesday’s letter concludes Wednesday; Thursday’s letter concludes Friday. The mind reels.

So that’s a second theme. And then there’s the reprint theme: two of our letters, the long ones, have each appeared in different forms in other places. This brings up many hard-to-answer questions, which we’ll try to address during the week.

Today’s letter is not one of those two-parters, and it’s not reconstituted: the author is Gregory Gransden, a Montreal video-journalist who has spent the last two years in Mexico City, making short documentaries for a series on RDI, the French-Canadian all-news network. Greg is English, originally, but he makes documentaries in French about people who speak Spanish.

The program that he works for is called “Un Canadien à…” which means “A Canadian in…”: each episode looks at a different country through the eyes of a Canadian journalist. Greg has previously contributed episodes from Mexico on the telenovela industry, wrestling, and ranchero music; he’s now working on a report on Mexican crime reporters, which he writes about in today’s letter.

Also, a technical question for you: yesterday evening, I received an email from a reader in New Orleans, who wrote:

I have a suggestion for you: When a reader who has bookmarked openletters.net goes to the site’s home page, he or she finds a short summation of the day’s letter, and links to the letter and to the day’s editor’s letter. I suggest that you eliminate the daily two-paragraph introduction and simply have the editor’s letter right there on the home page. I suggest this because the two-paragraph summation is redundant. It just means one more click added to a day filled with clicks. We need fewer clicks, Mr. Tough. And since your editor’s letter invariably summarizes the day’s letter anyway, someone who goes through all three texts (intro, editor’s letter, and letter) ends up dealing with repetition.

This email echoed an email that I received a couple of weeks ago from a reader at Stanford University, who wrote:

I am not crazy about the new format (the home page with the excerpt from the day’s letter). Like a pull quote, I imagine it is designed to catch my attention with the “sexiest” part of the letter. But I feel like it makes me rush through the reading, to skim the letter after having read the excerpt, just as I would skim through a crappy newsmagazine after reading the pull quotes. Before the home page was created as an intro, I would read your editor’s letter if I needed a starter. Now, I usually skip your letters and am more likely to skip or poorly read the daily letter.

Though “we need fewer clicks!” has the feel of a slogan whose time has come, I am not entirely convinced by these two readers, wise and insightful though they clearly are. The home page exists mostly for first-time readers, to orient them; regular readers can always subscribe to the daily reminder, which each morning provides a url that sends you straight to that day’s letter, enabling you to ignore the home page altogether.

And if the daily reminder seems too, I don’t know, daily, can’t one bookmark the home page, and then click right over to the letter or the editor’s letter without reading a word of the two-paragraph teaser?

These are not rhetorical questions: I am seeking your help, in the form of (a) your opinion, and (b), especially if you happen to be one of those web wizards, a solution. I’m certain there is an innovative idea out there that would let readers like the ones quoted above get the pre-hiatus feel they miss, while not puzzling the readers who found version 1.0 baffling. Please write me ateditor@openletters.net and let me know what you think; meanwhile, please enjoyGreg’s letter.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough