The Three-Way Street (Remix)

Back when I was in college (the early 90s), I wrote an entire research paper for a class on publishing history on the concept of the "letters page" and how important the interactivity is to making people feel a part of the readership experience. I predicted at the time that magazines and newspapers would expand into online letters pages to expand the surface area and stickiness of this section (without having to pay for expensive print pages).

Little did I know at the time that this interactivity would explode into these things called blogs and reader forums, and due to the ease of finding author contact information (often with nice, easy hyperlinks) even our own email inboxes would become receptacles for reader responses (I've posted on this topic, including more abusive of these over at my work blog, where I was savaged for writing an article that was critical of Apple CEO Steve Jobs).

Anyway, every writer worth his reader's salt knows that in the Internet Age, there's always someone out there, waiting to pounce on any critical point you make and vent their frustration in the form of a nasty email, forum post, blog comment (or in the case of the following story, voicemail box). Me, I received about 20 or so hate emails per day for a month or so, along with some perfectly legitimate criticisms of my original article, and ended up repurposing the more well-reasoned of the responses into our magazine's letters page for that month.

Others have used different tactics to deal with similar situations, including the use of the rest of the readership to "crowdsource" a response.

The following story deals with such a situation, and comes in two parts: first check out this podcast taken from the voicemail inbox at the SF Chronicle newsdesk.

A pretty harsh response for what was a slight redundancy. However, the editors there got the last word by inviting someone to remix the voicemail message:

And here's
the remix.

It's fitting that the internet's interactivity allows for some extra creativity in crafting "extra-editorial" responses, especially to some of our more salty readers.