MARY WESSNER PHOTOGRAPHY – Former Wall Street Journal letters editor Tim Lemmer talks opinion journalism and politics at the Daniel Island Club.
MARY WESSNER PHOTOGRAPHY – Scott Schenck, Tim Lemmer, Tom Carroll, and Evan Murray at the Nov. 12 Community Speaker’s Series, hosted by the Daniel Island Rotary Club.
For 37 years, Tim Lemmer had a front-row seat to the ideas shaping one of America’s most influential newspapers.
For 14 of those years, he was the letters editor for The Wall Street Journal, deciding from thousands of submissions each week which voices made it onto the page.
The longtime editor and Point Hope resident took the stage on Nov. 12 at the Daniel Island Community Speaker’s Series at the Daniel Island Club to give a rare glimpse behind the scenes.
“Letters are part of the Journal’s opinion section; that’s different from the news side of the paper, which is 20 times larger, at least. And it’s like a different planet.”
He recalled the newsroom divide.
“I spent almost two dozen years on the news side, and then I moved to the opinion side. The news people kind of think the guys on the opinion side are all crazy right-wing nuts. A couple of weeks after I started as letters editor, I ran into a news friend at the coffee station and he looked at me conspiratorially, and said, ‘Have they shown you the secret wormhole to Dick Cheney’s bunker?’”
The Letters to the Editor section, he said, was journalism’s first interactive space. “The Journal publishes letters that are exclusive to it, responding to Journal articles. We don’t publish open letters or general musings on life. We insist on real names, real facts, and real quotes, which we’ve checked to the best of our ability.”
The Oxford University grad put strict limits early on. “I decided that the upper length limit for a letter to the Journal would be 272 words. That’s the length of the Gettysburg Address. If you think about how many ideas Lincoln got into the Gettysburg Address, it just gets people to think about what they really want to say.”
Every week, Lemmer faced a mountain of correspondence. “I looked at every one of the 2,000 or 3,000 (submissions) we’d get a week. We’d sometimes get more, but rarely less. Once we had an article on the environment, and I got 4,000 letters in two days.”
He prided himself on fairness, balance, and a healthy dose of intellectual curiosity.
“We print letters with which we completely disagree. I printed letters from the government of China and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Our worldview’s overlap is not very large with those guys. We also print letters from people like Barney Frank and, you know, Democrats.”
His guiding principle?
“Think of the reader ahead of the writer. I look for well-written, high-content-to-length-ratio letters – the concise expression of intelligent thoughts. You want letters that provoke thought, further inquiry, and debate.”
Fame, he said, wasn’t a free pass to publication. “Lots of famous people write us. My theory always was that an ordinary, intelligent reader may come up with a really good argument, clearly expressed, and I would run that in preference to somebody who was merely famous but didn’t have a good letter.”
Among his favorites was one from physicist and former U.S. Air Force Secretary Thomas Reed, correcting a remark by then-Vice President Joe Biden about Iran’s uranium.
“Mr. Reed was a physicist who had designed and supervised the building and testing of two different thermonuclear weapons for the United States. The letter wasn’t that well-written, but we turned it into English and ran it. It reminded me of that scene in ‘Annie Hall’ where Marshall McLuhan shows up and tells the professor he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I felt Mr. Reed did that to the vice president.”
Editing, Lemmer said, was about elevating, not altering, the writer’s voice. “It is the writer’s letter, not my letter. While I would often tighten things up and improve grammar and diction, I didn’t put words in the mouths of people. Usually, people were very happy. Most said, ‘Wow, you made me look good.’”
Beyond anecdotes, Lemmer left the audience with a reflection on democracy and discourse. “I’m happy to be here where people of diverse views come together and learn stuff without throwing things at each other. People will proclaim, but they don’t listen. Arguing is good. Knowledge advances by conjectures and refutations. Whatever you think, 45% of Americans don’t agree with you.”
With a wink, he closed with a jab at uniform thinking. “If you want monothought, where the opinion pages and the news pages agree and sound alike, you can read The New York Times or the Washington Post.”
The latest daniel island weather
225 Seven Farms Drive
Unit 108
Daniel Island, SC 29492
Office Number: 843-856-1999
Fax Number: 843-856-8555
To sign up for breaking news email alerts, Click on the email address below and put “email alerts” in the subject line: patrick@thedanielislandnews.com
