Editing or Censorship? Letter to the Editor from Mike Shevlin

As the owner and editor of the Copper Gazette you have the right if not the duty to edit any submission for hateful or foul language to an extent that your website does not degrade, humiliate or embarrass your readers.

However, you also have a foothill readership that wants to sound off and not always lay their head on the proverbial chopping block which as you and I both know is the common practice in our foothill communities when these folks are ready to degrade, humiliate or embarrass the article or persons involved with an anonymous posting.

Your method of being the editor and posting as the Copper Gazette has been quick to include your disclaimers for any articles I have submitted. I understand your need to separate yourself for litigious reasons but it also is a form of editing. But your way of reporting and then asking to play nice and give your full name, social security number, driver’s license number and GPS location on comments becomes censorship. Just kidding but . . .

Your blog site is seriously lacking in readership participation comments to the articles posted. And with that it is probably going to start losing readers interest. It’s too bland with the vanilla flavored articles and no comments.

Your competitor posts many of the same articles that you post and then the comments go viral because passionate people can talk to each other without editor interference.

Many of the conversations border on lunacy but there are lots of postings with information brought to light by individuals that actually know about the situation first hand and they divulge this info as anonymous posters which in this format they are reporting more news.

Are the anonymous posters cowardly sniping at the original poster . . . sometimes but even then it starts a conversation. I almost expect to get battered when my articles go to the competition but I never hear word one from your readers being the same ones that have just ripped my ass on the other website and I know they are reading both sites.

If you want to keep your website interesting and gain more readers . . . you should rethink anonymous postings. You as editor making any disclaimer to the ideas or posting not being from the Copper Gazette are fine and understood.

However, when you look at this type of editing it is just another method of censorship. And reporting news is not always clean . . . sometimes you have to get down and dirty to get to the real story.

Take this in the spirit it was sent . . . I’m on your side.

Mike Shevlin