With the current technology now allowing readers to leave comments and messages online on magazine's websites a rapid decline in handwritten letters has been noted from magazine publications...
At Real Simple, managing editor Kristin van Ogtrop receives 600 e-mailed letters to the editor every month. “We get very few handwritten letters, which I mourn,” she said.
Glamour receives 30 to 40 handwritten notes a week, compared with 1,000 e-mailed letters. Both are a fraction of the 5,000 comments glamour.com receives online. New York magazine editor in chief Adam Moss noted the publication gets roughly three snail mail letters and 100 e-mails a week — that’s only 1 percent of the feedback it compiles. One story on nymag.com can elicit 3,000 comments in a week on the site.
Online commenting can have great benefits, one reason being that it is cheaper than organising a focus group to give you feedback on published articles or generating public opinion on a related topic, so much simpler to just scroll down in the comments section and observe opinions and views being shared, the other great reason is that all this is fast and free within minutes of releasing a feature online Vogue gets comments from people on an international scale!
