Emails: well, do YOU reply? Always?
WHEN IT COMES to dealing with email pitches, managing editor Craig Thomas (Letters, last issue) prefers a technique called “silent rejection” to a civil and speedy “no thank you”.
This fascinating idea needs some more explanation. How long after sending their pitches, for example, should freelances consider themselves silently rejected? Minutes? Days? Months?
How is the freelance to know the difference between being silently rejected and silently ignored?
The feeling is very similar, yet freelances who have given up hope for an idea frequently find themselves commissioned by an editor who hadn’t bothered to tell them they liked it.
The uncertainty this produces amounts to a restraint of trade. You can’t pitch the same idea to a rival publication because you don’t know if you’ve been rejected.
It is also bad for the publication. Just because an editor doesn’t like one idea doesn’t mean they won’t like the next one. But there won’t be a next one if they’ve treated the freelance with such contempt.
Yes, editors are busy — I know, I used to be one — but the thing that makes them busy is dealing with writers. That’s the job.
And there was I thinking journalism had something to do with communication.
Mark Fisher
Edinburgh Freelance Branch
I AGREE with Nick Inman (Gripe, March issue) that communication with editors has changed thanks (or no thanks) to modern communication methods.
So now I promise to reply to all and sundry who email me, no matter how useless or random. I’ll do that from the day I get, as Nick presumes I already have, a “generous salary and index-linked pension scheme” — and perhaps an ivory tower where I can bask in the unremitting glory of being an editor.
Is this the “all-pervading pessimism of the media” which Nick’s ignored book concerned, or is it just me being an underpaid, overworked, grumpy old editor who has had to get a second job to support his family?
Gary O’Keeffe
Editor, North London and Herts Newspapers, Enfield
IN CASE the Morning Star’s many protectors (and Nick Inman) missed it, that illustrious newspaper did publish a handsome and approving page lead critique of his The Optimist’s Handbook, by Paul Donovan.