Opinion: The Letters Top Five
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Last week, the world obsessed over a flying shoe. Letter-writers to the Los Angeles Times were no exception.
During the week ending Dec. 20, The Times received 580 usable letters, 333 of which were in our Top Five Topics:
- Iraq, President Bush, and the shoe: 108 letters;
- Detroit bailout: 75 letters;
- Proposition 8, including letters reacting to this Steve Lopez column about El Coyote manager Margie Christoffersen: 75 letters;
- Eyad El-Sarraj’s Op-Ed on Gaza, ‘‘Flowers not allowed’’: 44 letters; and
- Bernard Madoff’s alleged Ponzi scheme: 31 letters.
And now, here’s a question for you Letters devotees:
Was Sarah Palin Most Popular in our yearbook? Jonah Goldberg? Barack Obama?
Does gay marriage rule the roost? The budget stalemate in Sacramento?
In celebration of 2008 -- and our six months compiling the Letters Top Five - -we will be holding a contest and offering a prize to the reader who comes closest to guessing the top five topics for Letters for the second half of 2008. Details to come soon!
How the Top Five is tabulated: Each week, your letters maven receives thousands of e-mails, dozens of letters through the good old U.S. postal service, and even a few faxes here and there.
After she cuts out spam, obscene mail, letters addressed to more than one recipient, letters that seem to be the fruit of letter-writing campaigns and letters with attachments (which gum up our computer systems,) she is usually left with several hundred eligible items, represented in the Letters Top Five tally. From these, she selects the somewhere around 100 that get published in the newspaper.
Faxes and snail mail are not reflected in the chart.