News-Record.com

I pulled this item out of a comment thread this morning, from an anonymous commenter. I thought others might find it useful:

Hi Mr. Johnson,

This has nothing to do with your thread, but I have a question and subsequent request please.

Today the letter to the editor "World can’t sustain its huge appetite for beef" was published. We in the LTE blog have spotted out form letters numerous times, the majority from "authors" who promote vegetarianism. This is yet another example.

All I had to do was a simple Google search for "Beef production accounts for more greenhouse gas emissions than automobiles" and up came the following hits:

http://www.expressmilwaukee.com/article-2520-earlier-this-week-more-than-a-hundred-thousand-so.html

http://www.topix.com/forum/world/asia/TM56S3RFN3UGDUV6R#comments

http://www.suburbanchicagonews.com/beaconnews/news/opinions/letters/1008744,2_4_AU17_LETTERS_S1.article

http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/story.php?story_id=8850

Scroll down on the one above.

Question: Why can't the N&R perform a simple search of key words on most if not all letters as I did and other bloggers have done previously?

Request: As 1) historically the vast majority of form letters published in the N&R have espoused vegetarianism and 2) we have pointed this out several times before, then 3) why can the N&R at a minimum search letters regarding this topic?

These letters are so easy to spot. As soon as I read the first three sentences my mind told me; form letter. A simple search confirmed this.

Please try to keep your valuable LTE section free of letters from individuals who espouse a cause without using their own creativity.

My response:
Thanks for your note. As I’ve posted before, we routinely check suspicious letters and, believe it or not, the majority of them don’t make it into the newspaper.

But some slip through. We will receive more than 5,000 letters this year. We don’t have the resources to Google each one. But we will continue to vet any letter that looks fishy. On some occasions we have even called the writers, and explained to them that we consider this a form a deception and plagiarism.

We also receive alerts from the National Conference of Editorial Writers about form-letter campaigns.

We appreciate your help in spotting suspicious letters and we’ll continue to do our best to weed them out on our end as well.

A footnote: Letters about vegetarianism are hardly the “vast majority” of the form letters (or astroturf) we receive. Not by a long shot. Letters from political campaigns (and their surrogates) are.