MAKING PENDING LETTERS EASIER TO READ

As you must have noticed, the Poughkeepsie Journal changed the way it handles letters to the editor. Instead of putting letters for a single day in a single online file, letters are now (mostly) posted online individually. They are also posted online days, sometimes many days, before they appear in the paper, and apparently, some never get in the paper at all.

The way I’ve decided to handle this is to enter all letters that haven’t appeared in the paper yet as if they were published two days ahead of the current day. Example: If it’s Tuesday and you enter the date for Thursday, you’ll get the pending letters. You can also click the “Pending Letters” button.

My initial solution (I’ll spare you the details) resulted in the pending letters being in a rather haphazard order, making it very hard to tell what is new and what is old. Now, when you go to the pending letters page, you’ll find them in order of the date they were initially posted, with the newest first. When they appear in the paper, they’re moved to the page for the day they were published.

(Posted Tuesday, May 23, 2017 )

--Mid-Hudson Valley Perspective--