Opinion: What you learn from reading 10,000 letters

For 6 1/2 years, I’ve had the privilege of curating the ADN opinion space — a virtual town square for Alaska. It’s been a tremendous honor, and one that has reminded me every day how lucky I am to live here.

When people have asked what I like about this job (some a little more skeptically than others), my answer is always the same. It’s incredibly meaningful to foster a conversation about the issues our community and state are facing, as well as ways we should address them. And it’s humbling to see the breadth of folks who are engaged in that conversation — everyone from my neighbor down the street to the governor and our U.S. senators. And, with apologies to our elected leaders, it has often been the contributions of neighbors that have been the most meaningful.

Only a few weeks after I started at the ADN in 2018, a Girdwood mother wrote in with the wrenching story of her daughter’s struggle with opioid addiction, which resulted in her death after struggling to find care options that worked for her. Her willingness to share what might have been the hardest story of her life, in an effort to keep others from experiencing the same fate as her daughter, was awe-inspiring.

The theme of unflinching honesty in the face of hard problems is one I’ve encountered over and over in the pieces that have affected me most over the years. In the summer of 2020, as conversations over race and policing in America were boiling over, prominent Alaska attorney Donald Craig Mitchell wrote in with a thoughtful, nuanced take about an incident from his youth that, he acknowledged, might have unfolded much differently if he weren’t white.

In addition to the ADN’s editorials, which I’ve authored with help from the other members of the editorial board since 2018, I’ve also been able to contribute a few items under my own byline. Among other things, I wrote about the power of music to push back against the darkness, a sled dog who found her way home for Christmas after ending up 360 miles away, friends I grew up with in Fairbanks who represented Alaska at the 2022 Winter Olympics, and the destruction of the oldest permanent town on the Yukon River.

No single part of my job as opinion editor has given me more joy than letters to the editor. In an age when hot takes on social media are a dime a dozen, there’s something that’s still valuable to me about letters to the newspaper and the folks who write them. Sometimes those letters were serious, sometimes they were poignant, sometimes they were funny. My favorite letters came from a gentleman who, once a year, would write to complain about the horse owners in his neighborhood who let their horses poop in his driveway and wouldn’t pick it up (dog owners have to, he reasoned; why not horse riders?). Something about the specificity of the issue really tickled me. It exemplified the conversations among neighbors about all kinds of things, from thanks for help fixing a flat tire to making sure our police are enforcing the law equitably, no matter who they’re dealing with.

In my time at the ADN, by my rough count, we’ve run more than 10,000 of those letters to the editor, as well as around 5,000 commentaries, and I’ve written about 300 editorials. I’ve felt lucky to read nearly every letter and commentary — thanks to all of you who participate in the conversation, I’ve learned a tremendous amount about all of the issues Alaska faces and how ordinary people, not just our political leaders, feel about them.

Thanks for reading over the past 6 1/2 years. I hope you’ll continue to support the ADN and other local media by reading, subscribing and sending in letters and commentary — the more perspectives that are represented on these pages, the stronger the conversation will be, and Alaska needs every voice it can get to deal with the hard issues we face.

I’m leaving the opinion page in the capable hands of my newsroom co-workers; I’m moving north to my hometown of Fairbanks, where I’ll be a special assistant to borough mayor Grier Hopkins. It’s a different job from what I’ve been doing here at the ADN, but it has some of the same responsibilities at its heart: working toward solutions for problems our communities and state are dealing with, as well as listening to neighbors about how those problems might best be addressed. If we fall short of either of those responsibilities, I trust Alaska’s journalists — and letter writers — to hold us to account.

Tom Hewitt is the former opinion editor of the Anchorage Daily News.

The ADN is currently looking to fill the job of opinion editor. Learn more here.

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