Ardent Admirers
After the San Francisco Chronicle cancels Stephanie Salter’s
long-running column, her fans stage a rally and bombard the paper with
e-mails.
By
Kathryn S. Wenner
Kathryn S. Wenner, a former AJR associate editor, is a copy editor at the Washington Post.
Stephanie Salter finds out just how loyal her fans are when the San Francisco Chronicle scraps the unabashedly liberal column she wrote for almost 16 years, first at the Examiner and then at the Chronicle after the staffs merged in 2000. When protesters sent nearly 1,000 e-mails and held a rally in front of the building, it was "like dying and seeing all these wonderful eulogies," says Salter, 52. "I'm angrier for the readers than I am for me. I still have a job. All these people who say that I matter to them are just being dissed." But Salter, who now writes for the Sunday Insight commentary section, says she's grateful she had a month "to make a graceful exit, and...that I landed in a place that's an arena for thoughtful reporting." Editorial Page Editor John Diaz says the move was part of an overall revamping of the paper's opinion pages. He adds: "I do think we need to listen to our readers. At the same time, we cannot let our journalistic decisions be driven by protests or threats of boycotts or things of that nature." ###
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