The readers' editor on ... the future of your letters page

Jane Austen, who, it can reasonably be assumed, occasionally read The Observer, it being considered at the time to be 'one of the safest contemporary papers to be put into the hands of ladies', has Anne in Persuasion announce: 'My idea of good company, Mr Elliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation.' To which Mr Elliot replies: 'That is not good company, that is the best.'

Good conversation among the best company has always been the aim - not always realised - of this letters' page. It's a long tradition. The Observer of Austen's day consisted principally of letters to the editor, journalism still being something of an abstract concept. Reporting often took the form of letters from individuals who saw events first-hand - witnesses to the excesses of the French Revolution, cavalry officers caught up in the Napoleonic wars, admirals at sea and so on. The Observer was a place where readers engaged in a dialogue with the newspaper and each other, responding to events and raising new topics of conversation as the Industrial Revolution gathered pace and demands for reform grew louder.

Just as journalism was finding its feet at the start of the 19th century, so today, at the beginning of the 21st, a new, vigorous form of communication has emerged: the blog. And again it is readers who are leading the way. In previous columns, I have touched on the demise of the 'ivory tower' style of journalism where large media organisations hand down irrefutable tablets of stone to a grateful public who are given precious little opportunity to respond or protest. Now, journalists know that their stories can easily be checked by readers online. More importantly, those same readers are joining the conversation by adding comments to opinion pieces on our website.

This fast and combative dialogue will often exceed the length of the original piece and certainly exceed it in vociferous tone, but it illustrates a degree of knowledge and engagement that should be shared with those who read only the printed paper. The challenge is how to do this when the rules online are different to those expected in the paper. Letter writers are asked to supply their names and addresses, but those who comment online are under no such obligation. Although they have to register and agree to a code of conditions, their identities are not revealed.

Last week, as an experiment, our letters editor ran an edited version of online postings responding to a piece on the Comment pages in an attempt to show a snapshot of the fractious conversation that is going on out there, identifying contributors by their initials rather than the pseudonyms they use online, an admittedly imperfect marriage of letters' and blogging style. He and I would be grateful to hear from you about ways we can improve your access to the paper, both in print and online, always bearing in mind baseball player Yogi Berra's famous remark: 'It was impossible to get a conversation going; everybody was talking too much.'

reader@observer.co.uk