One word. Forty minutes. A conversation that started as a complaint and ended somewhere considerably warmer than either of us expected.
A longtime reader called the paper’s main line today specifically to argue about a single, particular word choice in last week’s column, a genuinely minor editorial disagreement about whether a specific term I had used to describe a local development project carried an unfairly negative connotation, and the resulting forty-minute conversation that followed, considerably longer than either of us probably expected walking into it, turned out to be genuinely one of the better parts of my entire week, in a way I did not anticipate when I first picked up the phone bracing for a fairly routine complaint.
I want to be honest that my first internal reaction, hearing the specific nature of his complaint, was something close to mild irritation, a single word choice within an otherwise fairly substantive fifteen-hundred-word column felt, on its face, like a genuinely minor thing for a reader to spend real phone time contesting, and I answered his initial call with, I will admit, somewhat less patience than the conversation eventually earned once it actually got underway properly.
What actually happened, once I let go of my own initial mild irritation and genuinely engaged with his specific point, was a considerably more substantive and considerably more interesting conversation than the seemingly narrow starting complaint suggested it would become. His actual objection, once properly unpacked, was not really about the single word in isolation but about a broader pattern he had noticed across several of my recent columns covering local development, a specific, recurring framing he felt consistently favored one side of an ongoing, genuinely contested local debate over the other, a considerably more substantive critique than I had initially assumed his call was actually going to be about.
I pushed back on some of his specific examples, genuinely disagreeing with a couple of his readings, and he pushed back in turn, genuinely engaging with my counterarguments rather than simply repeating his original position, a real, substantive back and forth that neither of us fully resolved by the time we eventually, amicably wrapped up the call, but that left me with several genuinely useful things to actually think about regarding my own recent coverage of this specific ongoing local story.
I think this is one of the genuinely underrated pleasures of writing for a small, local paper specifically, the real, direct accessibility to actual readers who care enough about the work to call in and argue about a single word choice, a level of close, engaged readership that I suspect writers at considerably larger, more anonymous publications rarely get to experience directly in quite this same way. There is something genuinely energizing about knowing your specific words are being read this closely and taken this seriously by an actual person willing to spend forty minutes of his own afternoon defending his particular reading of them.
Near the end of the call, once we had both said our piece on the actual substantive disagreement, the conversation turned considerably warmer and considerably more personal, him mentioning he has read my column every single week for close to a decade now, genuinely appreciating the coverage even when, as today, he strongly disagrees with a specific choice within it, a detail that meant more to me than I fully expected given how the call had started.
I am going to sit with his broader point about my recent development coverage properly over the next few days, genuinely considering whether there is a real pattern worth actually adjusting in how I approach this specific ongoing story, rather than simply dismissing today’s call as one reader’s minor pedantic complaint about a single word. I think that willingness to actually take a reader’s sustained, substantive criticism seriously, even when it starts from what initially sounds like a fairly small complaint, is exactly the kind of accountability this job, done properly, genuinely requires.
I told him, before we finally hung up, that I would genuinely welcome a follow-up call once he has had the chance to actually read my next couple of columns on this same development story, curious whether he still sees the same pattern he flagged today or whether my own renewed attention to the issue actually shifts anything meaningfully. He seemed genuinely pleased by the invitation, mentioning that most of the complaints he has lodged with other publications over the years never receive anything close to this kind of direct, ongoing engagement from the actual writer involved.
I think that specific gap, between how most larger publications handle reader complaints and how a small local paper like ours actually can, given how much closer and more direct our relationship with readers genuinely is, represents something worth actively protecting as this industry continues consolidating and shrinking more broadly. A forty-minute phone call about a single word choice is not, by any conventional efficiency metric, a particularly good use of a working columnist’s afternoon. I think it may nonetheless be exactly the kind of accountability and connection that makes this specific job worth doing.
I am adding his name to a small, informal list I keep of readers whose feedback, over the years, has genuinely shaped how I approach my own coverage, a list I do not think I have ever mentioned publicly but that represents, in its own quiet way, some of the real, ongoing accountability this job depends on, considerably more than any formal editorial process alone ever quite manages to provide on its own.
More from this author at Astrid Holgersson, prat.uk.