So you�re the bigshot editorial page editor, with your policies and your standards and your word counts and your adult conversation. You�ve got a rule for everything, right?

Well, what about this? Give a listen: [It takes 9 seconds after your audio player starts.]

If you can�t hear the message, here�s the transcript: �My name is Zach. I just wanted to know, if I wrote a thing about my dog would you guys publish it in the newspaper?� The boy starts out fairly strong, but his voice breaks about halfway through. So did my heart.

The call came to our reader representative, who also handles letters to the editor. She passed this around to various editors, wondering what we might do.

I should tell you that I love dogs. I don�t think life is complete without them. Right now, I have two. My old retriever, in fact, is lying next to me as I write this.  I know that lots of other people love dogs, too, and of those who don�t, most probably love cats. Or ferrets. Or cockatiels. Or lizards. People love their pets.

I also know that stories about pets are well read, and I have nothing against them. I wrote something of a humor piece about one of my former dogs, who was really quite awful but grew on me in the months before he ran in front of a car; on a lark, I sent it to the opinions editor, who loved it and used it as an op-ed. The reaction was very positive; one local police chief even made a donation in Max�s memory to Cornell�s veterinary school.

That said, my impulse was to say no to using the letter in the letters to the editor space. I had several reasons for this:

• Letters are usually for readers to comment on content that we published, or news that is well known enough that our readers would know what the writer was referring to.
• We don�t generally allow letter writers to report their own, unverifiable news.
• Publishing one dead pet letter could well open the floodgates to more, and while I wouldn�t have a problem telling adults that their piece wasn�t usable, I do not want to be the guy who has to tell a heartbroken child that their letter about their beloved late dog or cat or iguana just didn�t make the cut.

And yet. As I wrote in a note on the AOJ listserv: �We mourn the sense that we are losing relevance and that we have to cultivate a new generation of readers. Here�s one, begging to be a voice on our pages, who thinks being published in our paper would bring meaning to a painful moment in his young life.� (He also wanted in the paper, we would later learn, because the older people in his family only read us in print, not on line. Bless them.)

Fortunately, our features editor had a solution: use the letter as a springboard for an article on helping kids cope with the death of a pet (you can read it here: "A Few Words About a Beloved Friend").

I thought the solution was perfect. We bring human material to life and put it in context. Zach gets his letter in the paper. There�s no sense that we�re  setting a precedent or even making an exception; this is exactly what papers do.  

Still, I wondered what other editorial page editors would have done. I sent a message out on the AOJ discussion list explaining the dilemma, expecting pretty much validation of my decision and compliments on our features editor�s elegant solution.

That�s not quite the response I got. More than a few colleagues suggested I loosen up.

Dick Hughes said he strays from the �rules,� allowing thank you and dead pet letters sometimes, and hasn�t been inundated with them. �For years, I was guilty of looking for reasons to discard letters. Our guidelines were ironclad, never to be bent,� he wrote. �Eventually I got smarter. Or humbler. The letters I was inclined to reject - not an important topic of local interest! -- were the ones that touched people's lives.�

Pete Wasson offered a similar view: �My philosophy is to try to find ways to say yes to readers rather than saying no...if we want what we produce to touch people's lives - and that is the only way that we will stay in business, imo - then we need to find more ways to say yes when readers want to help us do that. Dogs die every day. Kids are saddened every day. But on this day, a sad kid whose dog died wants to talk about it with his community to share his pain. Why in the world would we stand in his way?�

Pete also suggested that rather than try to legitimize the material by building an angle around it, just, �Put it on the opinion page, run a photo of the kid and his dog, and then sit back and enjoy readers reacting.�

Bonnie Williams related how she took a pet situation even further:

�I had a similar situation a couple of years ago when someone had lost a pet. She stopped for gas and the cat escaped from her car. The lady called me in tears and said was there anything I could do. She was elderly and didn't feel that she could write a proper letter to the editor so, being an animal lover and rescuer, I wrote a short editorial.

�The happy ending to this story is that the person who found her cat called me, I got the two in touch and lady and pet were reunited. The hero of the piece received his thanks in print as well.�

She explains why finding a place for this kind of material matters in her view: �(D)oesn't it tell them a little bit about us, that we're not just about the dishonest politician, the big story or the "gotcha" moments? I like to think it encourages readers to think of us as more like them than they realize - and maybe even demonstrate that they get that by reading us and supporting their newspaper more often.

Karen Nolan, who said she�d start an online blog feature �If I had tons of kids writing tearful dog stories to me,� asked, �Why in the world are we so afraid of people writing us letters to the editor, even about topics that we might not personally find interesting?�

I still prefer our solution, but I have been haunted by this situation like no other in my time as an editorial page editor. Maybe it�s the time of year, when I notice many papers running (as we have in the past) the immortal �Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.� How many rules did Francis Pharcellus break � how much arguing did he have to do with his rulebook thumping editor � to get that classic into print? Yes, there is a difference between a professionally written piece and the average letter to the editor.

But I do wonder if binding up our readers in all these old rules has a way of constraining us, too.

[Jay Jochnowitz is Editorial Page Editor of the Albany (N.Y.) Times Union. The AOJ discussion list participants he quotes are from all over the U.S. map.]