Have I Been Recruited To The Green Ink Army?

In the 1990s and 2000s, working on the newsdesks of regional and national newspapers, I had the unrewarding job of opening, skim reading, sometimes sharing the most bonkers lines with a bored colleague and then binning the rambling opinions of green ink writers.

The ones I received were always passionate, occasionally racist,  definitely rambling, written with total conviction, and utterly unprintable. Some writers were prolific, covering dozens of topics every month; others only emerged when something really got under their skin.

And they took effort — sourcing pen, paper, stamp, envelope and postbox — all for a letter that no one beyond a junior newsdesk hand would read.

This came to mind recently when I wrote my first-ever letter to a newspaper and had to check if I’d become a green ink writer. One box ticked: the topic was niche — my MP delivering fake newspapers posing as political leaflets. (I’ll stop there before this becomes a green ink rant.) But I kept it short, avoided capital letters, and sent it via email — no green ink.

Still, as I hit “send,” it struck me: I’ve read more green ink letters this past week than during my entire newspaper career. Social media, citizen journalism, online comments — they’re full of them. X is overflowing, comment sections on news articles are a goldmine, and podcasts are now the spoken-word version. The eccentric, the angry, the obsessed — they all have a platform and the potential for an audience. Even my local MP’s fake newspaper is a version of a green ink letter.

The green ink writers didn’t vanish — they multiplied. Armed with reach, feedback, and most dangerously, each other.

My only hope is my letter gets published, after all I have put it through a good old fashioned editorial filter – the letters’ page editor. The only other issue is that writing and publishing this blog might already have me spiraling into full green ink territory that is now impossible to get out of.