PUBLISHED LETTER TO THE EDITOR WRITER OF THE YEAR - 2006

In 1996 Mark Greer began pushing a novel idea on DRCTalk: the
coordinated writing of letters to newspaper editors, traditionally a
mainstay of cash-starved grassroots groups, had been endowed with
more clout and precision because the web enabled accurate information
to be collected and shared with unprecedented speed and
precision. By adding volunteer labor to the equation, those benefits
could be realized at an historically low cost. At a time when
on-line editions of newspapers were just starting to appear;
participants in those early DRCTalk discussions were already sharing
scanned news items and editorials from local papers which were then
OCRed (scanned) and posted to the discussion group for the purpose of
generating the widest possible response. - From our history
http://www.drugsense.org/pages/history

Thus it has been a major goal of the Media Awareness Project from the
start to encourage the writing of letters to the editor. Our success
varies from year to year based on the issues of importance to the
public, and thus the space provided on the editorial pages of the
press to our issue, as you may see at http://www.mapinc.org/lte/

We encourage letter writing success through various recognitions
listed at http://www.mapinc.org/lteaward.htm

For the third year in a row it is our pleasure to recognize Robert
Sharpe as Published Letter to the Editor Writer of the Year for 2006
for the number of letters that he had published that we know of.

Robert Sharpe had 227 letters published last year, raising his career
total to an amazing 1,646 published, without a doubt the world record
for any drug policy reform letter writer.

In 1999 Robert started writing letters as a student at George Washington University and a member of their Students for Sensible Drug Policy ( http://www.ssdp.org ). Then he often used his SSDP chapter membership in his signature block to improve his chances of being published. We first recognized Robert's letter writing accomplishments in May, 2000 as you may see in this photo:

http://www.mapinc.org/images/Robert.jpg

Today Robert writes as a volunteer for CSDP ( http://www.csdp.org ).
He signs his letters "Robert Sharpe, policy analyst, Common Sense for
Drug Policy, Washington, D.C." Robert tells us that he is spending
about an hour a day after work sending out letters, and yes, many
more are not published than are. Robert has provided us with his tips
for letter writing success at http://www.mapinc.org/resource/tips.htm

You may read all of Robert's published letters at
http://www.mapinc.org/writer/Robert+Sharpe

Richard Lake is Senior Editor of the Media Awareness Project.