At home early Thursday morning, I was checking the Letters and Speakout blogs on the Rocky Mountain News Web site, and I saw a comment by John Ritter. He said, "I guess The Rocky won't publish my letter on Mr. Campos so I posted it here: http://lettersnever published.blogspot.com/."

I clicked over to see what he'd said. It's a perfectly fine letter - in fact, we put it up on the Speakout blog this morning - and there was no reason I could see why we would not have published it.

So when I came into work the next morning, I checked the incoming letters. And there it was, though it hadn't been processed yet. Since John had included his e-mail with the letter, I wrote him to explain how we handle letters. Then it occurred to me that other people might be interested as well, so here's what I told him.

We get hundreds of letters a week via e-mail (nobody actually counts) and when they come in, there's a software bit that forwards them automatically to one part of our internal publishing system, Unisys.

The Commentary department has a part-time clerk, Darlene Trujillo, who goes through that file and exports letters to the other part of the computer system, which is where the person who selects and edits letters for print finds them.

(This is not the most efficient system in the world. But it's worlds better than the one it replaced five years ago.)

John sent his letter about Rocky columnist Paul Campos shortly after midnight Tuesday, so it turned up in Unisys with a March 14 date. About 24 hours later - that is, shortly after midnight Wednesday - he posted the comment that the Rocky probably "wouldn't publish" the letter.

That suggests, though he didn't actually say so and maybe didn't mean, that we had made a decision and that the decision was based in some way on the content of the letter. Thing is, at that moment in time no human being at the Rocky had even seen the letter.

We print about 40 letters a week, and try to make them as representative as possible of the ones we receive. When someone's job entails reading 25,000 letters a year, he soon stops caring whether he agrees with them or not. Actually, in choosing Speakouts to print, we give a slight preference to ones that disagree with editorials, because what's the point of wasting dead trees on saying something we've already said?

Space for print letters is severely limited - 250,000 copies of anything is a lot of dead trees - which is why we limit both the length of published letters and how often we publish letters from the same person. When the Rocky launched its redesign Jan. 23, we also started putting most letters and Speakouts that we don't have room to print on the Web, and that is effectively infinite real estate.

People tend to think of "the newspaper" as if it were a single hive mind that we plug into when we get to work, but in fact it is a couple of hundred people doing quite specialized jobs, and holding wildly disparate opinions. When you're tempted to speculate about the Rocky's motives, keep that in mind. Comments are open at John's Speakout.

Linda Seebach is an editorial writer for the Rocky. She can be reached by telephone at (303) 954-2519 or by e-mail at seebach@RockyMountainNews.com.