[CQ-Contest] Open letter from CQ magazine (long)

[Richard Moseson]

An Open Letter to the Contesting Community from CQ magazine:


In response to our request that contesters e-mail their logs for 
CQ-sponsored contests, several e-mail messages were sent to us and/or 
posted on e-mail reflectors, questioning the wisdom and motives of our 
request. Because contesters are very important to us, we feel it necessary 
to respond. We are doing so in the form of an open letter, so that anyone 
who read the "flames" posted to e-mail reflectors may also read our reply. 
Please pardon the length of this posting, as many points were made to which 
we feel we should respond.

Many of you seem to think we are over-reacting to the world situation. Yet 
the anger expressed in some of your letters would suggest that we are not 
the ones over-reacting. We understand that many of you are angry and 
frustrated. All of us are angry and frustrated, but in most cases it has 
little to do with contest logs.

Several writers have suggested that we are "giving in" to terrorism by 
requesting that logs be submitted by e-mail rather than postal mail. The 
FCC announced last week that it will no longer accept hand-delivered paper 
documents in envelopes, that all mail addressed to its headquarters will be 
diverted to a satellite office in Maryland, and for two days, no 
hand-delivered documents would be accepted at either location. The FCC 
urged its "customers" to "make full use of the Commission's electronic 
filing system." This is no different from our request, except that we're 
perfectly willing to accept hand delivered contest logs. Is the FCC giving 
in to terrorism?

The government has posted armed National Guard troops at airports and put 
air marshals on airliners, established "no-fly" zones for private planes 
over major U.S. cities, and has jet fighters patrolling our skies and 
escorting to the ground any commercial flight that reports any sort of 
disturbance on board. You cannot drive a truck into New York City without 
its contents being inspected by the police. Does this mean that our 
government is panicking and that the terrorists are winning? Many of your 
letters would suggest that you feel that way.

This is not a "knee-jerk" response to vague threats, nor is it some 
sinister plot to make you buy contest logging software. The threat is all 
too real. Just ask the people at American Media in Florida; on Capitol Hill 
in Washington, and at NBC, CBS, ABC, the New York Post and Governor 
Pataki's office in New York. Every day seems to bring more. The FBI and the 
US Postal Service are urging all businesses to take reasonable precautions 
in their handling of incoming mail. This is part of our effort to do so.

Businesses all over the country, large and small, are taking prudent 
precautions in the face of  not imagined, not perceived, but real  attacks 
by mail. TV news operations in Los Angeles, 2500 miles from mailrooms in 
New York, have had no mail deliveries in a week. The House of 
Representatives shut down for several days, and collected all 
already-delivered mail to be screened. More anthrax contamination was 
found. The primary targets of mail-terrorism so far have been media and 
government offices. As a media company, regardless of size, we feel we must 
take reasonable precautions, and we feel that the precautions we are taking 
are reasonable.

Several writers seem to believe we will be inconveniencing large numbers of 
contesters and that encouraging e-mailed logs is something new. Both are 
incorrect. First of all, we have been encouraging log submission by e-mail 
for several years. Section XI/5 of the CQWW Rules states: "We want an 
electronic log. The Committee requires an electronic log for any possible 
high score." This is not new. Secondly, over 90% of logs submitted for the 
2000 CQWW Contest were e-mailed. At most, this request would affect 10% of 
those who submit logs.

Despite assertions to the contrary, we never said we would throw away 
mailed logs, or that we would not accept logs that are faxed or attached to 
e-mails as word processing or .pdf files (as if this is somehow different 
from e-mailing your logs). Any of these options is acceptable. Mailed logs 
will also be accepted, but will be held aside until we feel they are safe 
to open. An offer was made by one of our contest committee volunteers to 
have the paper logs mailed to his house. If we were to accept that offer, 
then we would be guilty (as already charged) of caring less about our 
volunteers than our staff. If we do not feel something is safe for our 
staff to open, we will not consider it safe for a volunteer to open, either.

Several writers also wondered about other types of mail that we receive. We 
are taking a variety of precautions regarding our mail, and the request to 
contesters was only one of them. In addition, several people saw this as an 
excuse to stop handling paper logs for convenience reasons. It is not. We 
have no problem with paper logs except what we've outlined above.

Let me take a few more moments of your time to try to explain what living 
in the NY metro area has been like in the past six weeks, and is like 
today. It is obvious both to Dick Ross (K2MGA, our publisher) and to me 
that even 100 miles outside New York City, life today is very different 
than it is within the city and its suburbs. We both talk to people all over 
the country and it has become very clear that people outside the New York 
and Washington DC metro areas don't really understand what it's like here. 
I live in New Jersey, about 15 miles west of Manhattan. Hicksville, where 
our offices are, is about 15 miles east of Manhattan. Dick Ross lives 
farther out on Long Island, in a small suburban town. Where I live, just 
about any high point offers you a view of New York, and especially  in the 
past -- of the twin towers. In winter, when there were no leaves on the 
trees, you could always see them from the top of my street. From Dick's 
office window at sunset, you could see the towers over on the horizon, lit 
up by the setting sun. These buildings have been symbols of security for 
us, "watching over us," if you will. No matter where you went within 50 
miles of New York, there was always a spot where you could see them. In the 
two weeks following the attacks, where we once saw majestic towers, we saw 
only a column of thick smoke. Our security is gone. And we are constantly 
reminded, at every hilltop, of what's no longer there.  In Dick's small 
town in the outer suburbs, there have been a dozen funerals in the past six 
weeks for victims of the attack. TV news continues to show funerals in 
various parts of the area for police officers and firefighters lost in the 
attack. These have been ongoing for six weeks. Imagine having to wait six 
weeks to bury a loved one! Every day, my local newspaper runs several 
"Lives Remembered" obituaries  every day, even six weeks later. Early on, 
there were one or two full pages a day devoted to these obits; now it's 
"only" about a half page, every day. The lead story in our newspapers every 
morning for the past two weeks has been the latest case of anthrax. Now, 
there's a Washington, DC postal worker dying from the inhaled form, along 
with the postal workers in Trenton, NJ who have been contaminated. For most 
of you, this is an event that's happening someplace else, an abstraction to 
a certain extent. For those of us in and around New York and Washington, 
it's here and now and very real.

Someone suggested in an e-mail that you're more likely to get killed 
driving to work than by anthrax received through the mail. Quite true. But 
when I drive, I wear a seat belt, because I know that taking that simple 
precaution greatly reduces my risk of being killed. That's not my point 
here, though. I want to tell you what it's like for me to drive to work. I 
have to cross the Hudson River and the East River to get from New Jersey to 
Long Island. That means two bridges or tunnels in each direction. That 
means passing two police checkpoints in each direction each time I go to 
the office. That means watching police officers, state troopers, and 
occasionally National Guard troops checking the contents of every truck 
trying to cross a bridge or tunnel, and tearing one apart if something 
doesn't look right.  When I cross the George Washington Bridge, no trucks 
are allowed on the lower level. This has become part of everyday life in 
New York, along with the traffic restrictions in lower Manhattan and two 
tunnels that still are not fully open to all traffic. I used to love 
crossing our bridges, and did my best to soak in the magnificent views they 
offer. Now all I want to do is get to the other side before some truck that 
eluded the police blows up. Someone else said in another e-mail that 
"they're not even in New York City." Perhaps not (and neither is Trenton). 
But New York City is in us. For anyone who lives here, and especially 
anyone who has lived or worked in New York City for any length of time, 
"the city" is a central part of the fabric of our lives. That fabric has 
been torn. "Our" city has been injured. We have been injured. And we 
continue to be threatened. We feel we must take reasonable safeguards to 
protect ourselves from further injury. We are buckling our seat belts and 
we want everyone in the car with us to do the same.

Finally, please keep in mind that we are not the bad guys. The bad guys are 
the ones who hijacked airliners and flew them into buildings, and who are 
sending anthrax through the mail to government and media offices. We are 
not anti-contest or anti-contester. We have been among the primary 
supporters of contesting for more than a half century, and our support 
today is as strong as ever.

Please participate in the CQWW. Please submit your log. And in accordance 
with Section XI/5 of the Rules, please submit your log electronically if at 
all possible.

Tnx & 73, and CU in the contest,

Rich Moseson, W2VU
Editor, CQ


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