By now, most of you have figured out that I take great pleasure in reaching out to readers for their advice in making decisions that affect the content of our daily Opinion pages.

That should come as no surprise, since I remember making the point in my introductory column nearly one year ago that I considered these pages the closest to a partnership of any pages in the newspaper.

That’s why it was particularly gratifying to get such a strong response to my column of two weeks ago seeking your advice on whether we should find room in our print edition for op-ed pieces from either candidates or their surrogates leading up to the September primary and November general elections.

And if so – and perhaps I didn’t stress this enough – what would we remove to accommodate them?

Unfortunately, most of the proponents for publication skipped that second step, which made it far more difficult to interpret the results.

Still, I’ve tried my best to compile an accurate summary of your opinions on whether we should publish these articles in print, online or not at all.

Here is the summary of what you had to say:

• 21: Publish in print; no suggestion on what to remove.
• 10: Publish online only.
• 6: Don’t publish at all.
• 2: Publish in print in place of Sunday local columnists.
• 2: Publish in print in place of national syndicated columnists.
• 1: Publish in print in place of Sunday Statehouse Watch.
• 1: Publish side-by-side candidate responses to question of our choice.
• 1: Publish in print elsewhere in the paper.
• 1: Publish in print; just add more pages.

Before examining these results in greater detail, here are a few examples representing the three major points of view:

“I would like to see you be able to publish op-ed pieces from the major candidates, especially candidates for president and for the U.S. Congress,” wrote William A. Condon. “Please, however, do NOT eliminate your “factcheck.org” material – it is priceless!”

(For what it’s worth, several readers took advantage of this opportunity to praise us for publishing the nonpartisan fact-checking column, which runs every Sunday on Page B-3.)

“Because of the space limitations, I would recommend The Telegraph placing a line (on the opinion page), indicating the op-ed subject, author and where a reader could view it online for full text,” wrote Harvey Bloom, a Merrimack resident and member of our Reader Advisory Network. “In this way, The Telegraph would be fulfilling its important role in informing citizens of critical views of all candidates who request op-ed space, while not clogging its printed pages.”

And finally there was this:

“NO! No candidate op-eds,” pleaded John Pilla, another RAN member who lives in Nashua. “Please.”

Looking at the numbers broadly, then, there are 29 votes for publishing candidate op-eds in print and 16 votes for running them only online or not at all.

But while that looks like nearly a 2-to-1 advantage for printing them in the paper, those numbers are mitigated by the fact that only eight of those 29 people could identify what they would be willing to go without to accommodate them.

So at the risk of making many of you unhappy, this is what we’re going to do: Starting next week, we’re going to make space available online for candidate op-eds in our “NH Campaigns 2008” section.

Specifically, this is how it’s going to work: We’re going to offer each candidate for governor and Congress – not their surrogates – an opportunity to submit one 750-word article on the topic of their choice prior to the September primary. As a bonus for the winners, we’ll give some thought to publishing one more piece online between the primary and the November election.

But there’s one condition: The candidates can use this opportunity only to share with voters something about themselves in general or to state their thoughts on a particular issue(s). They cannot – I repeat, cannot – use this space merely to malign their opponent(s).

At the risk of being naïve, there’s still something to be said for civil discourse in the political arena. Besides, if you want to read someone’s opinion of why a particular candidate is not qualified for public office, there is no shortage of places to go to find it – including our own news pages.

As for the online op-eds, why just governor and Congress?

Because all of our area candidates for the Statehouse recently were invited to submit biographical information and their responses to a brief questionnaire to our online 2008 Voter Guide, which will be part of our “NH Campaigns 2008” section.

We hope to have the voter guide up and available for viewing later this week.

Nick Pappas is editorial page editor at The Telegraph. He can be reached at 594-6505 or npappas@nashuatelegraph.com.