L'Étrangere should do a penmanship review and reveal of their own! Un petît "compare et contrast," perhaps?

People that write a lot if longhand quickly tend to develop ugly script. Doctors being the canonical example but I would imagine even today reporters fit that catagory.

I bet Frank is getting to know each and every one. Guess who will be first to get pink slipped.

That one in the upper left hand corner is someone who signed, then got cold feet about having done so and just drew a squiggly line through their previously legible signature. I mean, it has to be.

One in the upper left looks like a squiggly line through J. Balter to me.

To me it looks like the signer on page 1 just realized s/he was about to duplicate its signature (the loops of the G, l, and f match the first signature) and squiggled it out. Too bad Lynn Thompson has a short memory and signed twice.

I'm not gonna throw stones. My handwriting looks like a serial killer's handwriting.

Everybody should go back and repeat 2nd grade. Except for me. I have fantastic handwriting.

@7 This is true.

Obviously America is losing the penmanship race.

Our Cursive Gap must be overcome!

Penmanship is for writing, not signing. Complaining about illegible signatures aligns you immediately with grumpy old white Dads. Now get off my lawn!

@14 For serious-do you all sign with giant block letters or something?

My penmanship is completely unrelated to my signature-both are terrible, but in different ways!

@7

You cut out block letters from magazines and paste them on a sheet of paper?

To give y'all a head start, in yesterday's posting on the letter I did a partial identification of what's on the first page of signatures:

Many of them don't write legibly, but with the aid of their Newsroom staff page I could figure out these:

Kenneth Rosenthal, Lynn Thompson, Steve Miletich, Emily Heffter, Kristen Jackson, Kathy Long, Alan Berner, Danny Westneat, Holly Henke, Brian Cantwell, Nicole Brodeur, Keith Ervin, Sara Jean Green, Rick Lund, Mike Lindblom, Sanjay Bhatt.

@6: Anyone who looks through the letter will see that Lynn Thompson isn't the only one who signed it twice. I'm sure I saw the names Berner and Henke on other pages.

Courtney Blethen Riffkin is Frank's niece, and a staff photographer on the paper. There are something like 11 or 12 next-gen Blethens, though I doubt they all work for the paper.

Here's some, but not all.

Melissa Allison
Ken Armstrong
Michael J. Berens
Amy Bergstrom
Hal Bernton
Misha Berson
Sanjay Bhatt
Nicole Brodeur
Gabriel Campanario
Brian J. Cantwell
Paul de Barros
Andrew Garber
Greg Gilbert
Sara Jean Green
Katie Greene
Mary Ann Gwinn
Bettina Hansen
Emily Heffter
Mark Higgins
Kristin Jackson
Beth Kaiman
Susan Kelleher
Ken Lambert
Nancy Leson
Mike Lindblom
Katherine Long
Rick Lund
Moira Macdonald
Cathy McLain
Steve Miletich
James Neff
Mark Nowlin
Maureen O'Hagan
Jeff Paslay
Bob Payne
Cheryl Phillips
Lauren Rabaino
Courtney Riffkin
Evelyn Ringman
Steve Ringman
Dean Rutz
Teresa Scribner
Linda Shaw
Kelly Shea
Kyung M. Song
Larry Stone
Jennifer Sullivan
Michael Upchurch
Bob Warcup
Danny Westneat
Christine Willmsen
Rita Wong
Lori Taki Uno
Mary Cauffman
Jane MacDonald
Karl Neice
Sandi Doughton
John Frey
Bob Higgins
Albert McMurry
Evan Bush
Darrell Hay
Alan Berner
Holly Henke
Lynn Thompson
Kenneth Rosenthal