Editor:

I found your article by Marcy Burstiner comical ("Media Maven," July 2).

Leave it to an academic journalism professor to be absolutely clueless as to how the real world actually works. I shook my head at her lamenting can't-we-all-come-together plea to media and suggestions for the near-dead Times-Standard. She apparently is unaware that most everyone with a media finger, whole hand or toe in the area is already communicating. Well, with the exception of the Times-Standard — most of us small guys are not fit to breathe their rarified air or have the honor of e-mail exchanges.

The Times-Standard has decayed to nothing more than a supermarket flyer delivery system and no amount of inter-agency reporting is going to change the core problem with the paper: a trust in the reporting.

To illustrate my point, take the NCJ as an example. I am a staunch conservative. I have my problems with some of the issues put forth by the NCJ from time to time, but any feature story they produce and publish is right down the middle. I trust their reporting. Their agenda, should they have one, is always front and center.

Compare that with the Times-Standard. It's a free country and the T-S can run their business any way they want. Apparently they wish to run it by selling advertising to, and delivering content for, liberals of the community.

Burstiner would have been better off remembering and teaching her students from the get-go that journalism is a business. You can have all the feel-good ideas you want, but without readers you don't have a newspaper.

Tom Fredriksen, Myrtletown