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Your Views section of Gazette has gotten lazy

Content: I’ll be blunt. The Gazette has gotten lazy.

I’ll be blunt. The Gazette has gotten lazy. What you call 'Opinions' seems to have become little more than a weekly, albeit reliable, back-and-forth of irate left-wing provocation (often drawn from political relic Doris Wrench Eisler) rub in order to prompt predictably reactionary and equally ossified populist responses from fat-fingered, hot-breathed rural old men likely writing as they await the evactuatory call of their early morning black coffee and Metamucil. Sure, it might make for easy and somewhat self-sustaining content for your paper, but the dullness and pettiness of the combative nattering between St. Albert’s geriatric factions eventually wears on the slight number of younger regular readers who might look to your Opinions section to perhaps have some modicum of thought provoked. 

Of late, these pages have been devoid of that sort of content with a blatant (and recent) example of editorial complacency coming in the form of Regina Shaw’s July 10th diatribe, 'Crime is a crisis in Canada'. Aside from the seriously naïve, rambling contents of this letter, I was really struck by the apparent lack of vetting that the piece underwent, prior to printing – it moved me to write this note. Devoting valuable pulp to such a suprious litany of disorganized freestyling seems a waste of resources that the print version of a local gazette probably can’t afford, given the current media climate and media consumption trends. 

I get it. This is a free paper and the opinion pool from which content for this section is drawn isn’t that deep; you can’t be too pick-and-choosy when it comes to audience-sourced material. Really though, if the idea is for the Gazette to compete for readership by continuing to feature contributions that could’ve otherwise been mistaken for the overexcited, badly written social media post of that strange relative we all have, then you’ve lost that race – Facebook already dominates that niche, and in a paperless fashion, moreover.

Morgan Luethe, St. Albert

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