I recently received a letter from a reader that started like this: “Dear Alison Berber.”
Actually, my last name is Gerber. But you can call me anything as long as you keep reading the paper.
And letters are one of the best ways I can tell that people are reading. They’re an important gauge that helps me judge the depth of interest in our newspaper. And that’s true whether they’re positive or negative, grammatically perfect or spelling challenged.
If readers aren’t reacting to what we print, it’s a sign they may not be reading what we print. And that’s frightening to those of us who believe that what we do is important to our community, our society, our lives. There’s a familiar saying that “Knowledge is power,” and part of newspapers’ goal is to give that power to readers.
So when someone takes the time to type out an email with their thoughts about the paper, it means something.