To the editor:

I would like to thank the editors, reporters and staff of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise and Lake Placid News for their good work. I hope we won’t have to miss you. Your work has been essential in keeping me and others, informed about going ons in my community and elsewhere in the region.

For anyone who has lived anywhere without a truly local paper and who is old enough to remember what robust local reportage was, news of the sale of the Enterprise and Lake Placid News, I think must be concerning. One sees over the past 20 years or so how acquisitions of news outlets typically affect these — newspapers in particular, as already perhaps the lamest of an invalid crew, that their new benefactors whether by design or earnest foolhardiness have nearly always moved them into the media version of hospice to live out what life they have without recourse to lifesaving measures, but also often without the benefit of dignity or even comfort — or else (and even worse) the papers being bought up by Gannett or similar non-journalistic news organizations and thereafter forever condemned (for the general public if not for accountants) to serving only as tablecloths in hotel breakfast buffets or else to sit at the bottom of cat litter trays.

All papers have faded, but however faded the Enterprise may be, kudos to them for continuing to report granularly. The acrimonious meetings in neighboring towns that get scant substantial coverage elsewhere even in towns that have local papers, on following the difficult matters of local school funding and possible closures, on the legal jousts in Jay about a howitzer range, on mining in the ADK, the crime logs, the sports, the art reviews, the humorists, the always worthy obits, the gardeners’, hunters’ and naturalists’ observations and advice, the reprinting the national and international bits, the local comments on these, the useful advertisements. And, yes, the letters to the editor.

In short, I appreciate you and wish you all the best. You perform a great public service and I hope your new publisher does justice to the rather quaint idea that there should be truth in public discourse.

Kevin Sheasgreen

Tupper Lake