Dear Mr. Warren Buffet,
I read with a gentle lift that you have purchased a group of local newspapers for $142 million. However, I exalted at your quote, “In towns and cities where there is a strong sense of community, there is no more important institution than the local paper.”
The New York Times speculated that your purchase might have been triggered by your nostalgia at having had a paper route as a boy, yet I think you feel we need local reporting to expose the growing power of the 1 percent (at age 13, I sold and distribute the Times for three cents a copy at my intermediary school).
Mr. Buffet, you can’t read about Afghanistan in my paper, WestView News, but can of how powerful moneyed interests can buy a 161 year-old bankrupt hospital for peanuts and turn it into luxury condominiums or how a 14.5 acre pier can become 600 market rate apartments to preserve a private school playing field.
You’re right, it is increasingly tough to find a way to keep it going and out of work journalists become publicists who no longer seek the truth but camouflage lies. I can understand the exhilaration of the reporter on finding that you had bought his paper, “We all feel liberated.”
Finally Mr. Buffet, you will find enclosed some back copies of my paper and I am ready to be liberated.
George Capsis
Publisher and Executive Editor
