I got a letter published in the Deseret News, our state-wide paper. It has a circulation of about 50,000, I think, which is much less than the Salt Lake Tribune. I sent my letter by email to the Deseret News on Oct. 9 and it was published on Sunday the 13th, but I missed it in the paper when it was published. My boss mentioned it to me today and I went back and found it in our newspaper pile.
They removed the second to last sentence, and they replaced the first word of the letter with "The". I used the subject "Don't dumb down the paper" and they used the title "Stop changing measures". This is how I sent it: Friday's front page article, "Elevator into space a tall tale?", says the elevator would be 62,000 miles high. This figure is obviously a conversion from 100,000 kilometers. An article on page A3 in the same day's paper says NASA is trying to find all asteroids "six-tenths of a mile or more in size." This is obviously a conversion from 1000 meters or one kilometer. Another article a few months ago mentioned that "more than two pounds" of cocaine had been seized. How about one kilogram? Why are you changing simple, round measurements like these? NASA measures in meters and kilometers, and cocaine is measured in kilograms. We will still get the idea if you leave these kind of things in metric units. Please stop trying to insulate us from the measurement units that the real world uses. Carl
