Dear Editor,

I have been a subscriber to The Advocate-Messenger for the last 40 years of the 152 years and counting of our local paper.

I have seen a lot of changes in the last 40 years.

The local articles written by Ben and Kendra are very interesting and informative.

The local high school sports coverage has been excellent.

Now the bad stuff. The Advocate-Messenger is getting smaller and smaller, usually down to 10 pages. Six years ago, section B was usually eight or 10 pages through the week and the Sunday paper had four sections.

Since then, the cost of the paper has gone up and the information in the paper is getting less and less.

Gone is a large weather section that had a five-day forecast, area cities’ and national cities’ forecast and a kids weather page with their picture. The weather page now is a 1.5”x1.5” today’s forecast on the top of the front page.

Gone is the Business Section that included stock reports, stock of local interest and farm reports.

Gone is the full-page scoreboard in the sports section. Readers could follow the NFL, MLB, standings, auto racing, golf results, soccer, horse racing, etc.

That section has been replaced with a sports in short column.

All summer, the sports in short column featured Major League Baseball schedule for the day, but never had the results of the games. Since school has started, this column is useful following local high school sports and contains results.

All of the deleted information that used to be in the paper has been replaced by picture after picture and worthless research studies saying that 69.5 percent read the classifieds and 80.2 percent are interested in local news. These ads run on a daily basis and usually one of them take up a quarter of a page.

Come on Advocate-Messenger, let’s step back and make your paper great again.

Steve Anderson

Boyle County

Co-signed by Jeanette Fieberg, Earl Kleckner, Wayne Vonlinger, Pat Bridges, Wendy Brannock, Britt Myers, Kim Anderson, Dale Denton and Judy Gramstad