In his Sunday News Column which readers claim they will never read again and keep on objecting to, Gil Smart comes to the defense of the New Era. “The article was the latest in a fairly long line of what might be called ‘sin’ stories that have been plastered all over the front page….. While the Craigslist story – while all these stories – are legitimate stories, good stories, they are of such interest to local readers in part because there’s still a sort of naiveté in Lancaster County, I think a sense that these things don’t happen here.” (Emphasis original.)
WATCHDOG: We understand now. All those “sin” stories appearing in the New Era are to instruct us about our humanity, and providing provocative headlines and devoting the top of the front page of the newspaper to how to get l— locally is to teach humility to our children. (They might have missed this vital lesson had it appeared elsewhere in the paper and been written in a less sensational manner.) And here dumb us thought editor Ernie Schreiber was trying to increase circulation by exploiting our common prurience!
