Category: Letter

Brian Lambert [“Local News, Global Profits,” June] thinks covering and reporting local news is “easy to do—any writer can read the minutes of a planning commission meeting, or watch a ball game and file a story about it.”

Apparently he has never covered local news. Or covered it conscientiously. I won’t bother pointing out how important local news is to local people. I will, however, take issue with how easy local news is to cover. It takes a great deal of time, talent, and training to cover local government and report what is happening and the implications in a meaningful way.

It goes way beyond reading the minutes of a meeting. Maybe that’s how Lambert would do it, but many professional journalists in the metro area have a far greater sense of responsibility to their readers.

Fred Webber, Medina

As we enter the modern age of paperless-ness, there seems to be an increased hue and cry bemoaning the impending loss of the paper newspaper.

I’m one of those people.

What will I line my bird cage with, wrap my fish in, or spread across my floor as I paint my living room? Will newspapers go the way of the cigar boxes I once used to store my childhood treasures?

I’m as guilty as anyone for acquiring my news fresh off the internet, and later, seeing it analyzed in The Rake. But come on, what would Sunday morning be without a huge wad of ink-stained pulp thumping against my front door?

Dale Larsen, Fosston

The attached photo is of me and my wife Christine Homsey sailing a 52 foot Beneteau Oceanis 523 in the Sir Francis Drake Channel just South of the island of Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. We are part of a group that every few years charters sailboats bareboat (we crew the boat ourselves) in different locations around the world. Possibly the best part of sailing is losing touch with the civilized world, although with three people bringing laptops aboard this trip and the proliferation of free wireless Internet at marinas these days, it’s getting harder and harder to do.

Margaret Lonergan in Panama

Greetings from Carnival 2007 in Rio de Janeiro! Copacabana beach and Sugar Loaf are in the background. Having a great time. Wish you were here!

This avid and perhaps dangerously optimistic reader traveled to the island of St. Lucia in June with his wife in order to celebrate the couple’s tenth anniversary. “I got a good chuckle out of the ‘Beware Of Falling Coconuts’ signs on Jalousie Beach,” wrote Mark Ferry of Wayzata. “I never had one fall on me, but I had my copy of The Rake to use for protection just in case.”

While The Rake is a solid read, full of strong writing and hard-nosed reporting, we would have to suggest a helmet for deflecting coconuts. At least until that day when we publish a hard-cover edition.

Send along your Rakish travel snaps by snail mail or to prodmail@rakemag.com, and if we publish yours, we’ll send you a nonthermal, nonextreme Rake T-shirt and a $25 gift certificate from West Photo (21 University Ave. N.E., Minneapolis).

The other day, sitting in a little pizza place with a friend, I thumbed through a copy of The Rake and found “And Now This: Breaking the Spirit of Your Newborn Child” [May]. I just couldn’t believe what I was reading, so I had to do my own research. Now, the publisher you cite exists, but there doesn’t seem to be any Roy “Buck” Prescott or either of the books you say he wrote. This is a joke, right? What’s going on here?

Roy Prescott responds: Let me take one guess here: You were homeschooled in a solar-heated geodesic dome. Your mother plays a hammered dulcimer and your dad teaches clowning workshops to prisoners. It’s a big, tough world, son, and you won’t necessarily find what you’re looking for—or the truth, for that matter—sitting on your keister in a pizza parlor with “a friend” and wasting time on your computer. Wake up and smell the coffee.

As the executive director of The Wildcat Sanctuary, the only accredited sanctuary in the Upper Midwest, I wanted to thank you for your insightful article “Cat Scratch Fever” [May]. The article helped raise awareness of the exotic pet trade in Minnesota and the United States. In one year alone, The Wildcat Sanctuary assisted authorities in removing thirty-three tigers from Minnesota’s backyards. Even though Minnesota passed an exotic-animal law in 2004 to help control the purchase and trade of wild cats, there are thousands of wild cats and hybrids kept as pets in the state, many that will eventually need sanctuary or face being destroyed. The Wildcat Sanctuary provides a safe solution for the public and a humane alternative for the animal. We hope there will be a day that our sanctuary will no longer be needed and that wild animals will be allowed to be just that—left in the wild.

Thank you, and Brian Lambert, for pointing out the inadequacies of our local newspapers. [See Lambert’s blog Lambert to the Slaughter, at www.rakemag.com.] Many of us have given up on the mainstream and instead look to your magazine and other free venues for intelligent, comprehensive, and well-written journalism, telling us what is going on in our world. Of course, with a regime in the White House incapable of concise communication we can understand the dumbing down—generally—of too much of today’s media. The bar is at its lowest.

I have had the pleasure of working with Dave St. Peter [“Marathon Man,” April] in the world of media with the Minnesota Twins. We are fortunate to have a man like Dave running the Twins. He is the consummate professional who always presented a positive outlook, even when the Twins were not world champions. He sees the team’s value to the community no matter what the win/loss record. It was a great article and I think it captured that essence.